June 25, 2026
Thesis, tears, tapas
Doing a masters while working in Spain
He moved to Barcelona, worked part-time, got a master’s—and the comments turned it into a life crisis
TLDR: A developer in Spain balanced a part-time job with a demanding master’s degree and says it was one of the most stressful periods of his life. In the comments, readers turned it into a bigger debate about burnout, second chances, and whether grown adults can still survive school.
A software worker’s attempt to reboot his life in Spain has hit the internet like aspirational chaos. After pandemic boredom, loneliness, and a dried-up freelance gig, he moved from Granada to Barcelona, took a part-time job, and somehow survived a demanding master’s degree at UPC while biking between class and office. The actual plot twist? The community didn’t just read this as a school story—they read it as a referendum on adulthood, burnout, and whether any of us still have the energy to reinvent ourselves.
The strongest reaction was a mix of admiration, envy, and low-key panic. One commenter basically begged for the full Mediterranean fantasy package—beaches, bars, presentations, all of it—turning the story into a “show us the dreamy expat montage” moment. Others got deeply personal fast: one reader said a remote second master’s during late Covid reminded them that studying is, in fact, brutally hard; another thanked the author for proving the workload struggle is real and not just a personal failure. And then came the emotional dagger: a late-30s commenter wondering if the ship has already sailed on doing a degree while managing adult life.
That’s where the real drama lives. Not in the classroom, but in the comment section’s collective existential spiral: is going back to school brave, romantic, exhausting, or slightly unhinged? The funniest hot take may be that academia is less about prestige and more about needing “something structured to do” before your brain melts. Mood.
Key Points
- •The author began a master’s degree in 2022 after relocating to Barcelona and simultaneously took a part-time salaried role at Adevinta when freelance work declined.
- •The degree was UPC’s Master of Innovation and Research in Informatics with an advanced computing specialization and included subjects such as randomized algorithms, advanced data structures, and social and complex networks.
- •Course assessment relied heavily on take-home projects, presentations, and written papers, which made the theoretical program feel practical.
- •The author describes strong faculty support, including regular guidance from thesis advisor Alicia Ageno and help from professors in obtaining academic credit for meetup presentations.
- •Balancing in-person study with 20 hours of weekly work was highly stressful; the degree took 2.5 years, included 12 ECTS credited from work, and ended with a workplace-based master’s thesis.