The beginning of a new chapter
Looking back my decision of wanting to change career paths came around 2018. I was still working in the NHS as an administrator and realised I was not happy. It was then I realised I was spending my working life in a place I just did not want to be in. I was mentally frustrated with where I was and knew I needed to look into a career path that would give me the passion and drive I was missing.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” — Confucius
Never has a quote stuck with more than this. When you think about it you spend the majority of your life working, you spend more time with your colleagues than you do with your family. So why continue to work somewhere that was not making me happy.
All of this started my venture on what career path I wanted to take. I started to list out the pros and cons of my job. I really enjoyed the fact I was given a number of opportunities to set up processes in my various job roles. I enjoyed the concept of researching how to set up spreadsheets that would help contain all the data needed, asking my colleagues what was missing from our roles that was not making our workload more efficient, and trying out different ways of streamlining pathway coordination. All of these pointed me to the Tech industry.
I was always interested in technology, but thought it was too late for me to get a career in it, as I decided it was too late in my life to follow this path. This mindset caused me to shelf my desire of switching career paths for another year. Flash forward to summer 2019, my thoughts and desires of wanting to change career paths started to come back up again. This time I pushed the idea of “it’s too late” out of my mind and started looking into how I could invest in myself to follow a career path that would ultimately be more fulfilling. This started with thinking about re-enrolling into university with a computer science course, but the thought of 3 more years of university wasn’t a major selling point. That was when the Holy Grail appeared, Coding Bootcamps.
A few searches later and Makers was the only one that kept drawing me back, so what other way than to take it as a sign right? Makers had this appeal of developing yourself holistically, which really stood out. Makers’ approach was to teach you to teach yourself. Reading about how Maker’s teaches you how to learn made me understand that Makers was giving a lot more accountability to yourself. I knew how much I had slacked in university, so the idea of continuously challenging yourself, actively contributing to your learning, and the level of accountability was the sort of regime I needed. A few blog posts and FAQs later, I found Makers suggested a few materials to try out to see if coding is for you.
Codecademy’s Ruby course, for someone who had never looked into coding, this was a bit daunting. It did take me a couple of chapters to get my head around coding, and how to actually get it to work. However, starting with Ruby was very user friendly and did ease that process a bit more. I was finding out that I was actually enjoying the tasks at the end of each chapter which further deepened my decision to go down this career path. After completing the Codecademy course a few times, I went on to try Codewars. Codewars, codewars, codewars… My first speed bump. I didn’t even know where to begin with the Katas, or even what each Kata was asking me to do. Codewars was completely different from Codecademy, to the point I started questioning if this was for me. However, I decided to take this challenge to prove to myself that I can do this. From this, I gave myself a deadline of applying for Makers by the end of 2019.
“I can do this.” — the mantra I had on loop
It’s safe to say, this story can’t go on without mentioning Covid-19. Yes, my plans to apply were halted once more. Same with everyone, 2020 had me reflecting and thinking about my life a lot. Is applying for Makers my safest bet? Do I really want to leave the comfort of my job? Are there still jobs going in this current economy? Am I willing to take the risk? Is this something I really want to do? Questions upon questions circled my mind. It took a lot of mental strength and will power to decide to continue with my path. Attending demo days, Q&As and code accelerators really helped to spark up my interest again, and I am so grateful to Makers for continuing these, as they did help me get back on track. Besides I would never know if making this decision was the right one if I never committed to the decision. December 2020, after completing the “Are you ready quiz?”, I submitted my application and so the new chapter begins.
