June 2026 · 6 min read
My CV says it plainly now: BSc in Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, discontinued. For a long time I wrote things like "ongoing" instead, hoping nobody would ask. This post is the version I would have wanted to read back then.
I did not leave because the degree was too hard. I left because somewhere in the middle of it I found the work I actually wanted to do, and the degree became the thing standing between me and doing it. In 2021 I joined Gameriv writing gaming content. Writing needed thumbnails, thumbnails needed graphics, and one day I realized I was spending more care on the images than the articles. Nobody assigned me that. It was just the part of the day I looked forward to.
The part people skip in these stories
The montage version jumps from "discovered design" to "design manager." The real version is slower and less flattering. I made hundreds of bad graphics before the good ones. I studied other designers' work the way my classmates studied past exam papers: what grid is this, why does this feed layout breathe and mine suffocates, why does their type look intentional and mine looks placed. I took every design task nobody else wanted, because volume was the only teacher available to someone without a design school.
Dropping out cost me things, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Some doors in Bangladesh check the degree box before they check anything else; government roles, some corporate ladders, certain visas. I chose to compete where the portfolio is the credential. That was a real trade, not a slogan, and I made it with open eyes.
What replaced the degree
Three things, roughly in order. Proof of work: by the time Misfit hired me for UI design in 2023, I had a public trail of shipped graphics, and that trail answered questions a certificate would have only gestured at. Range: content writing turned out to be a design superpower in disguise, because most design work is deciding what something should say before deciding how it looks. And reliability: at SEOSkit I design for fifteen-plus brands on real deadlines. Managers do not ask where you studied when the work ships every week at quality. They ask when you can start the next one.
If you are standing where I stood
I will not tell you to quit university. The degree is the safer road and the safety is worth something, especially here. What I will say is this: if you already know what your work is, the fastest way to get good at it is to do enormous amounts of it in public. Keep every piece. Date them. In two years the folder becomes an argument no interviewer can dismiss, and unlike a certificate, it compounds.
And fix your CV before someone else finds the gap. Mine says discontinued now, one honest word, and in every interview since, it has cost me exactly one question. The portfolio answers the rest.