Between FSC and university I had a year with no structure and no permission required. I used it badly and well in equal measure. I taught myself Python from scratch. I tried crochet — genuinely, not ironically — and got decent at it. I attempted clay modelling, wood carving, origami. I played a lot of football. I made serious attempts at Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese, which mostly taught me how languages actually work rather than producing fluency in any of them. I read everything I could find on whatever I was curious about that week.

What the year taught me wasn't any specific skill. It was something about how I learn — that I need to touch a thing to understand it, that I'd rather try ten things seriously than one thing safely, and that the thread connecting all of it is a genuine restlessness toward understanding. That hasn't changed. It just has a CS degree around it now.

I chose Pre-Medical because it seemed like the serious choice — medicine is real, medicine helps people, medicine has a clear path. What I didn't account for was that I'd spend the entire time more interested in the logic underneath the biology than the biology itself. The gap year made the mismatch undeniable. I was spending my free time building things in code, reading about systems and economics and ideas, and avoiding everything that pointed toward a clinical future.

CS wasn't a sudden revelation. It was more like admitting something I'd been deferring. I enrolled at UET Taxila in 2025 and found it harder and more interesting than I expected — which is exactly what I needed.

A few things keep recurring regardless of what I'm supposed to be studying. Iqbal is the constant — not as a national symbol, but as someone who took selfhood seriously as something built, not given. His idea of Khudi is one I keep testing against my own choices, more than I probably admit.

Underneath that is a question I haven't resolved: whether being drawn to many things at once is a strategy, or just a personality trait wearing a strategy's clothes — and what it costs to be honest about which one it is.

I play table tennis with the intensity of someone who treats every game as slightly more important than it is. Chess, when I can find a patient opponent. Long walks — I think better moving than sitting, and Taxila has enough open space to walk a thought all the way through. I photograph things that catch my eye, which is how HMS Clicks began.

I alternate between long quiet stretches of deep focus and periods of scattered high-energy curiosity. I've stopped trying to flatten one into the other.