There are things I carry that I never stop to examine. Experiences I walked through on autopilot, with enough presence to function but not enough to remember . GDSC was one of them. It has been almost two years since I left, and this is the first time I am actually stopping. maybe subconsciously I was avoiding it, maybe the experience was painful in a way that needed distance. or at least that what I thought back then, but mostly it is because I have a self pattern of moving forward and forgetting to look back, and this is me deliberately breaking it, for once.
This is addressed to the team. but I’m publishing it because I think there are things worth saying out loud.
How It started
The acceptance email is dated September 20, 2022. I remember the feeling when I got it, I was happy, genuinely, and also immediately anxious. I had applied to the media team rather than the technical team, not fully because I was more drawn to media work or something, but because imposter syndrome had already done its work on me. the technical team felt too competitive. I was a first year student and there were people with years on me. I told myself I wasn’t good enough, and I rerouted. that is the honest version. and I think it was a smart move looking back. to get my feet there first, and then figure out what to do.
Ahmed Ali was the first person who made that environment feel safe. I owe him something specific: he simplified every large thing I had inflated in my head, walked me through what I didn’t know, forgave mistakes without making me feel like they were being tracked. I was shaky in those first weeks in a way that wasn’t visible from the outside, and he was the reason it didn’t spiral. that kind of steady guidance is something you only recognize fully after the fact, when you’re the one who is supposed to offer it to someone else and you realize how much it actually costs.
The media team in that first chapter was me, Ahmed Ali, Dalia Badia, Sa3adia, and Taj Eldeen. what I remember about that team was the quality of communication. respectful. clear. the standout work was the visual content we built around the network course ,a type of design I had never done before, and I loved it.
But I kept feeling a pull toward the technical side, and eventually I followed it. that shift changed things. Mohammed Elhaj and Reem Mohammed and Mohammed Eltayeb were a different kind of team, less anxious than I, less concerned with the architecture of every decision. they operated with a looseness I didn’t naturally have. they made progress feel lighter than it usually felt in my head. the distinction I’m reaching for is something like the difference between optimizing for correctness and optimizing for movement. I needed to be around people who chose movement. what came out of that technical team became real things: the Python course , the ML course , the solution challenge guidance . things people can still find and learn from. that part I am proud of.
The War. Then the Wheel.
The war in April 2023 did something to the team before it did anything to the country. it scattered people across cities and borders and broke the momentum before we had finished what we were building. and beyond the logistics of it, there is the interior cost of war, how it makes you turn inward, how it replaces forward motion with a kind of suspended grief where you are mostly just trying to figure out what remains. I had a lot to process at the time. everyone did.
I was in Egypt when Ahmed sent me the nomination code. he thought I was a good candidate to lead the next chapter: previous core team member, co-lead, someone who knew the memory of the club. he was right about all of that. I hesitated. despite all the encouragements I received. and then I had a specific image in my mind that moved me.
I thought about a teenager, sixteen or seventeen, somewhere in Sudan, who was the same age I was before university. highly curious, highly motivated, and unable to access the kind of material that changes what you think is possible for yourself. that image was what I said yes to. not the title. not the position. the specific teenager who deserved to find content that spoke to him in his dialect, from a university he looked up to, about things that would matter for his future. I accepted the lead for him.
And then I was in a position I never feel fully comfortable holding , leading in the formal sense. and what I remember about the period that followed is mostly a blur. I was on autopilot in a way I couldn’t have named at the time. I did the work. I sent the emails. I tracked the KPIs. I showed up to every coordination meet. but I was not fully present, not in the way that would have let me see the team clearly and remember them the way they deserved to be remembered. my memory does this — it files the feeling and loses the details.
What Leadership Actually Was
I want to be honest about what it cost, because I was not honest about it with myself while it was happening.
Leadership at that stage, given everything surrounding it, was not light. The emails and planning and conflict resolution and KPI tracking and system design were not the hard part. the hard part was emotional. knowing how to listen to a team member who needed to feel heard rather than just directed. knowing how to communicate a vision without losing patience when the execution diverged. knowing when to push and when to leave room. knowing that responsibility, unlike a task, has no completion state, you don’t finish being responsible, you just carry it until the thing ends. even when you aren’t there.
I had come in as someone who had been a media team member, a technical team member, and a co-lead. people expected a certain level of knowledge from me, and I tried to transfer everything I had. sometimes I succeeded. sometimes I was so stretched between the role and the rest of my life, which was also in the middle of reconstruction after the war, that I would go weeks without closely following a particular team and only notice the distance when it had already grown. that is not an excuse. it is the honest account of someone trying to lead while they were still very much in the middle of learning how.
And what I was learning, specifically, was how to stop being a perfectionist . how to accept good enough. how to not over-analyze every small interaction. how to be kinder in the moment rather than generous only in retrospect. I was trying to learn those things at the exact same time I was supposed to be modeling them for a team. I don’t know if I would have learned them outside of that environment. but I know I wasn’t done learning them when I was leading, and the team bore some of the weight of that.
What the Team Was
I said I won’t attribute the success of this chapter to myself, except in one thing: I tried, genuinely, not to micromanage. I learned early that I wasn’t the asset. the asset was always the team — the core members and the volunteers who showed up knowing the context, the grief of the war, the scattered geography, the reduced bandwidth that comes with living through something — and still chose to build something. they were the working hands. they were the ones crafting what actually mattered.
I remember Adam Logman, Leena Abo3obida, Mohammed Khalid, Lina Basheer, and others whose exact placement in the timeline I can’t recover cleanly, which is the honest cost of the foggy memory I carry. I know they were there. I know they built things. I know that each of them had their own version of the same weight everyone was carrying, and they still showed up.
What I want to say about the team, and what I should have said much sooner, is that the kind of maturity they brought was not something I could manufacture or instruct. when things went wrong, when my oversights created friction or when my miscommunication added pressure that wasn’t necessary, they didn’t make it personal. they resolved it, moved on, and kept building. that is not a small thing. that is the kind of environment that is very hard to build and very easy to take for granted when you are inside it.
The club was a home in the truest sense. people could propose things and actually work on them. there was freedom to grow, to fail, to try something and see what happened. I didn’t always evaluate every idea as closely as I should have. I missed things. but the spirit of the place — that people felt free to bring something to the table — that was real and it was theirs, not mine.
What I Owe
If I were watching this club from the outside during those years, I would have been proud of us. proud in the specific way you feel proud when people keep going despite everything pushing against them, not from immunity to the pressure, but from a choice made repeatedly that the work still matters.
I wasn’t the best leader. I want to say that directly and without burying it in qualification. I was young, mid-reconstruction, overwhelmed in ways I didn’t disclose, and learning things about myself and other people in real time. the team was kinder to me than my performance always warranted. and I think the debt I owe is not one that can be repaid retroactively — but I can at least stop letting the experience pass without naming what it was.
It was a formative two years. it was one of the places I learned the most about how I function under responsibility, about the gap between the leader I imagined I would be and the one I actually was, about how much the quality of the people around you determines what becomes possible. and the people around me were exceptional. they cared, they stayed, they built real things in hard circumstances, and they were generous with a leader who was still figuring out what he was doing.
I’m grateful for that. I should have said it years ago. but here it is now, which is the only time I have.