Over time, I have tried a few different industries to accel at and immerse in: writing, nursing, politics, massage therapy, etc. When none of those were panning out for a variety of life reasons, I wondered what is next then? I will keep taking classes in something, but ultimately, what do I want to do in terms of a professional career?
After one more setback trying to afford a college way too expensive for my income and circumstances, I returned back to my community college to keep taking general classes needed toward any science degree, as in higher level math, science and any missing prerequisites. I thought, any of these classes could work toward a higher level degree toward a biology, physics or some engineering based degree, I’ll take them and see what I get inspired toward.
I really enjoyed my higher level math courses, I had always thought of myself as being a little mediocore at math unless I had some phenomenal teacher which rarely exists. I decided I could definitely handle the rest of the math requried for any major and continued on into Calculus I, which also went very well, it was like a math puzzle.
In between semesters and busy times within classes, I decided to start a blog site on WordPress to post a couple essays I enjoyed writing, thinking it may also, additionally, inspire me to continue writing creatively as an outlet beyond academics. I still only have two posts, more to come perhaps in the future. However, what I experienced on the WordPress platform inspired me to take my first computer science class.
I enjoyed the ease of use of using a pre-designed template, but always wanted to change some aspect or have the option of flexibililty or more control over that template. I started looking into plugins and custom code and ftp, etc. Suddenly, I was learning HTML and CSS from ebooks and YouTube tutorials, learning how to make a mock in the designs of the template I had chosen for my blog. Forget blogging, from there, I enrolled in Introduction to Computer Science with C++ at my community college the very next semester.
C++ was amazing! I noticed I got lost in time on my problems that were more difficult to solve, trying different ways to make the console applications run as intended, I would forget to eat at times. Maybe that’s not good, but I never had any other task occupy my mind so much, it was amazing to have such an innate and intense focus. On the occasion I couldn’t solve a problem immediately, I’d walk away from it, go do something else, but my mind was already back on the problem somehow, refreshed and ready to tackle the coding problem from some new angle I hadn’t thought of previously.
I thought this is amazing, I love this stuff, I would love to sit around (or stand for standing desks, I have to get one of those too maybe with a treadmill, not sure) and do nothing but solve these intricate problems all based on this complex network of keywords and functions that end up generating more amazing things such as video games, advanced electronics, cars, planes, medical equipment and anything else that could exist in the future, not on the market yet. It is a massive and infinite industry with so many avenues.
Ready to move out of New York City and back to warm weather I applied at Florida International University for Computer Science and got accepted. That is all fun and well, but I decided to accelerate the learning and career process by applying to the Flatiron school, here, representative of this blog post, I think because technology changes so quickly it is best just to get immeresed into the career path as soon as possible and start gaining experience.