The Apprenticeship.

College began as a race for technical depth. While the syllabus covered the basics, I was building my own detention center for bugs. Writing malloc from scratch to understand segfaults, scraping portals before there was a polite reason to, and obsessing over the distance between a textbook example and the actual wire.

Learning to see the system.

The 9.55 CGPA wasn't about the grades, it was about the discipline of completion. I learned early that taste comes from quantity. The path from first-year to mainnet isn't a leap, it is a thousand boring repetitions until you stop being surprised by your own mistakes.