Closing The Gap: Why I Decided to Get into Software Development
Roughly 80% of college students switch majors at least once. This was a statistic that stuck with me throughout my senior year of high school. As I watched my classmates dive deep into the application process, go on campus visits, and have discussions on which college would be best for them, I sat back and thought about what going to college would mean for me. What exactly would I be studying? How long would that program take? How much debt would I be in? What would my employment opportunities look like beyond graduation? These were just some of the questions I considered throughout the year.
I had ruled out a couple of different career pathways. Although I occasionally watched Shark Tank, anything in the business world was out of question due to its lack of real structure and more importantly, I didn’t feel like I had the personality traits required to be a businessperson . At the time, I figured all the useful apps had already been created and the computer people were going to get replaced by computers in the near future. With that in my naive mind, any computer science related career was not given any serious consideration. Of the rest of my options, what seemed like the the best career pathway was something in the Medical Field. I had always found the human and animal psychology to be very interesting. Orthodontics was also another field of interest. Still, after taking all this into consideration, I was not convinced on something yet which I saw myself sticking to in the long run. That 80% statistic was still looming large in my mind, making me question if I would be committed to whatever career I chose to pursue.
My virtual graduation day came and went and I had still not decided on a career to pursue. This indecisiveness lead me to decide to take the year off and figure out what exactly it is I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing before kicking off the college experience the following year. At the top of my list of list of potential professions were Psychiatrist and Orthodontist. I was going to spend my gap year interacting with people in all sorts of professions in hopes of one nudging me into their direction.
Throughout the year, I would hang out at my friend’s place. His brother was one of the computer guys I believed was going to get his seat taken by some robot. One day I brought up my belief while having a conversation with him and in computer mumbo jumbo, he explained to me how it would be a very very long time, before computers replace human programmers. This opened up my interest to the field and after watching a few videos he recommended, I decided to get a Codecademy account and embark on a new adventure.
Once I got started, there was no looking back. With the ability to create things that work, I felt like I had some superpowers. After coding for a couple weeks, I started to look at the world differently. I remember I would get to a traffic light, I would think to myself “There’s an if statement somewhere in there which is connected to some sort of timer or sensor which is responsible for what color gets displayed”. The person behind me would then honk their horn, snapping me back to Earth. Or even, looking at slots machines and realizing that the win probability was lowered by some programmer. That same programmer could just as well have raised the win probability so some people could actually walk out of a casino with enough to buy a burger.
The programming experience is one filled with ups and downs. The downs can be very very hard to get out of and there is a lot of self doubt involved. However, when your code finally does what was expected after many tweaks, the feeling is euphoric. You go from doubting if you know what you’re doing to feeling like you are capable of creating life itself.
Before I knew it , I had cut my gap year short. I realized I wanted to make a career out of this. I started researching options and the option of a coding boot camp stood out as the best. I would build on my basic skills while working alongside other students, and I wouldn’t be paying nearly as much as I would be for college tuition. I selected the online coding boot camp at Flatiron School and although it is vigorous, I wouldn’t spend my gap year any other way.
