The Second Quarter of 2026

When I wrote about the first quarter of 2026 back in March, a lot of it was about learning to show up more: to events, to conversations, to new rooms and to the kind of people who make you want to think bigger.

Three months later, I am writing this in early July, and the quarter behind me looks nothing like the version of it I had in my head when spring started. I had expectations going in, like anyone does when they are thinking about the future. You hope for the best, you chase the things you care about, you set goals and tell yourself that if you work hard enough they will work out. I did all of that. Things just did not unfold exactly the way I imagined they would, and I am starting to understand that maybe that is not always a bad thing.

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Where I Thought I Would Land#

For most of this quarter, sometimes in the back of my mind and often right at the front of it, I was looking for a summer internship and trying to see where I would land in this AI-driven ecosystem.

Big tech interviews and online assessments were not really in my favor, and after sitting through quite a few of them, I started to realize that the path that made more sense for someone like me was probably to talk directly to founders, show what I could build, and get hired because someone actually believed in my work rather than because I survived a timed coding round.

I would say that approach worked, well, but not quite enough to get me where I wanted to be. Internships became my number one priority for a while, and as an international student, that kind of pressure sits differently than it might for someone who does not have the same constraints hanging over every decision.

NYU was getting better for me. More people started to recognize me and acknowledge the work I was putting in, but it was not the kind of enough I was looking for when I thought about where I wanted to be by summer.

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A Week In San Francisco#

This spring break I had the chance to go to San Francisco for a week, which is really all the time spring break gives you, but I tried to make the most of every day I had there. The experience was genuinely good in a way that is hard to fully put into words, partly because if I had told my fifteen-year-old self that a decade from now I would be walking around San Francisco and living in New York, that kid would not have believed me.

I come from humble beginnings. My parents worked hard enough to give me a comfortable life, but my dad was still in the building stage when I was growing up, and we were barely getting by. If you had told that version of me that one day I would have the chance to travel halfway across the world and live what honestly feels like the best years of my life so far, I would have thought you were joking. I am really thankful to my parents for making that possible.

I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, traveled around the city, and met founders and builders who are genuinely working on the future of technology. Every city has its good and bad sides, and if I had to choose I would still rather be in New York because I am quite comfortable here, but San Francisco was interesting in a way that stayed with me. You cannot escape tech there. From the moment I landed until I left, I must have seen at least a hundred ads somehow related to AI B2B SaaS, and the stereotypes exist for a reason.

It is an exciting place if you are someone who wants to build, the innovation, the hustle, and the density of startups operating at that level is something you feel immediately. Competing with the kind of exceptional people building there is probably a dream for a lot of folks in this space.

What I like about New York and the startup culture here is that it feels creative in a different way, and I want to be clear that this is not me trying to rank one city over the other, it is just a personal preference that became clearer to me after spending time in both.

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Back In New York#

When I came back from spring break, I tried to refocus on my studies, but I could not do that as much as I wanted to because there were other goals pulling at my attention. The frequency of tech events I was attending kept increasing, and most weekends I was out at something, sometimes a hackathon, sometimes a get together, building alongside people from every corner of the industry, engineers, non technical folks, product managers, market leaders, all kinds of people who see the world differently and build differently.

Eventually I started winning hackathons here and there, and that was a great experience honestly, but at some point the wins and losses stopped mattering as much as the people I was meeting along the way. I have made really good friends, people I stay in touch with, hang out with on weekends, go out with and talk to without needing a reason. The network I got access to through all of this is worth way more to me than anything I could put on a leaderboard.

In June there was tech week in New York City, which was one of the more surreal stretches of the whole quarter. I attended events across different fields, met people I would never have crossed paths with otherwise, and spent a week feeling like the entire city had turned into one long conversation about what people are building and where things are headed.

The last three months or maybe like the last five months, have been an essential part of my life in a way I did not fully appreciate while I was in the middle of it.

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Six Weeks#

There was a stretch of about six weeks, like a month and a half, that felt more special than everything else happening around it. I got along with someone and it became a kind of ritual where every weekend, usually Friday or Saturday, we would go out, roam around the city, share experiences, and talk about everything from culture to the random interesting things happening in each other's lives. Not heavy intellectual debates, just the kind of conversations that feel worth having with someone who actually has something to say.

Maybe I am growing older, or maybe New York changes what you want from the people around you, but I have found that I care more about being around folks who have thoughts of their own and principles they actually stand by, not just people who are pleasant to look at but people who are genuinely good to talk to. Some of those evenings were simple in a way that stayed with me, sitting somewhere and realizing I had not looked at my phone in a while, not because I was making an effort to be present but because I simply did not feel the need to.

It did not last long, and that is okay. I am glad it happened, and I am glad we did not drag it out longer than it was meant to go because whatever happened was probably for the best.

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Looking Ahead#

The second quarter of 2026 did not go the way I hoped when I was planning it back in March. There were things I wanted badly that did not work out, and school took a back seat more than it should have. But I also spent a week in a city my younger self would not have believed I could reach, met people who changed how I think about building, won things that stopped mattering the moment I realized the friendships were the real prize.

I still do not have everything figured out when it comes to career, relationships, or what the next few months are supposed to look like, and I probably will not anytime soon. But the last few months taught me something that chasing goals on a checklist never could, that you can plan for the best outcome and still end up somewhere worth being as long as you keep putting yourself out there and letting people in.

I hope the next two quarters are even better.

And honestly, I think it will be alright for me.

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