It was a brisk New York City morning. The walk to work that day was especially chilly, and taking that turn onto a windy 11th Avenue was more than I needed to wake up. Typically, on a morning like that, all I would be thinking about was getting to work as quickly as possible. But recently I had begun to wonder if the job on 11th Avenue was what I really wanted.
I came to New York about 5 years earlier to fulfill my dream of working at an ad agency. Well, maybe it wasn’t a dream so much as what I had assumed I would do after college. You see, I was a junior in high school when I took a career aptitude test and met with my guidance counselor to review the results. Advertising was at the top of the list. Not because I was best suited for a career in advertising, but because I was mildly suited for a career in advertising, and the list was alphabetized. To this day, I’m not sure what was next on the list. And for a while, I didn’t give it much thought.
So off to college I went to major in Integrated Marketing Communications (I know — fancy, right?!). Fast-forward four years and I did it - I landed a job in advertising! My guidance counselor would be so proud. Granted, it wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. Sure, I was in New York City. But I wasn’t sitting around in meetings with a bunch of people in suits, smoking cigarettes, pitching insanely creative ideas to clients. You know, like Mad Men (full disclosure: I’ve never seen Mad Men, but that feels accurate). I was working in direct mail (I’ll pause here so you can gather your thoughts, I know how riveting that sounds).
Okay, I’m back. Working in direct mail meant I would be creating a lot of detailed documents and checking a lot of data every day to make sure everything mailed correctly, all while trying to make our process more efficient. Now, I understand if that doesn’t sound exciting to you, but I truly enjoyed it. I’m pretty detail-oriented, and looking for ways to improve never hurts. But I think my favorite part was getting to know our clients and building those relationships.
Let’s fast-forward another five years, to that cold morning in December. I was at that same job, on that same team, and had started wondering what I wanted to do next. Did I want to get another job in the same field? Or did I want to do something else altogether? I had finally started to wonder what came after “advertising” on that list.
That particular day at work, we had a town hall where they showed us some impactful campaigns from the year. About half way through the presentation, seven words caught my attention: “Girls can do amazing things with code.” It was Google’s “Made With Code” campaign, which aimed to get teen girls interested in coding. I was easily 10-15 years older than their target audience, and I couldn’t stop wishing I had seen that campaign 10-15 years earlier. It seemed like something I would enjoy.
Which brings us to late last summer. I was at dinner with a friend and she randomly mentioned she had started looking into coding bootcamps. I asked her to elaborate and I quickly realized that maybe it wasn’t too late. There are these bootcamps out there that teach you how to be a software engineer in a relatively short amount of time, preparing you for a job in the field. This was great news! When I got home that night I did some research and I haven’t looked back since. Everything just made sense. They say to be a good software engineer it helps to be detail-oriented, a problem solver, and have decent communication skills. Hmmm…
I’ve been working in Flatiron’s Full Stack Software Engineering program for a few months now, and while I’ll admit it has been challenging, it’s also been enlightening. I’ve found myself approaching every day activities differently. Now when I’m playing Super Mario Run on my phone, I’m not just chasing after mushrooms and coins, I’m wondering how Mario knows to jump when I touch the screen. And when I use Google Maps, I no longer take it for granted. Thanks to the hard work of other people, I don’t need to have a sense of direction (which is good, because I never really did).
I have found this journey to be incredibly fascinating, and honestly, a little scary. The possibilities are endless. I may never find myself out in California, in meetings with a bunch of well-dressed people, smoking (let’s be real, probably not cigarettes this time), pitching the next big app to investors. You know, like Silicon Valley (yeah…I’ve never seen that either…). But I’m excited that I’m giving myself a chance to try. The truth is, there were probably a lot of decent career options on that list 12 years ago. But I like to think that if I had bothered to get past the A’s, and all the way down to the S’s, I would have found “Software Engineer”.