End of 2025 Review – Amanda Park

2025 was a year with various changes in my life. Here’s an overview:

The Good of 2025

A New Job!

In March of this year I left my job at Corewell Health, which I had been at for over 5 years, for a new opportunity at Cardamom Health.

I’m grateful Corewell Health took a chance on me out of grad school, and that sense of loyalty was certainly part of why I stayed at the company as long as I did. However, over my time there, I saw roughly two cycles of talented data scientists come and go (most of them lasting around 2-3 years), and realized that my both my skillset and salary were lagging relative to my peers.

When I got an offer from Cardamom, I realized loyalty wasn’t a good excuse to be complacent in my career, and I needed to take the chance and see what things were like on the consulting side of healthcare. And now that I’m a few months into this position, I don’t regret my decision at all! I’m glad I waited for the right opportunity for me.

Switching roles has been a great opportunity to stretch my skillset in ways I couldn’t in a larger company. While I’m no longer building predictive models in my current role, I’ve gotten experience developing LLM solutions and even being a full-stack software developer. (I now know the difference and importance between client-side and server-side callbacks, which if you had asked me that back in March I would have had no idea.)

Yet Again, More Travel

This year, I continued my travels and added 3 National Parks to my belt with visiting the Everglades, Redwoods, and Crater Lake. (I don’t have ambitions to hit every single national park in the US or anything like that; I’ve crossed off quite a few national parks that were on my “must-do” list since I visited my first one back in 2022.)

In general, my main travel experiences consisted of the following:

Florida
Oregon
Chicago
New Jersey
Philly & PAX Unplugged

Florida

I took a trip to visit my parents in March (which was awkwardly placed in between my two-week notice at Corewell, so it was a very weird trip emotionally speaking), and we decided last-minute to go visit southern Florida.

But also hit some areas closer to central Florida, such as my first hockey game:

Probably my last one too, since it was such a high-scoring game that I don’t think another game could compete in terms of intensity.

And a nice state park:

Oregon

In July, I visited Oregon and traveled around the state on a week-long trip, hitting a lot of the highlights of the state in the process:

Chicago

I attended the Microsoft AI Tour in Chicago in September as a part of a work trip, but that didn’t stop me from doing some sightseeing outside of the event:

New Jersey

My dad was experiencing caregiver burnout in the fall after everything going on with his parents, so I dragged my parents on a relatively last minute trip south to Atlantic City (and hitting things slowly on a drive back):

Atlantic City. The Giants actually won when I was down here and watching Dart and Skattebo light up the Eagles in primetime is the happiest I’ve probably been as a fan since 2021. As of me writing this blog post, they haven’t won a game since…

Hickory Run Boulder Field. My dad was annoyed I didn’t remember going to this when I was a kid. It’s a bit of a pain to drive to, but an interesting sight.

PAX Unplugged

Early last year, I told myself that conventions weren’t really for me and I made a note to not really go to them going forward. However, I decided I didn’t really do everything I wanted to in Philly when I last went in 2021, and some friends were already going to the con, so I gave the board gaming convention another go:

The “LOVE” Sign was smaller than I thought. The bean was better.

My first mini I painted at PAX. I ignored the instructor and just painted Gingy from Shrek.

Goodbye Dating Apps (And Good Riddance)

Over the past couple of years, I watched almost all of my friends either pair off into serious relationships or, for the polyamorous ones, integrate more people successfully into their polycule. It was starting to feel like dating was musical chairs, and I was the one without a seat. Even the kid I used to babysit got married this year, which triggered the “what am I doing wrong?” line of thoughts.

Some of my life choices in the past few years hadn’t really set me up well for success with dating, such as living in a rural area and working remotely. These decisions were great for other aspects of my life (particularly financially), but they didn’t help the numbers game for meeting a partner.

I also had some other factors working against me. I started dating later in life than most people do, and my lack of experience put me at a disadvantage. In some ways I felt like dating was going through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), and because I didn’t have the right keywords or years of experience, I would get HR-level responses very early in the process. It was exhausting, and I’d regularly take breaks from dating just so I wouldn’t become bitter.

Even in July of this year, I was debating if things didn’t turn around dating-wise in the next few months or so that I’d trial living in a larger city in part to see if that would improve my dating odds at all. I wasn’t particularly optimistic about giving the dating apps another go given my past experiences, but I wanted to be thorough before I considered more drastic measures to improve my dating situation. I won’t go into any specific details given the nature of this blog, but let’s just say I’m satisfied with the outcome from the first date on this particular roll of going through the apps.

So why did it work out for me this time?

I got lucky and found someone that had what I was looking for and simultaneously matched what they were looking for.

Not a very satisfying answer, I know. It would be so easy to say “it’s because I mastered insert random personal development skill” but outside of just having general communication abilities, there’s no silver bullet. If anything the pressure to constantly grow and develop inevitably sanded down some of the more authentic parts of my personality, and I needed to shed those incredibly high and restrictive expectations to create the environment in which a relationship could grow and blossom. The productivity bot version of myself wasn’t going to have a successful relationship; it needed to be me.

The Bad of 2025

Death in the Family & Fallout

My grandpa was in hospice most of this year and passed this September. This involved my grandma going into a nursing home and selling their home.

My dad bore a lot of the brunt of the logistical planning, but unfortunately after my grandpa’s death a lot of the stress and drama came to a head and led to a falling out between my dad and his brother.

I was never particularly close with my uncle so it didn’t exactly sting to be disowned by proxy of him disowning of my dad, but it’s disappointing that the situation played out as it did.

AI

As someone that uses AI tools at her work daily, I’m not going to argue that there aren’t any benefits to the technology. But the societal effects of having generative AI easily available to people is terrifying:

The subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI feels like a Black Mirror episode
Sora 2’s capacity for believable video deepfakes makes it hard to trust anything on the internet. Video was an okay bellweather against text and image generation advancements in the last couple of years, but that’s no longer the case, so we’re speedrunning dead internet theory
The lack of regulation in the AI space means there’s a proliferation in scams and identity theft with voice cloning technology (highly recommend freezing your credit to help protect yourself from these threats!)

There’s also other obvious societal effects from AI (thinks kids in school using AI to write their papers) but these recent ones I’ve learned about this year are snowballing into a break in the social contract. When I was in school we told kids “learn to code” to get a good job, but these generative AI technologies have made it even more difficult to get into tech (and it took me ~500 applications to get into Corewell out of grad school).