I sat to write this post about why I decided to pursue an education in software engineering with the belief that it would be a simple task. However, as I started to reminice on this question, I realized that it wasn’t as simple as saying I wanted to make more money or find a different career. I am in my 11th year since graduating college and I am just now starting to feel confident about what I want to do with my life.
Back when I was at my University of Wisconsin orientation, the task of choosing my first class elections was the most daunting thing imaginable. Each decision felt like a permenant cut into stone that would shape what my future would look like. As someone who had a lot of interest and skills, but no clear passion, it was a true shot in the dark.
Eventually, I graduated from university with a degree in Communications with an emphasis in Film, but with no exact career path in mind. After school, I spent some time studying the science of brewing beer and worked at several breweries before starting my first “real” job as a jack-of-all-trades type at a consumer electronics startup. From then on, I followed the pull of a career that led me to co-founding an e-commerce mattress company in Toronto, working at a healthcare tech startup in Chicago, and into my current role in online advertising sales.
There were two common threads in my career path since agonizing over which classes to take for my first semester. First, I have always followed the logical next step rather than take much control in determining what would actually make me happy. I could feel myself getting further from my innate skills and interest and over time I felt less in control of my destiny. Although I have had success in each role, I have never felt very happy at work, nor have I felt a solid sense of belonging.
The second common factor is that I have always worked tangentially with technology. At the consumer electronics startup, I was helping to rapid prototype devices, run statistical analysis, and worked with some brilliant engineering minds. At the healthcare startup, I sat 10 feet away from about a dozen coders working on novel solutions to hand hygiene compliance tracking. At an ad-tech company, I found myself more interested in the inner workings of the technology, rather than my role of actually selling it.
Since working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve had time to ruminate on why I’ve been feeling so dissatisfied much of my work life. In pursuing the path my career pulled me towards, I’ve ended up in a role that uses most of my weaknesses and not many of my strengths. It has become clear that I need to make a change and now is the perfect time to do it. It’s past time I regained control over my career trajectory.
Software engineering has always been the skillset I desired. It embodies so many of the things I have liked in aspects of my work: creating products, challenging myself intellectually, and a having strong reliance on my own ability. I’m excited for this next chapter. I don’t know yet entirely where it will lead, but I do know that it feels good to finally figure out what I should have studied starting my first semester in college, only 15 years later.