The Path I Didn’t Plan: How Curiosity Changed My Direction

By Robert Barder

“It always seems impossible until it is done.” That Nelson Mandela quote has been hanging on my bedroom wall for years, and I have found myself thinking about it a lot during my time at UF. When I first came to UF, I felt like I was supposed to know what I wanted my career to look like and where I was headed. I came in with a plan: Finance, a career in the financial industry, and a pretty clear idea of what came next. But the more I got involved and tried new things, the more that plan started to change. I started finding interests that weren’t part of the plan at all.

Innovation Academy has been an important part of that process. Through IA’s Catalyst competition, I worked with a team to take an idea that was still pretty rough and turn it into something we could actually present. I remember getting questions about parts of our idea that we hadn’t fully developed and having to figure out how to explain our thinking on the spot. It was one of my first experiences having to put an idea in front of other people and be comfortable with the fact that it might not be perfect. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that experience would come back later in the summer.

I saw that lesson again during my internship at Robinhood, where I spent the summer in Menlo Park, California, as a Financial Compliance Intern. I learned a lot about compliance and the financial side of a fintech company, but some of the most interesting parts of the summer came from people I met outside my team. I spent a lot of time with software engineering interns and became interested in what they were working on and how products actually get built. I found myself asking them questions about their projects and thinking more about the technology behind a company like Robinhood. It was an area I had never really considered for myself before.

That curiosity also pushed me to get involved in things outside of my regular internship work. One of the highlights of the summer was working with a graduate student on a product idea and volunteering to present it to a panel that included Robinhood’s co-founder and CEO, Vlad Tenev, and other senior leaders. I was definitely nervous, but Catalyst had already given me experience developing an idea with a team, responding to questions, and presenting to an audience. I almost let someone else volunteer, but I decided to do it. It ended up being one of the experiences I was most proud of from the summer.

By the end of my internship, I was thinking differently about what I wanted to study. I had started college convinced that Finance was the right major for me, but I had become increasingly interested in technology, data, and product development, especially when they intersect with business and finance. When I returned to UF, I decided to switch my major from Finance to Information Systems. I don’t see that decision as leaving Finance behind. If anything, my internship helped me realize that I don’t have to choose between these interests.

This semester, I will be continuing my work as a Student Assistant at the Lastinger Center for Learning, where I am developing my data and communication skills in an environment very different from a fintech company. I also plan to stay connected to finance through the Hedging and Trading Collective, where I will take on a leadership role. These different experiences are giving me the chance to keep exploring how my interests in technology, data, business, and finance can come together.

If I could tell my freshman self anything, it would be to give myself permission to explore, but also to remember that exploring means actually doing things. Talk to people whose work you know nothing about. Join something that interests you. Ask questions. Take an internship even if you don’t know exactly where it will lead. It’s hard to know what interests you until you give yourself the chance to experience different things.

I came to UF thinking I needed to know exactly where I was going. Now I think it is more important to stay curious, keep trying new things, and be willing to change direction when you learn something new. You don’t have to see the entire path to take the next step.

Go Gators! 🐊