When we finished college, there was no such thing as campus placements, at least not for us, and getting a job was less about being chosen and more about how long you were willing to keep showing up without any real signal that something would eventually work out. This meant that at some point we decided the only variable we could change was where we were, and so we chose to move to a bigger city, carrying with us the simple and largely untested belief that opportunity must exist somewhere and that maybe it was unevenly distributed, and if we placed ourselves in the right geography, something would eventually shift.
We didn’t have much of a plan beyond that, and somewhere in the middle of those early days, just before we left, we ran into a friend almost by accident, the kind of meeting that feels casual and forgettable in the moment but quietly rearranges things later, and in the middle of that conversation he mentioned he knew someone in the city we were heading to and gave us a number, suggesting that we should call when we got there, which we did without thinking too much about what would come of it.
The freind he know we spoke to, asked us to come by in the evening, and when we reached, he didn’t just help us find a place to stay, he treated us with a kind of ease and familiarity that didn’t quite match how little he actually knew us, as if we had arrived somewhere we were expected rather than somewhere we were trying to figure out how to belong, and while it didn’t solve the larger uncertainty, it made the city feel slightly less unknown, not smaller, but less hostile.
The first two months after that were harder than we had imagined, because days began to take on a rhythm that felt productive on the surface but uncertain underneath, where every morning the four of us would step out with a directory of companies and their addresses, split ourselves into two groups and head in opposite directions across the city, leaving our CVs wherever we could, sometimes being called in for a conversation, sometimes being stopped at the entrance and asked to just leave the document behind, which we did without asking too many questions, and then repeating the same thing the next day, and the day after, without really knowing if any of it was accumulating into something or just passing through.
At some point in that stretch, we walked into a training institute and asked if we could teach, not because it was something we had set out to do, but because it felt like something within reach at a time when most things didn’t, and the owner looked at us for a moment, almost surprised by the request, and then said something that didn’t fully land at the time, which was that we were aiming too low, that we shouldn’t settle for what was immediately available just to end the discomfort of not having anything, and that the industry that was just beginning to expand would need people willing to step into it even if they didn’t yet feel ready.
We walked out of that place without a job, but with a subtle shift that was difficult to name then, which was not quite confidence but a hesitation about lowering the bar simply to make the uncertainty go away.
A few days later, on a hot afternoon that had already taken more out of us than it should have, we walked into the office of a company we had only heard about and asked at the reception if we could meet the CEO, which was not part of any plan so much as it was the absence of one, and the receptionist, assuming we had an appointment, asked us to wait and then led us into a cabin that we had no real reason to be sitting in.
When he walked in and saw us, we told him the truth, which was that we were looking for a job, and there was a pause that followed, the kind of pause that usually signals the end of a conversation before it begins, but instead of asking us to leave, he thought for a moment and said that he knew someone who might be looking for people like us and offered to connect us, which was not an outcome we had anticipated when we walked in, but one we accepted without overthinking.
That introduction turned into an opportunity, and over time, that opportunity turned into something much larger than what we had imagined when we first arrived in the city with nothing more concrete than the assumption that something would eventually work out.
Years later, when we had come to know those people better, they told us what that moment had looked like from their side, which was not a careful evaluation of our qualifications but a kind of surprise at the fact that we had walked into a room we had no claim to and asked anyway, and that there was something in that which made them believe we would find a way to make things work.
At the time, it didn’t feel like courage.
It felt like we had simply run out of reasons not to try.
Looking back now, it is easy to connect the dots and give the sequence a kind of narrative shape, the move, the uncertainty, the conversations, the break, but in the moment, none of it felt like a story unfolding, and it certainly didn’t feel like anything was leading anywhere in particular.
It was just those days, walking in different directions with a list of names and addresses, entering buildings, leaving behind pieces of paper with our names on them, and a few people along the way who, for reasons we did not fully understand at the time, chose to respond.