Last First Day: Four Classes Between Me and the Finish Line

Today is the first day of my last semester in the Information Engineering Management program at UAB. Four classes stand between me and December, and I’ve sat through enough first days to know how this one usually feels. There’s a new syllabus, a new group chat, and the usual anxiety about the workload before it’s even started. This first day feels different, though, and it’s not because the workload is lighter. It’s because I can finally see the finish line, and seeing it has me looking back at who I was when I walked in.

I’m not the same person who enrolled in this program.

This program handed me the company of one framework from the very beginning, and it didn’t just add to how I think about work. It changed my perspective on my career, and the results showed up immediately. It didn’t wait for next semester or for graduation. It showed up right away, in how I looked at the job I already had. Once you start seeing yourself as a company of one, responsible for your own output, your own growth, your own direction, that shift doesn’t stay contained to a lecture or a syllabus. It follows you into every room you walk into after that. That’s not a small shift. That’s the kind of thing that tells you the growth already happened, whether or not you have the diploma yet to prove it.

The same program made me ship a product before I felt ready for it. I didn’t love that in the moment. Nobody wants to hand something over knowing it could be better, knowing you could use two more weeks. But that discomfort taught me something readiness rarely does on its own. Waiting for ready is its own kind of trap. You can prepare and revise and second guess yourself right past the point where the work would have actually helped somebody. The version of me who enrolled in this program would have kept polishing. The version of me finishing it knows when to let go.

Even the smaller lessons have stuck with me the same way. This program encourages the use of AI, supports it openly, but it does that in a way that still pushes us to think for ourselves. This time, I noticed it instead of just using it, and that noticing is its own kind of growth. The version of me who enrolled might have taken a tool like that for granted. Now I pay attention to how a program teaches you to use something without letting it think for you, because that’s the same balance I try to live by everywhere else.

I’m thankful for the faculty who built a program willing to hold structure and independence at the same time. And I’m thankful for the classmates going through this last stretch alongside me, the people comparing notes on the same syllabus I haven’t fully read yet, wrestling with the same deadlines, showing up to the same first day I am.

I have four classes left. I’m not carrying the same toolkit I carried in on day one. I’m carrying a framework that changed how I see my career, a lesson about shipping before I feel ready, and a sharper eye for the tools I use and why. December is the actual finish line, the day the degree becomes official, but the growth that matters already happened along the way. The diploma is just going to make it official.

So here’s what I keep coming back to on this first day of my last semester. What milestone are you walking toward right now where the real proof isn’t the finish line? It’s who you already became to get there.