When I joined campus to study Electronics Engineering, I already had a picture in my head of what my life would look like being outside, climbing on rooftops, working with drills, cables, and all the heavy hardware stuff. And honestly, that’s exactly how it started. It felt physical, hands-on, and intense.
Then senior year hit… and suddenly I was being introduced to networking, microcontrollers, and embedded systems. It felt like a plot twist I didn’t see coming. Around the same time, I enrolled in a software school to learn coding so I could work on my senior year project. I thought it would just be a small add on. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
Learning HTML and CSS at the beginning was a struggle. Flexbox, grid, positioning, one minute things looked okay, the next minute I added position: absolute and everything was everywhere. Nothing made sense at first, and there were moments I felt completely stuck. But quitting? That never crossed my mind. I was way too curious.
Before I even realized it, I was surrounded by developers, learning a whole new world and loving it. Watching something I wrote actually work felt magical. With just a few lines of code, the entire design could change. I could control how things looked, moved, and behaved. That feeling? Unreal. I was hooked. Woooow my world was expanding in ways I never imagined.
They Were Connected From the Very Beginning
All of a sudden, I wasn’t just working on the frontend anymore. I was diving into the backend, writing Python, working with databases, learning Object-Oriented Programming, and understanding how systems actually communicate behind the scenes. It stopped being just about how things looked and started being about how everything worked. Data flowing, logic connecting, systems talking to each other. That’s when patterns started forming in my head.
That’s when it finally clicked: software and hardware had always been connected, I just hadn’t seen it before. Hardware doesn’t exist in isolation; good hardware needs software to come alive. Just look around (mobile phones, TVs, Bluetooth devices) none of them work without both worlds coming together.
As an electronics engineering student, I had been so focused on the physical side of things that I missed the bigger picture. But once I saw the connection, everything started to make sense. What felt like two separate paths turned out to be part of the same journey all along.
But How Did I End Up as a Technical Mentor?
After about five months of coding, some nights where I was just surviving and others that ended with a good cry. I had gone through both frontend and backend. Then came Data Structures and Algorithms. And all I can say is… Woooow. Sometimes everything made perfect sense, and other times I was just staring at my screen like, huh???
Still, one thing about me, I’m not a quitter. I might struggle, but I will show up. So I sat in that class, listened, practiced, failed, retried, and tried to soak in as much as I possibly could.
Then came HackerRank. Not just practice, a leaderboard competition. That got my attention real quick. Apart from loving control, I’m also very competitive. I was writing code on Christmas morning and Christmas evening, determined to stay at the top of that leaderboard. No one was taking me down. Period.
That drive didn’t go unnoticed. My mentors and the school started paying attention. They saw the consistency, the hunger, the effort, and they were interested in training me as a Technical Mentor. At the school, strong performance in DSA is one of the key things they look at when retaining students, and there I was: a girl hungry for knowledge and proving it through action.
Before I knew it, I was being trained, and in just about two weeks, I was mentoring a whole group of beginners, walking them through their first steps in software. The first week felt unreal. I couldn’t believe students were showing up every day to be taught by me. But then it hit me, who better to teach than someone who had just gone through the same struggle and survived it?
I will leave it at that for now. I was just introducing myself. Stay tuned and I will be sharing more of my journey into software. And who knows? The tables might turn again. After all we are in the world where anything can happen.
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