Why I chose Software Engineering

Choosing to go back to school never is an easy choice. However, for me it felt like it was the best option I had considering my circumstances. Having recently graduated college with a bachelors in finance, I was used to being a student so the idea of going back to school wasn’t something outside my scope of experience. Moreover, I wanted a real skill to put down on my resume. Going to school for a bachelors in finance was difficult, but I always imagined myself working in an office and using those things I learned in school for work post graduation. After graduating college I was fortunate enough to land a job working for Meryl Lynch Wealth Management as a financial advisor. Shortly after joining the work force I learned how unimportant everything I learned in school really was. Being a business student was always great, the teachers were for the most part caring, fun, and the classes were easy aside from math intensive courses. Business students didn’t have the same necessity for a specific skillset that other degrees required, and that was great at the time but made things difficult post graduation. Working in the business field is about your social skills if you do not have a clear cut skill. Falling into that category I found myself only being “qualified” for jobs that were in sales, even if I had worked experience as an accounting intern. Even working for somewhere like Meryl Lynch all you needed was the social skills to do it, and that wasn't something I realized until after I took the job.

The job began with my boss telling me that I had to pass my series 7 & 66 licensing exams to be qualified to be a financial advisor for them, and so I studied and passed my exams, but I was always under the impression that my job was going to be different. That although it was technically in the scope of sales jobs it would somehow be “different”. Unfortunately, for me I quickly realized that my co-workers were all nice on the surface, but in sales the mentality is ‘there can only be one’ which tends to lead to a toxic work environment. Quickly, I realized that the line of work, what was expected of me, and the environment was something I did not want to work in no matter how good the money was. Money couldn’t buy me happiness or fulfillment, and so after having the job for roughly seven months I quit.

Unfortunately, for the world a pandemic plagued all our lives shortly after I left Meryl Lynch and a long period of contemplation about my future began. It ended with me deciding that I wanted a proper skill that I could use to actually create a career in a line of work that wouldn’t be automated in the future. I had roommates in college who were information technology students, and post graduation they were all able to get jobs in their field that were relatively high paying that allowed them to have the flexibility of working wherever they decided as long as they had an internet connection. Through conversations with them and looking for resources online I came across Flatiron School, and decided that I should take the chance on becoming a software developer.

I am currently three months into my studies, and immediately I realized how different it was from what I was learning in school for my finance degree. The biggest difference is the emphasis on continued learning. As a developer you need to constantly be learning and expanding your range of knowledge as the field expands. Whereas, everything else I learned in school was pretty standard across the board, and on top of that a lot of what you would do in the business field was already automated for you. There was no need to be able to have good technical skills because its likely that you have software that does the math for you or someone has already aggregated the data you wanted into a nice spreadsheet for you already. I wanted to step away from the easiness and simplicity that my degree gave me and challenge myself to learn something not a lot of people can learn. I hope that this path leads me down a road of success and fulfilment, and I can already tell that the road is already laid out ahead of me, I just need to keep going.