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2024 - Multi-pronged growth

Cherry blossoms in Toronto

Cherry blossoms from my trip to Toronto in April 2024. 🌸

A year of growth

Well, we finally made it to the end of 2024! Congrats! We don't often take time to pause and celebrate the fact that we made it through a challenging period. Give yourself the time to reflect on your accomplishments and growth this year. You deserve it, and no one else will do it for you. Just like it's important to hold oneself accountable, it's also important to celebrate the small wins along the way.

My 2024 was a year centered on juggling multiple areas of growth and responsibility, however it was the first time in a while where I felt proud of where I am headed. It was a year of putting my head down and creating opportunity rather than waiting for it to come to me. Unsurprisingly, the opportunities and goals I have planned for 2025 are far more ambitious than were on my radar a year ago.

This blog post is meant to serve as a reflective piece with recommendations and examples that hopefully you can take away and implement in your choices moving into 2025. This is not meant to be viewed as calling for recognition or seen as me complaining about insignificant problems you don't care about. It is meant to serve as a realistic example of what I was able to accomplish juggling my own responsibilities, goals, and aspirations.

Overall

This year, I worked full time as a software engineer, began my Master's degree part-time, conducted research, volunteered, exercised, traveled, and spent time with family and friends. I say this to highlight that it is possible. It is in no way easy, but it is certainly possible.

Career Growth

2024 was my breakout year in terms of working as a full-time engineer. I entered this year viewing the upcoming projects as an opportunity for growth which would only come to fruition if I took the initiative to plan and execute on a path that would help get me there. I took the initiative to speak frankly with my manager and division leaders about my intentions and where I planned to grow during the year. My team was clear about my intentions and goals, and worked with me to help find and support opportunities that would help get me there. For this, I am eternally grateful. It takes a leader and team that wants to support you where you are to achieve your goals. My managers and project teams could not have been more supportive, encouraging, transparent about constructive criticism, and celebratory of our collective wins. This type of environment is a key reason why I was able to achieve many of my professional goals this year.

This was the first year I traveled for work, albeit multiple times across the U.S. Despite being 5+ years younger than most of my collegues, my hard work placed me in the meetings and rooms necessary to listen and learn how our business runs.

2024 allowed me to serve as an engineering lead on multiple projects for this first time. To get here, I needed a proven track record of ownership, responsibility, and delivery of timely and impactful results while working as a more junior developer. 2022 and 2023 allowed that to happen, slowly working at interesting projects and volunteering to take on more responsibility. Now that I'm here, I realize how much additional work this actually entails. CRA has its engineers juggling multiple projects at once. I was handling up to 5 this year, which makes it very difficult to do your best work across all efforts at times. I am still learning how to best manage my time and energy across these projects, but ascertaining a position of leadership has forced me to better priotitize my time and energy. I am learning to implement skills out of necessity that will set me up for success deep into my career.

Since 2023, I have taken a leadership role in driving CRA's internal component library. From hosting weekly meetings to supporting demos and knowledge-share sessions, I was able to help drive meaningful progress on a part of my job that receives no direct funding. This grassroots effort is a team effort, spurred by colleagues who have a genuine desire to help grow our tooling to support the highest DX possible. I'm really grateful for my colleagues and fellow engineers who believe in and support this effort with their time, energy, and positivity. It has made for a really fun and collaborative environment that is easily one of my favorite parts of my job.

This year I achieved a raise, bonus, and promotion to SWE III in one calendar year. Naturally, the effort to get there spanned the last 2+ years, much of which was thankless and difficult as I'm sure you are familiar with. These accomplishments are mentioned to serve as reflections of hard work. We celebrate the result, but the effort to get there is where I worked to establish myself as a reliable engineer.

2024 was also the first year I really stepped into leadership with recruiting and talent acquision at CRA. On one prong, I assisted in the hiring process of new software engineer and designer roles. For the engineering role specifically, I was involved in developing our team's coding assignment, conducting behavioral interviews, leading technical interviews, and contributing to the final hiring panel. In short, I was involved in CRA's full hiring process. The engineer who has joined our team is fantastic, and I am so lucky and thankful to learn and work alongside him everyday! On the other prong, I have stepped into a managerial role this winter by spearheading the hiring of a new engineering intern. We are currently hiring for a Summer 2025 SWE intern and/or co-op! I will serve as the manager for this role. I am thrilled to now be in the position to help positively contribute to CRA's culture, while also supporting the hiring of at least one engineering intern during an incredibly competitive time in the job market. Trust me when I say that I do not take this responsibility lightly - I am manually considering as many candidates as possible.

Academic Growth

If you missed my post earlier this year, I announced that I had committed to Georgia Tech to pursue my Master's in Computer Science! Go Jackets! I am attending this prestigious institution remotely on a part-time basis, affording the opportunity to puruse my graduate education while working full-time. I am incredibly thankful to CRA for their encouragement in my interest for pursuing graduate education, in addition to their generous continuing education benefits which have helped to massively defray the costs.

Fall 2024 was the first semester of my program. I enrolled in one course focused on AI research, where I received an A! I knew that I aspired to pursue research while in my master's degree. Through a great deal of research and persistence, I was given the incredible opportunity to join the Design Intelligence Lab at Georgia Tech as a Graduate Research Assistant under famed AI and Cognitive Science professor Dr. Ashok Goel. Here, I conduct research at the intersection of AI, HCI, education, and design through VERA. Our research addresses difficult questions around developing AI models which can explain themselves to users in a way that is understandable and actionable. While incredibly challenging, I am thoroughly enjoying the academic rigor that our lab is pursuing on a weekly basis. I am thrilled to be continuing this research in 2025.

Earlier in 2024, I learned that I would be placed on an innovative, multi-year AI healthcare/bioinformatics program at CRA. This was an incredibly exciting prospect for me, given my consistent affinity & track-record for working at the intersection of healthcare, AI, and HCI (see my prev. experience at Iterative Health, GE HealthCare, undergrad capstone project, etc.). Viewing this as an opportunity to help expand my career further into the healthcare domain, I chose to dive in head first. During the Summer 2024 semester, I commuted to Cambridge and enrolled in a course at Harvard Extension School - Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Through this course, I was able to accrue a great deal of foundational knowledge and context into the work that AI engineers and bioinformatics researchers conduct. I had the opportunity to learn R, and actually apply this knowledge with a real dataset to develop all of the components necessary for an epidemiological publication. This experience has been, and will continue to be, invaluable as I delve further into our healthcare program at CRA in 2025.

I also wanted 2024 to be a year of working toward publications. I am proud to say that I have contruibuted to two poster acceptances this year! The first is a poster I co-authored with my colleagues at CRA, which was accepted to the 2025 HFES International Symposium in Health Care. This poster will be shared at the HFES Health Care conference in Toronto this April. The second was a poster I co-authored with my VERA research colleague at Georgia Tech, which was submitted to the 2025 OMSCS Conference. I will be traveling to Atlanta in late April to present the poster in-person! If you're a GT student, please reach out! I am incredibly proud of the work our teams accomplished. To have two posters accepted is a huge win, and is a reflection of the caliber of academic research we are capable of producing in the future.

Personal Growth

My personal life also saw a number of changes and growth in 2024. I:

  • moved apartments this summer
  • watched my incredible partner complete nursing school and obtain a fantastic job
  • saw my sister graduate from college
  • watched two lifelong friends get married
  • visited with friends and family throughout the year

just to name a few. This was also a year of growth on a number of levels personally, which I won't belabor here. Plenty of difficult and discouraging moments were faced. However, the patience, trust in myself, trust in the pace of my journey, and persistence I maintained are factors I am very proud of. I proved to myself that it is possible, and will sacrifice nothing to continue this outlook in 2025.

Travel

Travel was a surprisingly major theme of my 2024, despite what I intended at the beginning of the year. In no particular order, 2024 included travel to:

  • Hawaii
  • LA
  • Canada - Toronto & Waterloo
  • Florida
  • Colorado
  • The Cape
  • Pennsylvania
  • Rhode Island
  • and more!

Rest is just as important as hard work. I have really come to realize that you should not wait to travel to the places of your dreams. Take your loved ones and travel as soon as you can. Life is so precious and can be taken away so quickly. Please don't wait. I promise you won't regret creating those memories.

Volunteering

I was raised by parents who always instilled in me the importance of giving back. Whether it be with your time, monetarily, or via other efforts, I encourage you to make 2025 a year of giving. The world really needs our help, if you are in any position to give. This year, I focused my volunteering efforts on assisting students and young professionals.

  • Schreyer Alumni Interviewer - 3rd year interviewing prospective Honors College students
  • IST Alumni Mentor - 3rd year mentoring a student in the College of IST
  • CRA Ambassador Program (2025) - I am hopeful to join CRA's Ambassador program in 2025, where I will support the recruitment, hiring, and retention of diverse STEM talent at CRA.

I am truly passionate about helping students and professionals find the way to their ideal career no matter their background. There are so many ways to level-up your career even beyond the traditional avenues. Working to highlight these opportunties and help others navigate a tumultuous landscape is one way I plan to make positive change in 2025.

What I'm looking forward to in 2025

My favortie tools of 2024 that I will be using throughout 2025

  • Morgen
    • The best task and calendar app out there, hands down. You'll thank me later.
  • Raycast
    • If you're a power user, just download this please. You'll thank me later again.
  • Vivaldi
    • Honestly got tired of dealing with dwindling hype and a non-prioritized browser moving forward that I don't want to pay for. Came back to Vivaldi as an open-source alternative and has been fantastic overall! (rip Arc)
  • Obsidian
    • This is my go-to for academic note taking. I am a big believer in the importance of owning my data locally moving forward. I encourage you to look into PKMS and software that best support your needs, then actually implementing this in 2025.
  • Notion
    • Notion in goated in many ways, including being great for task management and non-private note taking. I use Notion for my academic tasking, personal career planning, and more. It integrates directly with Morgen for task management, which is a huge win for my workflow across like 4 different calendar and email services.
  • Ghostty
    • Brand new terminal emulator written performance-first.

Wrap-up

To my family, friends, colleagues, classmates, and anyone I have positively interacted with this year: thank you! Your support, kindness, and relationship is very much appreciated. I need to work on stating that more often, but I hope this post highlights just how many incredible people I work with on a daily basis.

Here's to an incredible 2025! 🥂

Keep pressing forward, I see you. You're doing great. 🌟

Cheers,

-Nick