“Trust the process”

Growing up.

I don’t remember much from my childhood, but the things that still stand out are the long summer days playing soccer with my friends, riding bikes and wanting to be a detective.

You read that right, for the longest time I wanted to be a detective. I was devouring all sorts of books about solving crimes, teenage kids grouping up and taking out the bad guys/girls. Spoiler alert: I didn’t turn out to be a detective, at least not in the traditional sense.

Teenage years.

My teenage years consisted of playing video games, fiddling around with tech and church activities.

Growing up in a very Christian-fundamental environment certainly had it’s challenges when it came to consuming certain content (think games, music, movies). This is where I began to develop my researching skills that I needed to bypass firewall and MAC address filters to circumvent the internet limiter my dad had set up for me and my sisters. One could almost call it detective work.

Stepping into IT.

After graduating from technical college for business and administration I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

I certainly didn’t want to pursue any further studying since I grew tired of chewing through school books and doing assignments. I started to apply for apprenticeships and somehow found my way into a small systems integration shop in my home-town as a “Information and Telecommunications System Specialist”. Ironically I was stepping in my dad’s footprints as he used to be a Systems Administrator for about 10 years.

Chasing Dreams.

Three years later I completed my apprenticeship and found myself on vacation in Canada.

I always had a dream of leaving Germany but I never really paid much attention to it, until I found myself in Canada. My friendships back home started to phase out as people got married and had kids so I took a risk and got myself a work permit to move to Canada. After a rather rough start I ended up finding a job with a managed IT service provider in Edmonton as a Network Administrator.

Permanent Residency.

After almost five long years I finally received my permanent residency in April of 2019.

Needless to say it was a very special day for me and a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. After three (or four?) different work permits I finally reached my goal I’ve set for myself back in 2015. I definitely had to “trust the process” to get where I wanted to be.