I'm playing catch-up after having my normal blog day (Monday) off last week for Labor Day. This week's blog post will feature not one, but two(!) posts in one. Woohoo!
You’ve been a software engineer for a few weeks now. How do your day-to-day responsibilities differ from what you expected? Have you been surprised by the breakdown of work each week?
Oh gosh, a "software engineer". I still don't feel worthy of the title, despite the insistence of everyone around me that I do actually qualify for it. This feeling of not being a "real" software engineer yet is exacerbated by not having yet been placed on a project with my host company. As such, I don't have solid day-to-day responsibilities as much as I have an amorphous lump of time to devote to learning as much as possible (right now working through an agile/scrum course) and to working on my umbrella project. While I'm definitely loving this time to learn, I think I will be better able to answer this prompt/question after I've transitioned onto a project. Will come back and do an update once I reach that point!
Where do you fit into South Carolina’s ecosystem right now, and where would you like to contribute in the future?
This is a great question. Right now I feel like I'm on the fringes of integration into the SC tech ecosystem, on the cusp of becoming a meaningful part of things, though not quite there. I think that (as I mentioned before) being placed on a project and contributing to the work that project is doing will help to solidify both my place in the ecosystem as well as my confidence in myself as a developer. Down the road a bit, I would like to encourage other women/moms/career-changers to consider the idea of joining the tech ecosystem, and to show that this is a diverse field that truly is accessible to all types of people. I've mentioned this before, but programming is something that I never considered myself capable of until being kindly introduced to it by a loved one. There are pervasive stereotypes around the types of people who are well-suited for this field, and I never even considered that I may have a place here because I don't fit into those stereotypes. Though I don't know what my contribution will look like exactly, I'm hoping to be lucky enough to know it when it finds me and to contribute something meaningful back into the community that has supported me so completely.
This week my goals are to: make some excellent headway on the umbrella project, complete a course on scrum/agile, begin learning Unity/C#, maintain a grateful mindset, and feel even 5% more competent/confident than I did last week (a trend that has been holding steady throughout - I've learned so much!)
The journey continues!
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