30-Day Progress Update: Struggles and Doubts

It's been 30 days since I started this challenge, and I’ve been slacking a lot lately. It feels like I’m not focusing on the things I should be.

In the past 10 days, I’ve spent less than 20 hours on learning AI—averaging less than 2 hours a day. That’s incredibly little.

One significant thing that happened during these 10 days is that I had a statistics exam. I really love statistics; it’s such a fascinating science. However, due to my procrastination, I could only study it for short-term memory…

Moving forward, I want to implement retrieval practice using Anki at the end of each day to retain these concepts in the long term.

Doubts

Over the past few weeks, I’ve developed a lot of doubts about the AI industry and my path forward:

1. How much of university is actually useful in AI/Data careers?

Our study program is heavily math-based, and after a full year at university, I feel completely unprepared for a real-world AI job. We’ve only used PyTorch for a single CNN project—that’s it.

In my free time, I built a DistilBERT text classifier to detect news bias, and I used maybe 1% of what I learned in university. This makes me wonder how much of my curriculum is actually applicable to the job.

I asked a tutor about this, and they mentioned that their experience was mainly research-based, not real-world applications. So, I’m left wondering: how much of the work in the industry is simply downloading models from Hugging Face and fine-tuning them? And how much requires actual mathematical thinking and problem-solving?

2. How do I find joy and fulfillment in the AI/Data industry?

As a web developer, there’s always an endless number of websites or apps you can build for various use cases. But I don’t feel the same with AI.

I never feel the urge to open PyTorch and code my own architecture. Why would I? Thousands of people far smarter than me have already optimized the best approaches. It feels like there’s very little incentive to learn and fail—like you need to be on the cutting edge to be relevant. The barrier to entry in AI feels incredibly high. How am I supposed to compete?

I did try working with LangChain recently, but honestly, that’s not AI development—it’s just software dev with a sprinkle of "prompt engineering."

I’m confused about how to find passion in an industry that feels impossible to break into for the average person. Do I really need to study all this time just to become a certified Hugging Face model downloader? That’s pretty demotivating…

I want to fall in love with AI the same way I fell in love with software development and programming in general. But right now, I’m struggling to find joy in it. It feels like every problem has been solved, and I’m left feeling useless, unable to catch up.