Background
After graduating in 2021, I immediately started working as a software developer at a company in Kathmandu. A few months in, I realized that the onsite setup was quietly eating my life. Two hours of commuting every day, nothing to show for it except exhaustion. So I kept applying for remote jobs on the side, and fortunately it didn’t take long. The next job was fully remote. Work from anywhere, no commute, no fixed desk. At that point in my life, it felt perfect.
But a couple of years down the line, the restlessness came back. I had been writing code, building features, and reviewing PRs every single day. The first two years were genuinely fun. By the third year, I was doing the same things with my eyes half closed. The job could have let me explore a different tech stack, but for whatever reason that never materialized. Meanwhile, a quieter thought had been growing in the background: I wanted to go deeper into one specific field, not just keep accumulating years of general experience.
I had been drawn to NLP and machine learning for a while. It felt like the area where things were actually moving fast, where the problems were hard in interesting ways, and where my software background would be useful rather than irrelevant. A master’s degree felt like the right way to actually commit to it instead of just reading papers on weekends.
Planning the move
After three years at that job, I resigned. The timing wasn’t ideal. Trump’s tariff announcements were rattling the global economy and things felt uncertain. But I had made up my mind and I still think it was the right call. Waiting for a good time to do something like this is how it never happens.
After leaving, I focused fully on applications. Germany had been at the back of my mind for years as a destination: good universities, free or low-cost tuition, strong research culture, and a serious approach to engineering. I applied to several programs and got offer letters from a few. The University of Trier’s NLP program was the one that made the most sense, and I accepted.
Then came the visa process. Just as I was in the middle of waiting, the GenZ protests in Nepal broke out, which disrupted some administrative processes for a stretch. It added a few weeks of uncertainty, but it eventually resolved. In late September, I finally arrived in Germany, in Trier.
To be continued.