I study urban planning. Most people's reaction to that is either "oh interesting" or a polite nod while they think about something else. It's not exactly a field people associate with tech careers. So this one needs a bit of explanation.
// How it actually started
About five months ago I built my first PC. That's the real starting point, not some grand career decision, just genuine curiosity about hardware. I wanted to understand what I was using every day.
Once that door opened, I couldn't close it. I started pulling on threads. How does an OS manage memory? What actually happens between me pressing enter and a webpage loading? I found CompTIA material, started going through it, and for the first time in a while I felt like I had found something I actually wanted to learn, not for a grade or a deadline, just because it was genuinely interesting.
Then I found AWS and cloud computing, and something clicked in a different way. It stopped being just interesting and started feeling like something I wanted to do.
// The overlap that surprised me
Urban planning is about designing systems that scale. You don't plan a city for today's population, you plan it for what it'll be in 20 years. You think about redundancy, what happens if one route goes down? You zone areas by function so they don't interfere with each other. You design access controls. You think about cost and capacity constantly.
None of that felt foreign when I started learning cloud architecture. VPCs are basically zoning. Public subnets are the commercial districts, facing outward, accessible. Private subnets are residential, protected, not directly exposed. Route tables are road networks. Availability zones are different boroughs. The mental model translated almost directly and I think that background in systems thinking has genuinely helped.
// Why cloud specifically
Because it moves fast and there is always more to learn. And because the problems are real, reliability, cost, scale, security. These are the same categories of problems urban planners think about, just in a different medium. I passed Cloud Practitioner in February 2026 and I'm deep in SAA prep now. Not looking back.