The first winter I spent in Lowell, Massachusetts, I genuinely thought something was wrong with me. Not homesickness wrong. Something deeper. By 4 in the afternoon the sky was already dark, and I would sit in my apartment wondering why I had no energy to do anything, why everything felt heavier than it should. I was 24, thousands of miles from home, doing a master's degree at UMass Lowell. I had wanted this. And I could not understand why it felt like I was slowly disappearing.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning.
Where I'm from
I grew up in Walajapet, a small town about three hours southwest of Chennai. Not a place you'd find on most maps people look at. Quiet, tight-knit, the kind of place where everybody knows your family and your family knows everybody else's business. I love it for what it gave me. I also felt a little out of place there for most of my teenage years, like I was meant to be somewhere else but hadn't found it yet.
If I'm being honest, Hollywood did a number on me. Growing up watching American movies and TV shows, the US looked like the place where you could actually be yourself. The land of the free, they said, and what that meant to me at 20 wasn't freedom in some abstract political sense. It was freedom from the constant "what will people say" that shapes every decision back home. What college you go to, what job you take, who you marry, whether you're seen to be doing well enough. I wanted to go somewhere where that particular weight didn't follow you into every room.
I want to be honest about what the decision to come here looked like from the inside, because it gets described from the outside as brave or ambitious or a calculated bet. It was none of those things cleanly. It was more like: this is the path, and I'm walking it, and I'll figure out the rest when I get there.
So I got my bachelor's in Computer Science from Anna University, applied to master's programs in the US, got into UMass Lowell, and packed one suitcase and a backpack. Twenty four years of life, one bag. I landed at Logan Airport in Boston with $100 in cash and the address of my apartment in Lowell written on a piece of paper.
That $100 was gone before I made it to Lowell. The taxi from Boston to Lowell cost exactly that. I sat in the back of the cab watching the meter tick up, doing the conversion to rupees in my head, trying not to think about the fact that I had just handed over everything I had to a driver who probably made that run five times a day without thinking about it. Welcome to America.
Day one
I dropped my bag off at the apartment and went for a walk. I ended up at the Merrimack River, which runs right through Lowell, and I remember being genuinely surprised by how quiet and quaint it was. Not what I had pictured. The buildings along the river were old brick mill buildings, the kind of thing that would be a tourist attraction back home but here was just the neighborhood. It was beautiful in a way I hadn't expected.
And people kept saying "morning." Not good morning, just morning. A guy walking his dog said it. A woman jogging said it. A man opening his car said it. I didn't know whether to be confused or charmed. I decided to be charmed.
That walk by the river was the first moment I thought: okay. Maybe this works.
The culture shock nobody prepares you for
Lowell is a post-industrial city in the Merrimack Valley. It's not Boston. It's not the America you picture from the movies. It's working class and unhurried, and I had never owned a proper winter coat. I didn't understand tipping. I didn't understand why people at the grocery store didn't make eye contact. Silence in a public space is just the New England default, and it took me months to stop reading it as hostility.
Food was a whole thing. The first week, I walked into a McDonald's because I had grown up watching American movies and McDonald's was in all of them and it seemed like the right cultural initiation. I ordered a cheeseburger because I thought a cheeseburger was just a grilled cheese sandwich. In my defense, the word cheese is right there. The burger arrived and I took a bite and the meat confused me deeply. I ate the whole thing anyway because I was hungry and also because I had just spent $100 on a taxi and I wasn't throwing away food. But I want to be clear: I was disappointed. The McDonald's in Hollywood movies had always looked transcendent. The real one on Merrimack Street in Lowell was just a McDonald's.
I ate a lot of rice I cooked myself after that and tried not to think about my mother's cooking. I found a small Indian grocery store about 20 minutes away and treated going there like a weekly ritual. Small things anchor you when the big things feel unsteady.
The academic pressure was real too. The program moved fast, and I was doing it alongside people who had been coding professionally for years. I spent more nights than I want to admit in the library at 1am wondering if I had made a mistake.
But here's the thing about New England that took me a while to understand. The silence at the grocery store isn't coldness. The person who doesn't make eye contact is the same person who will spend 45 minutes helping you change a flat tire in the snow without being asked. New Englanders are grumpy on the outside and quietly, stubbornly generous on the inside. Once I figured that out, I stopped being lonely and started feeling like I belonged somewhere. A decade later, I genuinely cannot imagine living anywhere else. These are my people.
What the winters actually were
Which brings me back to that first winter. I didn't have a name for what I was feeling until years later. What I know now is that seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is genuinely common in the northeast, and it hits people from tropical or subtropical climates especially hard because the adjustment isn't just cultural, it's physiological. Your body is used to a certain amount of light. Take that away and something shifts. I wish someone had said that to me plainly in 2015. I wish I hadn't spent those winters assuming I just wasn't tough enough.
If you're reading this and you just moved here from somewhere warm and the first winter is doing something to you, it's not weakness. It's real, it's common, and it gets better when you know what it is.
How data science found me
The master's at UMass Lowell eventually pointed me toward data science, which at the time felt like a natural extension of what I was already doing: writing code, working with systems, trying to make sense of information. I graduated, did a second master's at Southern New Hampshire University focused on information assurance, and landed at Northeastern University where I've been building data platforms and ML systems ever since.
My title has changed over the years. Lead Data Scientist is what it says now. But the work I find most interesting sits at the intersection of data engineering and applied AI, designing the systems that let organizations actually use their data rather than just collect it. Ten years in, I'm still more curious about this stuff than I am tired of it, which I think means I chose right.
I'm also building palStack.io with a few close friends, a privacy-first suite of household apps. More on that in a future post. The short version: we got tired of every app wanting to store your data on their servers and built our own.
Why I'm writing this
I've been in this country for over a decade now. I have a good life here. I also remember very clearly what it felt like to not have one yet, to be in that Lowell apartment in January not quite understanding what was happening to me, not knowing anyone who had been through the same thing and come out okay.
This blog is three things running at once. It's a technical journal about data engineering and building palStack. It's a builder's log about the decisions we're making with the product. And it's this: an honest account of what the immigrant tech worker experience actually looks like from the inside. The H1B anxiety, the career navigation, the mental health stuff that nobody in our community talks about openly because we're all too busy trying to look like we have it together.
I don't have a fixed schedule. I post when I have something worth saying, no newsletter, no algorithm, just a site you can bookmark. If any of this sounds like it might be useful to you, I hope you stick around.