I am a 29 year old Latina from Watsonville, CA looking to make a career change after over
a decade of working in education.
My coding journey to date
looks like this: In 3rd grade I wanted to be a paleontologist. Why is this relevant? Because this is the
first time I started to be told that I couldn't be a scientist. I unfortunately had a series of not
so wonderful teachers from 3rd grade onwards who made me believe that I wasn't smart enough,
and that girls shouldn't even try to be mathematicians or scientists. For a long time I believed
that they were right and that I couldn't be a mathematician or a scientist.
These teachers actually were part of the reason I chose to go into education,
both because I thought I couldn't pursue my passions (paleontology morphed into cardiology and then
into research), but also because I wanted to make sure no child, and especially no young woman
of color, ever felt that way under my teaching.
Fast forward to March 2020. I started to become interested in programming last year
when my school transitioned into virtual teaching during SIP. I started
working with new technologies and programs that I had never seen before
and slowly began to realize that I was more interested in understanding
the programming behind things like Zoom, Buzz, Seesaw, Tableau, and other programs
we were utilizing than I was in teaching. I felt immense guilt about this
at first, believing that it somehow made me a bad teacher and generally a
bad person and actually pursued a new teaching job back in CA (I was living in Chicago at the time),
thinking that maybe it was just homesickness and online teaching that was making me so despondent.
Despite these feelings, I began to look for programs to begin
learning to code in earnest in October of 2020, but had a difficult time
finding programs that allowed me to learn while keeping a teaching job
that required 80+ hour work weeks.
In March of this year I
took a short leave of absence from my teaching position to reevaluate my
priorities and began to use an app called Mimo to learn Python in order to keep myself busy.
The more I learned about programming on Mimo, the more I wanted to learn, until I
reached out to a friend who works as a software engineer in SF who started
to connect me with further resources. I then transitioned my full time
teaching career into a part time support role in order to focus on my
wellness and my path into engineering and am currently looking into
bootcamps.
To date, I have earned 5 certificates from Mimo
including Introduction to Javascript, Introduction to Python, Web
Development, Become a Hacker, and Android App Development as well as completed 20+ non certificated
courses in the Mimo app. In addition, I have attended numerous free introductory classes with General
Assembly on
a variety of technology and engineering topics; completed SheCodes Basics; and applied and
was accepted into Stanford's Code in Place program. I have also completed
several courses on FreeCodeCamp including the Javascript Basics course, Debugging, and Object Oriented
Programming.
I have no
formal experience in coding or background in computer science, but I am so
excited and ready to learn!
