Flatiron First Mile

I recently started an online software engineering program at the Flatiron School and it’s been pretty great so far. I’m two weeks in and about to finish what they call the “First Mile”. During this first mile I’ve learn a whole lot and met some pretty great people who are very smart and know so much about coding it’s awesome!

Part of this “First Mile” is to write a blog about why I decided to study coding and honestly, before this I hadn’t really thought about it, I guess I just really like learning new skills and experiencing new things. I’ve always been the type of person to jump at opportunities to expand my horizons and pick up a new skill, especially a kind of skill that most other people don’t have and probably don’t understand.

My interest in wanting to study software engineering started during the current global pandemic. I had just graduated with my BA in Psychology in the summer of 2019 and started working at Tropical Texas Behavioral Health as a case manager. I was surprised to get a job with my degree so quickly after graduating it was not even a month before I got the job offer and to be honest I didn’t really want to go into the mental health field, despite studying mental health, but I decided to try it out for a year and see where it takes me.

While working at TTBH I started to become complacent and I felt like I could just stay there for the rest of my life, work my way up and then retire one day. However I felt stuck. I wasn’t happy, I felt like I was just there because it was a “good, stable job” which I knew I could live off of. But I didn’t want that for my life. As a kid I always had this dream of leaving my hometown, traveling to new places, experiencing new and exciting things and having a “cool/fun” job that I could enjoy and I felt like I was letting my younger self down just giving in to the life I was dealt. Then COVID happened.

I’m naturally a very introverted person so I didn’t even notice anything different until they had us start working from home, after that I started keeping up with the news to see what was going on and I was enjoying my time just staying home not having to go in to the office. While at home I had more free time and started playing video games more often. I got in to VR and eventually decided to start learning to make my own video games. You would think I would enjoy the level design aspect or any of the more “artsy” parts of game design but I found myself being more interested in the coding part and seeing how just a few lines of code can make a game run and play the way you want it to. I was excited to run into problems and having to figure it out on my own and then finally after hours of struggling to make a simple function, you finally get it to work, that’s the best and most satisfying feeling ever!

As I started learning little by little I REALLY started to hate my job. I just wanted to to research and learn how to make games with code. I didn’t progress much in the actual “making a game”, part but I would just start small projects just to see how a line of code would mess with my game. It was so much fun, at times super confusing and made my head hurt but when it finally worked, that feeling was addicting. The more time I spent learning and coding, the more I wanted to make it a job somehow. So I did what any logical person would do in the midst of a global pandemic. I quit my job. Not only did I quit my safe, stable job, but I also decided to move to Dallas, TX. If I was going to make a change in my life I was going to go BIG! I would finally realize my dream of leaving my hometown and going to a “big city”. I didn’t really have a plan but I was going to make it work somehow. I moved in June and got a job with Amazon and kept studying programing on my own time, then one day I saw an add for Flatiron school on YouTube. I did some research into the school and the programs they offered and decided to apply. To my surprise I got in and now here I am.

I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do for the rest of my life but I’m taking it one step at a time and seeing where this takes me. Regardless, I’m excited and I know that this path leads to many opportunities in many fields. Who knows, I might just end up working with a big company like Facebook, Tesla or Google, or maybe even start my own big tech company. The future isn’t clear but I’m excited to be pursuing something I actually enjoy and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for me.