If someone had told me during my first years at university that I would one day work in banking, I probably would have wondered how that could possibly happen.

My journey started quite far from finance. I first studied architecture and urban & regional planning, then later moved into industrial engineering. For years, my academic world was built around cities, systems, optimization, and numbers.

Finance, meanwhile, was something I watched from a distance.

I had always been curious about financial markets and quietly imagined what it would be like to work in that world. But when your education and experience have already taken you down a very different road, changing direction does not feel like a small decision.

At some point, though, I thought: why not give myself a try?

That question changed more than I expected.

I stepped into banking, first as a financial institutions credit analyst and later moving into relationship manager. What had once been a field I was simply curious about gradually became my everyday work.

It was a big change, but strangely, I never felt that everything before it had gone to waste.

Architecture taught me to see the bigger picture. Engineering trained me to think in systems and numbers. Finance gave me a new place to use both and introduced me to a world I had wanted to explore for a long time.

Looking back, the path still does not look straight.

And I am glad it wasn’t.

Sometimes, we spend so much time trying to follow the path in front of us that we forget we are also allowed to change direction.

For me, giving myself that chance was where a different journey began.

And perhaps this page is where I start writing it down.