From full-time Graduate School to full-time Coding bootcamp.
In my early semesters of college I was set on going to Pharmacy school, I got my first real job as a pharmacy technician and was taking the prerequisites required. I planned out my college roadmap up to every small detail, but as many college students know, it’s not that easy to follow. I’ve changed my mind countless of times, but I made sure to still stay within the Health / Science fields because I didn’t want any of my courses to go to “waste”. Fast forward 4 years and I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Health Management, wasn’t the same plan from the beginning and I was already constructing my next move, because I knew it would be hard to get a career in that field without at least a Master’s.
January 2020 I got accepted into the Bioinformatics Master’s program within my university, mainly because of my extensive Science background, I guess those courses didn’t go to waste. One of my first courses in the program was a Database class, where we learned how to use SQL and build databases, well that was the intention until the country went into lockdown and some professors were new to the whole online zoom meetings. Our course ended up being short answer assignments and quizzes which was not really hands on. In my second semester within the program I took a Programming class that introduced us to Python, and that’s where my interest in programming came from. That was my first step in researching a career in Software Engineering, Bioinformatics does involve using technology and coding, but the Biology and Chemistry portion bored me and I only wanted to focus on the programming portion.
After an extensive amount of research, which involved: Youtube videos, podcasts, articles and blogs of people who chose to take the coding bootcamp route and end up in a career that interested them I knew I wanted to take the risk. I still wanted to graduate from the Bioinformatics program so I decided to take one more course this Spring 2021 semester and obtain my Graduate Certificate for all the stress ad hard work I put into that year. I believe all those signs brought me to this bootcamp and overall I think I made the right choice.
