Beginning
Being a junior in high school, I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life since I didn't really have an interest in anything. I then saw the opportunity to apply for an internship that would start senior year, so I said why not not thinking anything about it. I went in for an interview for the program that places students in corporate companies. Seeing all of the students that were there for the same reason that I was, I was sure that I wouldn't get placed. Summer comes around and I was invited to the training that the program requires in order to be an intern, I was so close to dropping out of the program because it was really taking me out of my comfort zone, but I decided to stay after a feeling of gult, little did I know that decision changed my life.
I was placed as an IT intern in a corporate company my senior year and after working there for a few weeks, I found an interest in computers, but I wasn't sure if I was smart enough to pursue anything in that field. I was getting a haircut one evening, and my barber referred me to codecademy. Later that day, I went home, I sat at my desk for 7 hours straight learning about html which then allowed me to make a simple website about bears. I wasn't thinking about a coding future at that moment, only how cool my bears website looked and the feeling of finally finishing that project after being stuck and having my hands over my face looking for solutions to my errors.
Hope
Covid-19 hit around the time I was close to graduation, I stopped coding I'm not sure why. During the summer, I was going through a really tough time because once again I had no idea what I was doing which often lead to many breakdowns. At my job that I'm currently still working at, my co-worker introduced me to a software engineering program, but I immediately shut him down due to the fact that SE seemed a bit scary in my head. I looked up the Bootcamp that he was talking about and I applied, I did the first interview then they sent me a coding puzzle that I would need to complete before the second interview. The puzzle was so much fun, but it was also challenging of course, I got accepted to the Bootcamp a few days later and I felt joy because I had something to look forward to.
The bootcamp prep work was really challenging for me, but I had some of the basic HTML and CSS stuff down since I had studied it before. I went through multiple emotions while doing the prep work, there were times when I was so stuck that I was questioning if software engineering was even for me, and times that made me feel like an actual programmer. I started to look at web pages differently, I thought about how they were made even though I probably don't know half of the code that was used to make them yet.
The Present
I was nervous to start my bootcamp at Flatiron School, It's been my first week and I can say that It's a challenge that I'm actually looking for. The community is great, I love their values and how much they care for the students, but most importantly, I know that I'm going to learn way more than I already have. Junior year, I never would've thought that I would be interested in studying software engineering or even simply coding, I am so glad that I did though as well as applying for an internship that led me where I am today.
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