Hey HN community, been feeling a little lost lately. I just turned 23, and am completing my master’s in Biology at Harvard. I’m also a student in Georgia Tech’s OMSCS, specializing in ML.

Throughout my life, I always breezed through things, coasting through school. When I started my undergrad at UCSD, I decided to study Cognitive Neuroscience, because I’ve always been interested in replicating intelligence and understanding human consciousness. I plugged into an amazing group of student entrepreneurs and engineers, many of whom introduced me to the hacker culture, including YC and HN. But, I really became enamored with trying to get projects out, and scored a few internships as a PM on some health tech products. But through this whole time, I never really built technical depth, be it in programming or research. I showed up to tests, got As and promptly forgot the material. I never made meaningful connections with Professors and I never got involved with research because I just wanted to build the next cool app. I graduated in just under 3 years, and because I didn’t really know if I wanted to do grad school, I applied to a few Master’s programs.

By this point, I knew that CS, specifically ML and AI, and to a lesser extend app development, were necessary skills I needed to cultivate if I ever planned to do meaningful creative work in computational biology, AI, or health care, which were my chief interests. I enrolled in Hack Reactor, gained some fluency with modern web technologies, gained some recognition, and continued into both Master’s programs.

The last 12 months were a whirlwind, I finished all of my biology master’s and much of my CS master’s coursework, and have reached the stage that I can begin work on a thesis topic upon finding a professor. Also, I worked on a startup with a friend that got me to YC’s final interview stage and into a summer accelerator.

But the thing is, I honestly feel broken. I found all the knowledge I have is brittle and rushed, and that the sheer uncertainty of trying to build a startup is daunting. I haven’t been able to develop my career in any way, be it with software engineering internships, research assistant ships, or even successful side hustles. I haven’t found a professor who would like to work with me, and I’m utterly unprepared to apply to PhD programs this fall.

Through it all, I’ve found an intense love for ml, and I’d like to spend the next 4-6 months diving deep, validating some hypotheses, and becoming a capable researcher/ml engineer. But my insecurities force me to constantly try and productize my learning, and I constantly get distracted thinking about how folks are building incredible companies and I’m losing time to make an impact. 23 but me hard, I still feel 17, and I fear I’ll soon be 50 with the same superfluous, brittle understanding of things. All fluff, no depth.

It’s begun to affect my health, I’ve been losing sleep and gaining an alarming amount of weight, while falling behind in classes.

Do you have any suggestions as to what’s i should focus on? Should I go for a job/internship as soon as possible? Should I try for PhD’s without any research experience, only some novel projects and entrepreneurship.

Any advice would be appreciated, I really love this community and look up to many of you.