Passion is what drives people to follow and chase their dreams. Passion is what allows people to achieve their goals. Passion is what gives purpose to people. Passion is what lead me to drop out of community college and enroll in Flatirons coding Bootcamp.
Ever since I was young I've always had a curiosity about how computers were able to do what they do. It never made sense to me how such a small device was able to perform a superhuman task. From doing calculations at super speed to being a part of virtual worlds via video games, computers seemed to be out of this world to me. I knew from an early age that I wanted to pursue a career in software engineering as I wanted to be able to control this superpower. Being able to make a computer do what I wanted it to do seemed like trying to tame a beast that's capable to do anything you imagined. I became fluent to use computers on the user side but never touched programming until my junior year of high school.
I believed the best way to learn programming would be following the schooling path so that's what I did. I didn't know anything about programming, coding, or software engineering before taking an AP computer class. From the first day in the class, I knew I was right at home. The first class started slow-paced as it should since it was the very first computer class in the curriculum. It was very enjoyable as it taught the very basics of computers and how the internet worked which only drove my passion. By the end of the class, we were able to write basic JS code to make a phone app. My next computer class is where my passion was truly found. AP Java gave me a new outlook on what coding can be. It showed me hard problems that I needed to solve only using Java. It was vastly different from anything I had seen before and I instantly fell in love with it. Throughout the class, it was obvious I could understand it differently than everyone else as most people struggled to grasp the concepts of coding in general. I was able to pick up these foreign concepts relatively quickly compared to other students as I had more of a passion for the topic. Unfortunately, this class was cut short due to the global pandemic and I was never able to fully write out a functional project from scratch. The next part of my journey was college where I was majoring in computer science. I was only in college for three semesters but it felt like an eternity.
I was already never the best student throughout my school career and my bad schooling habits only shined harder in college. My computer classes were the only classes I was able to earn A's in. As the college semesters continued I felt myself falling into a deep abyss of unmotivated work slowly losing the passion I once had. From taking what I saw as pointless classes it felt like I was wasting time and energy every day. It didn't help that the computer classes I was taking were still going over concepts that I had learned and were fluent in from high school. It constantly felt like I was ahead so I never felt the challenges that gave me the passion, to begin with. It reached a point where I was so unmotivated I stopped trying which lead to worse and worse grades. I was struggling to find the drive to do any school work as three semesters in I still haven’t learned anything new about programming. This eventually led to me dropping out in November 2021(which was a hard sell to my immigrant parents).
I feel like the school system had failed me so I had to find a different alternative to becoming a software engineer. I started to learn about coding boot camps and what they can do for careers. I was scared about this option at first as I was always under the impression that a degree was the only way to become a software engineer. After discovering Flatiron I reached out to alumni of the program to see how they felt about the program. Their answers to my questions started to reignite my passion. I started to get excited about coding for the first time in a while. I enrolled in the Flatiron software engineering program shortly after. So far Flatiron has lived up to my expectations and is truly giving me the challenge that gave me the passion. I am excited about my future and that is something I couldn't say five months ago.
Top comments (1)
Thanks for sharing your story! I'm confident that you have a bright future in technology!