I must have been thirteen or fourteen years old, the age when you first begin realizing that childhood won’t last forever and one day you’ll have the same privileges and responsibilities as your parents. “Big Data”, what does that mean? This article on Yahoo swears it’s the field that will see the biggest boom over the next decade (turns out the correct answer would be Social Media Influencer, but my dad bod and lack of desire to yell “HEY GUYS” into a phone camera for hours at a time made this a career I was not equipped to take on). I read a bit about it, it sounded cool but way over my head and nowhere near the medical field, which is where I kept my gaze.
“The most important language to learn will not be one we speak, but it will be one we write. Learning to code is the number-one skill any young person should be racing to pick up.” I have no idea who said it and can’t even say for sure that the quote above is verbatim, but it’s certainly how I remember it from the mouth of a white, condescending tech bro who was probably just frustrated with the lack of talent his startup was able to find. But he was right, learning Mandarin or Spanish, as cool as it would be, would never be half as valuable as Python or Java. I wish I would’ve listened, but I had just declared a major (Pharmacy) and was excited about the six years of school followed by countless boring days in a lab.
As I learned more about the opioid epidemic in this country, I became less enamored with the idea of pushing pills to folks who were suffering more from improper medical care. I decided to switch majors, and after some deliberation I was between Computer Science and Sport Management. In retrospect, I made a hilariously dumb decision, which nobody has ever done at the age of eighteen, and went with Sports Management because I wanted to one day join a front office for a pro sports team. Little did I know the way to do that was to have the technical analytical chops that would come from a computer science curriculum, but I can’t do much about that now.
Two years later, just far enough in to school where changing my major would be cost-prohibitive, I did more and more research into careers that were growing, and again “Big Data” and software engineering were atop every list. I knew I had to get into this field one way or another. I began taking courses on Udemy that taught basic web development, including JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, and even made a new website for the pizza shop I worked for in college. I was derailed by working two jobs and being a full-time student, and if I could do it again I’d change a hundred things. Once I was out of school, bills were due and I wasn’t close to skilled enough to get a job in tech, so I took a sales job in California that paid well(lol) and set out.
Life has been great since I moved, I’ve made new friends, met the girl of my dreams, and get to enjoy the weather and beauty of Southern California. But my one regret was always waiting to get into coding to the point where I could do it for a living. I researched it maniacally, almost a form of masochism, and began to get more comfortable with Data Science and what that looked like. I enjoyed statistics and coding, and it seemed like a great match for me. I had applied to Flatiron previously, gotten in, but had to decline because I did not have the time or financial flexibility. I was laid off due to Covid-19 at the end of June, and my first call was not to any of my loved ones, but to Courtney Morgan, admissions lead at Flatiron. I told her I was in and she worked hard to squeeze me into the July 4th cohort.
From there, the rest is (very recent) history. I have been in the program for a month and loved every second of it. I’ve been challenged like never before and responded in ways I didn’t know I could, with others in my life saying they’d never seen such a motivated, driven version of me. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, it’s as exciting as it is scary. But one thing I learned is that if you challenge yourself and make the right decisions, anything is possible.
