My name is Mustafa Esad Ustunel, and the path that brought me here was never a straight line. Looking back, every hard part of it taught me something I still use today.

I was eleven when my family faced political persecution in Turkey. My father was imprisoned, and for two years my mother, my baby sister, and I learned what it means to hold a family together when the world around you steps back. Those years were difficult in ways I don't always have words for — but they taught me resilience long before I knew the word for it.

By fourteen, I was working full days — in kitchens, as a waiter, making deliveries, and on weekends in a shop — while keeping up with school online. I learned early that effort is one of the few things you can always control, even when nothing else is in your hands.

Eventually, staying was no longer safe, and my family made the hard decision to leave the only home we'd ever known. We spent about a year in Georgia, and at sixteen I graduated high school there with top marks — proof to myself that I could keep moving forward no matter where I was standing.

When that chapter closed, another long journey began — one that took us through several countries before we finally reached the United States. My family came here for safety. As a young person, I saw it as something more, too: a chance.

For my first couple of years here, that chance looked like 5 a.m. mornings and long shifts in a warehouse — processing thousands of orders a day, unloading trucks, and keeping inventory moving. There was no car and no easy road back to school, just work. It was exhausting, but it became the foundation everything else was built on.

When I finally had the opportunity to go back to school, I knew exactly what I wanted: a career in IT and network engineering, the field I'd been drawn to since I was a kid. I started my studies in computing, and not long after, I earned a role as a Campus IT Specialist at Harmony Public Schools, running real infrastructure for an entire campus.

Today I'm studying Information Technology at the University of Massachusetts Global, with a focus on Network Engineering, while working in IT full time. I don't wait to be taught — I teach myself. Structured cabling and connectivity troubleshooting, endpoint and device deployment, Cisco environments, Azure AD, Linux and SSH: I take on work that isn't always "my job," because every problem I solve makes me sharper at the one I want to build my life around. This is only the beginning.