i went to bed with my mind still thinking about the questions i couldn't answer, i woke up at 6:30 am and couldn't fall back asleep thinking about the questions. i eventually got up and took the call with J and mafia to help with her commencement speech. the questions started circling in my head again and i started looking into the answers. i also got my interviewer's email during this time, and i thought of sending an email thanking them, along with the solutions. more for my own peace of mind, than an attempt to redeem myself.
i got the rejection email soon after sending that email. i was 85% certain that i wouldn't be passing, but i felt the sting. 7 days of non-stop prep and full focus on leetcode and ml system design, all for nothing. i couldn't even ansifwer basic questions. i went back to nap because of the lack of sleep, and then dragged myself out of bed again to go to the seminar on campus. i'll be late if i walk so i took a lime scooter for the first time. they're so expensive, it's 55c/min but including tax and other fees, a 10 minute ride was about $8. after seminar i stayed in class, working on homework. the lecture was about Unets and word2vec, and bayes theorem in language modeling and markov theorems.
when i walked back to class, i felt the low of the rejection. i felt like an idiot. in hindsight, if i had just given the problem more thought, if i had better mathematical foundations, if i had the ability to grok a concept, and if i didn't breeze through details and actually spent time to understand things at a deeper level, i wouldn't have had trouble in that interview. i kept blaming myself. i blew my only opportunity to work in big tech, a cushy job with high pay, working with some of the smartest people in the bay.
that was the hardest interview i've had in my life, and this past week was been intense. i acknowledge that maybe this isn't what God wants for me now. He has something greater planned for me. i have to remember i'm merely following where God leads me. there are more doors ahead of me.