A powerful reflection on abandoning a fifteen-year career in enterprise tech to pursue authentic passion in optical engineering, exploring the courage required to choose genuine fulfillment over external success.
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After 15 years in enterprise tech, I realized success I didn't choose for myself was just a well-dressed cage, so I walked away and started over.
Jula Sherene · In Her Own Words
Her Story
About Jula
Jula Sherene brings 15 years of experience as an enterprise software developer specializing in SAP solutions. She began her career after earning a Bachelor's in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University in 2010 and advanced to the role of Associate Manager at Accenture LLP, where she managed global clients and developed strong collaboration skills across diverse teams. After a career break, she returned to academia and is now pursuing a Master's in Computer Engineering at the University of Tulsa. Her research centers on AI/ML optical systems, exploring the intersection of mathematics, engineering, physics, and artificial intelligence to understand hardware-software interfaces. She values hard work, continuous learning, and taking on challenging tasks, attributes that have supported her transition from application-layer development to deeper systems research.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jula
01What do you attribute your success to?
I don't define success in one point. Success keeps on elevating. I define success to keep learning. Every day learning a new skill, that's a success for me. If I accomplish something today, I learn something very new today, I think that's success for me.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Keep learning, you know, learning doesn't stop at all. So keep learning, and give in your best. Take in challenging tasks. If you're in a team of 5 members, and 3 members say that they cannot do it, then pick that task. Take responsibility, accountability, and take the task, and give your full best. One step at a time.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
My biggest fear was examination coming back after 15 years to college again. The first semester was really a nightmare. Managing all the other situations as a woman. You need to handle your family, your parents, your siblings, and everything, also your studies.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I value the hard work. I'm a millennial, so I believe in hard work rather than smart work. Whatever I do, I do it perfectly. I always think that I should do it really perfectly, and deliver it. The same thing I'm putting across in my personal life as well. Whatever tasks I do, even a cooking, do best with love and care for yourself.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Jula
Success I Didn't Choose: A Fifteen-Year Career, and the Courage to Start Over
What 15 Years in Enterprise Tech Taught Me About Starting Over
Success I Didn't Choose: A Fifteen-Year Career and the Courage to Start Over
From SAP to Starlight: What Fifteen Years in Enterprise Tech Taught Me About Starting Over
I spent fifteen years being good at something I no longer wanted to do.
Not bad at it—good. I built a career across Accenture, SAP PLM implementations, ABAP development, and client-embedded technical delivery for Fortune 500 companies. I had the title, the stability, and the kind of résumé that made recruiters call back. By every conventional measure, I had already "made it."
And still, I kept sketching circuits in the margins of meeting notes.
The Quiet Cost of the Right Path
Nobody warns you that the hardest career decision isn't the risky one—it's the comfortable one you have to walk away from. When something looks successful from the outside, questioning it feels almost ungrateful. I wasn't burned out in any obvious way. I wasn't underpaid or undervalued. I was just increasingly aware that the version of success I'd built was optimized for stability, not for the parts of myself that were actually alive—the ones drawn to hardware, embedded systems, and the physics of how information moves through light.
That awareness sat quietly for years before I let myself act on it.
Starting Over, On Purpose
At 15 years in, I left enterprise consulting and went back to school—full stop, from the beginning. I'm now an M.S.E. Computer Engineering student on the thesis track, research-focused and working on ML-driven optical communication systems: using neural networks to correct beam distortion in free-space optical links, the kind of research that sits at the intersection of AI, optics, and embedded hardware.
Some days, "graduate student" doesn't feel like success by the metrics I used to measure myself against. I traded a senior title for coursework. I traded a stable paycheck for a thesis deadline. I went from being the expert in the room to being, once again, the person asking questions.
But it's the first career decision I've made that was entirely mine.
What I'd Tell Her
If you're standing where I was—comfortable, capable, quietly restless—the discomfort you're feeling isn't a sign that something is wrong with you. It's information. Success that isn't yours to want will keep costing you, quietly, for as long as you let it.
Walking away from what works toward what's actually yours isn't a step backward. It's the first honest step forward.
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