Why the career change? I think my story may begin like a few others over the past year; I lost my job due to COVID-19.

My last job was as a Concierge at a luxury cruise line, and I thought that just maybe I had found my ‘lifer’ company. And then COVID happened. My hopes, dreams, and plans were all seemingly swept out from underneath my feet when I got the official letter, and meeting, from my company that said:

‘We are sorry to inform you, that due to the current pandemic and the business situations at hand, that you are being laid off.’

And it was as if my world had collapsed around my ears. In a matter of moments, I was no longer employed due to something that was way beyond anything that I could control. Now, like millions of others around the globe, I had to worry about being able to pay my bills, my groceries, and caring for my family, not to mention healthcare (that is a whole other subject that would, and does, warrant its own TED talk and article); so what now? What am I supposed to do?

I am thankful that I had the wherewithal to sense that I needed some time to think, and we had just so happened to have planned a getaway to the coast (which was done with all safety measures and recommendations being practiced); this time allowed me to try and clear my head and try to think about what it is that I actually wanted to do, not just what would pay my bills.

I dug down deep and did what I thought was some soul searching, and at first, I thought that I could go back to school for Archaeology which has/had been a lifelong dream of mine. But after discussing it with my spouse, we decided that we just couldn’t afford for me to go back to school for at least another eight years while I worked to get a Ph.D. in Archaeology to pursue that dream. Unfortunately, that was the only idea that my thought process had deemed important enough to bring to my attention. I’ll admit it wasn’t a very wide scope and was a pretty narrow approach to figuring out what I wanted to do next in my life.

So with seemingly no direction, I started to do what everyone tells you not to do when trying to figure out your next job; I took career quizzes. Of course, there are a bajillion of these types of quizzes online, and as the collective we knows, each one comes up with a different slew of suggested career paths, with no two being even remotely similar. But this time there was a similar vein that seemed to run through every single one of these quizzes I took; software engineering/web development.

People seem to always say that they are waiting for some kind of a sign for an opportunity to be able to do something, and well this sign tried to hit me square in the face while I stared at it like a deer in the headlights.

Now I know that I shouldn’t pay any special attention to these career quizzes, let alone actually take one of their suggestions as sound career advice, but something in my gut was trying to tell me something. There has to be something to this career choice that comes up in every single quiz that I’ve taken; that’s when the logical side of me kicked in and said wait a minute, what is it that it is actually suggesting that I do?

So I did some research, and some more soul searching and realized that software engineer/web development kind of put together most things that I liked to do and, in my opinion, was relatively good at. I love to figure out how things work, like gardening and cars, and I love to build things like woodworking, crafts (crochet, sewing, etc.), computers, and baking/cooking.

I guess growing up the daughter of an airplane mechanic kind of rubbed off on me!

Now to just try and figure out how to become a software engineer/web developer! I started trying to find all of the free ‘learn to code’ resources I could and started working on those, and while working on these lessons I simultaneously researched schools and found that Flatiron School checked off all the things I needed it to, and so I applied to their full-time online software engineering program.

The next thing I know, I’ve been selected for an interview with the school to see if I would be a good fit for their program. I had wanted to start as soon as humanly possible thinking that the effort I had shown in trying to begin my education in this field on my own would help fast-track that process. Unfortunately, all of their imminent cohorts were full, but they offered up their September 2020 cohort which still had space available; this is the cohort I ended up being accepted into a few short weeks later!

Great, now I have a plan with a set start date and a rigorous curriculum that I had hoped that I could keep up with. I began their pre-bootcamp course to better prepare myself for what I had signed up for, and thankfully went on to complete my course on time, and graduated in February 2021!

I still love coding, and it has become somewhat of a cathartic process for me. I can sit down to work on some of my projects and time will just slip away from me and it feels like nothing else exists for a while. I love trying to figure out what each little bit and piece of my code is doing, and it feels so rewarding seeing something that I built show up on my screen; it’s even better when it actually works like I want it to!

And so here I am; trying to work on coding projects (albeit not very successfully on an everyday basis, but I’m trying to work on that part) and trying to land my first job in tech!

For those reading this, I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you have read this far, and I wish, that for those aspiring to change careers like I am attempting to, that I could tell you it is easy, but it’s not. It is hard hard work, but so far it is still so worth it to see how far I have come from where I was a year ago, and I can’t wait to see how far it will take me!

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

-Walt Disney