Dr. Jolanta Zjupa is research staff at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in high-performance computing (HPC). She talks about her path and experiences in different scientific domains, how intertwined a scientific career is with private life, and how one impacts the other. Investing 10 years of academic life in computational astrophysics, working on large-scale cosmological galaxy formation simulations, for the last 3 years her path has continued in HPC and computational science with strong focus on user support and HPC education to ensure effective and sustainable use of supercomputing resources.