From as young as I can remember my parents encouraged me to follow my passion. However at the time I didn’t feel particular passionate about anything, besides the typical interests of a young girl. As I grew up, I struggled to find my “passion”, at least with the definition I held; a very strong interest in an activity or an object. My inability to identify my own passion led to an immense stress to find that beloved interest, and feelings of inadequacy that I did not possess one.
I entered college as a Liberal Arts major in efforts to experiment with different disciplines in pursuit of finding my future career. At this point I had eliminated the word passion from my vocabulary and instead was in pursuit of my interests. After spending the first year debating my options, I committed to psychology. I loved working in the lab environment; creating and testing hypothesis. In my last year of college when I started to take a deeper look in my options for the next step in my career, I found myself becoming more disinterested in working in the field of psychology research. After working as a bartender for a while, I landed a marketing job with a local brewery.
Throughout my time working at the brewery, my responsibilities expanded from taproom and marketing to managing our small marketing team, HR duties, liquor license compliance, and IT. The one commonality, amongst all the departments, that I found I really enjoyed was problem solving. I liked finding ways to increase efficiency and using creative methods to solve problem. I experienced “flow” in creating new “methods” or “items”, ranging from creating a description and design for a beer label, to writing operating procedures for a new way of executing a task, or policies— I would become very focused at the problem or task at hand and time would fly by.
I started to consider learning software development a couple years ago while creating a new website for the company. The template was lacking certain function I wanted so I attempted to read the HTML, and play around with it. Because I wore many hats, I found efficiency in daily tasks to be pivotal. I started searching for software tools that could help organize and execute tasks and when I couldn’t find the right tool, I started to dreaming up software I wished was available. However, studying something like software engineering didn’t seem like an actual possibility until a few months before I applied to Flatiron School.
At the beginning of 2019, a close friend passed away, and it caused me to reevaluate every part of my life and the decisions I had made. Pretty cliche. I realized I hadn’t taken many risks in my life, and I hadn’t worked really very hard for anything. You don’t have to be a psychology major to know the harder you work for/towards something, the more satisfaction you receive from it. Everything I had done or achieved in life was relatively easy because I ‘fell in to it’, so to speak. I started paying very close attention to my feelings about myself, my self-esteem, and my gut emotions to things I encountered.
I noticed a desire to learn a new skill, specifically a skill that didn’t come naturally to me. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to develop a skill as a hobby, or a profession, so I started with rock climbing— an activity that certainly doesn’t come naturally to me. I am somewhat afraid of heights (apparently predisposed to a fear of heights— Thank you 23andMe); I don’t have a strong inherent sense of balance. I also started practicing painting, drawing, and playing around with clay — all of the activities my parents desperately encouraged me to do when I was younger.
I felt a noticeable difference in my happiness, but I was still craving a change in my professional life. I was increasing aware that, although I was a great generalist, I wanted to be specialized in something. I was ready for a change and a challenge, and then all of a sudden I wanted nothing more.
I look forward to learning a valuable skill and entering into a profession that tests and challenges my problem solving abilities and memory, that can lead to working on rewarding projects and job flexibility. And as a female, I look forward to help shift the stereotype of a software developer.
So why not software engineering?