…wait what?
I’m right there with you… still trying to wrap my head around my massive lifestyle change.
October 2019 — I just landed home in Austin after working a Ride & Drive Event at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. I was a Spokesmodel for a Luxury Automotive Brand. I traveled multiple times each month to cities across the US; New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale… you name it, we probably had events there.
Despite loving that job and the career that I’d built over the last 7 years, I wanted to take on a new challenge.
This was a familiar pattern in my life. I got my MBA at 23 because I wanted to see if I could. I worked for a Fortune 500 financial firm for a while, eventually taking a risk and switching careers to work for myself doing something I enjoyed. After about 4 years of independent contracts with various Experiential Marketing agencies, I landed a recurring contract as a Spokesmodel in the Automotive Industry. That was the role I left to take on my latest risk: learning Full Stack Web Development.
When I was researching the skills I needed to make a career change into the Tech world, I had my eye on UX/UI because I thought my Experiential Marketing skills would easily translate. It made sense! But it goes against my, ahem “fluctuating” pattern of decision-making…
Enter: Flatiron School
It felt like I’d heard at least 50 radio ads for Flatiron School while I was home in Austin. Eventually, I did a quick Google search and learned that Flatiron is one of the highest rated bootcamps on Course Report for both UX/UI AND Software Development. This seemed like a big deal because Course Report is to bootcamps what the Princeton Review is to universities.
I clicked every.single.link on www.flatironschool.com to learn as much as I could. Somehow, in a matter of days, I’d gone from exploring the UX/UI curriculum to signing up for the free Coding Bootcamp Prep work. Not the track I was expecting, but I went with it.
The Learn.co curriculum was challenging, filled with current pop-culture, and remarkably rewarding. I also felt connected to the community immediately thanks to the sidebar that shows you the names of other students and the lessons they complete in real-time. It was great knowing that hundreds of people were working on the same labs and I wasn’t alone.
Slowly, I became obsessed with working on labs in my free time. We’d be in a fun city and my coworkers would invite me out, but I would decline and say I really needed to work on my labs. This was when I realized I need to jump in head first and see how far I can go with this coding thing…
January 2020 — My last Auto Show in Houston was bittersweet.
It never feels right to leave a good thing and jump into the abyss. But now, 5 weeks into the Software Engineering Immersive program at Flatiron, I feel solid about my decision.
If you told me, this time last year, that I will:
- Understand the fundamentals of OOP, learn to code in Ruby, and work with Github…
- Work with a classmate to build a CLI app that pulls data from an API and allows a user to manipulate it…
- Build a Rails app from scratch that stores data in a DB, then present it to my class…
Honestly, I would have laughed. But now, I feel grateful for my progress in just 5 short weeks and excited to see what the next 10 weeks will teach me.
Take a look at the current Flatiron School courses: www.flatironschool.com
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