I graduated high school in 2019 convinced I already knew what I wanted. I just didn’t know yet how many doors would close before I got there.
I sat the concours for several engineering and business schools that year, the entrance exams that decide almost everything in the Moroccan system, and I failed all of them. What was left were the schools that don’t require a concours at all, where your high school grades are enough to get in. I had a couple of options in front of me, but Business Intelligence had a kind of magic to it that the others didn’t, so I chose it.
I won’t pretend I walked in excited. By the time I started at EST Fès, I was running on fumes, worn down by months of exams and the rejection emails that came after them, tired of picturing a university life that kept not happening. I told myself I’d do the minimum. Then, somehow, I started actually liking the subjects. I started liking probability and statistics in a way I hadn’t expected to; there was something about probability laws that impressed me, the way understanding them could change how you read almost any decision in life.
I finished my first semester at the top of my class. That was enough to shift something in me: if I could be first once, I wanted to be first again, and I was, for the next three semesters straight. Somewhere in that stretch, the interest stopped being about proving something and became real. I started actually loving the concept behind business intelligence, the idea that behind every mess of numbers there’s a story waiting to be found, and that if you look closely enough, data can tell you the truth about almost anything. I graduated at the top of my program, among the best BI students in the country. For a moment, that felt like enough.
It wasn’t, not by the rules of the system I was in. In Morocco, an associate degree doesn’t put you on equal footing with someone who becomes an engineer through the traditional track. Your real options afterward are narrow: sit the concours for les grandes écoles, except most of them won’t even consider you unless you came up through classes préparatoires, an associate degree doesn’t qualify; or spend a year on a license pro, then two more on a master spécialisé, and still not come out the other side with the title “ingénieure.” Neither path was really a path. So I decided to try the door that wasn’t supposed to be open to me. I started reaching out to engineering schools directly, asking if I could sit their concours anyway, associate degree and all. I spent a long stretch trying to prove, one email and one conversation at a time, that my grades and my drive were worth the exception. After enough tries, one said yes. I was in: ENSETM’s Big Data and Cloud Computing Engineering program.
The first year nearly broke me. Algorithms and operational research were a different kind of hard than anything I’d studied before, not hard in a way that felt like growth, but hard in a way that felt like drowning. I was away from home for the first time in any real sense, and homesickness crept in and sat on my chest most nights. I remember the specific exhaustion of that year: not the tired that sleep fixes, but the tired that follows you into your dreams. I’d lie awake wishing for a break from everything, then wake up with no energy to study anyway. Slowly, without really noticing it happening, the thing I’d fought so hard to get into stopped feeling like mine. My passion for data didn’t disappear all at once. It just got quieter and quieter until I couldn’t hear it anymore.
I kept showing up to class, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being a square peg pushed into a round hole. No matter how hard I studied, I felt like I was reading the material from outside a window, never quite able to get inside it. And somewhere underneath the exhaustion was a harder question I wasn’t ready to ask yet: after everything I’d fought through to get here, what if this simply wasn’t what I loved?
Around that time, almost by accident, I joined two communities that would end up teaching me more about myself than any lecture did: the NGeeks club, and DigiGirlz ENSETM. I didn’t sign up for DigiGirlz because I was passionate about mentoring high schoolers in IT. If I’m honest, it wasn’t even really on my radar. But I ended up in rooms with teenage girls trying to figure out whether tech was for them, and I found myself telling them: follow what actually pulls at you, not what your family or your society expects to see. Push past the noise and go find your real interest.
It took me longer than it should have to notice the irony. I was handing out advice I hadn’t taken myself. Every time I told one of those girls to go find what made her come alive, I was really talking to the version of me who still hadn’t done it.
By the end of 2021 I was running on empty, burnt out and genuinely lost about what came next. Then, almost by luck, our program required an internship, and for once we got to choose our own topic. I picked something in data analysis, half hoping, half doubting that it could bring back a feeling I’d assumed was gone for good. And for a month, it did. The internship felt like air after being underwater. I was doing something I actually enjoyed, and I remembered what that used to feel like. Then it ended, and I went straight back into subjects that drained me, back into what I’d started to think of, privately, as a toxic environment. The depression I’d been holding off came right back with it. But that one good month did something important: it made the truth impossible to keep avoiding. I didn’t want to keep fighting to feel okay in a field I’d fought this hard just to force myself into. I wanted to find the thing I could do without anyone pushing me toward it, including myself.
So when my second engineering year began, I changed the question I was asking. Instead of “how do I get better at this,” it became “is this even mine to get better at, or is there something else out there for me?” I started looking for anything that might help me answer that honestly; programs, opportunities, anything that would put me somewhere unfamiliar enough to find out what was actually mine.
I didn’t know yet what I’d find. But for the first time in a long time, I was finally asking the right question.