From Teacher to Developer
My road from Thailand to NYC to Flatiron Bootcamp and now the job hunt as a developer!
Change takes courage and walking out of your comfort zone. I’ve done this many times in my life, in fact its been a pretty constant theme. But not without the pain of growth that accompanies each new endeavor. I’ve gone from being a Teacher in Thailand for 3 years, a Teacher in New York City for 2 years to becoming a Full Stack Developer. And it had been quite the journey, indeed.
You have to recognize when you need a big change
One of the keys to figuring out where you are going to succeed, find happiness, and continually grow is to constantly be evaluating yourself. Where are you, what are you learning, what are you doing, are you bored, miserable, happy, excited? These feelings are what lead to my first big decision to jump on a plane and move 8,000 miles away to Thailand. But I didn’t just pull that idea out of thin air, it came with the recognition that my life as a paralegal had reached a point where I was desperately ready for something so ridiculously different, challenging and pushed me so far outside my comfort zone. However, it took a spark to really push me, and unfortunately that was in the shape of a horrific bicycle accident that broke my jaw in 3 places. It was during this time that my plan really started to take shape and after never living outside of North Carolina before my move, I was ready for all the challenges, or so I thought.
Finding courage isn’t found over night but is created through baby steps.
Before any of this ability to jump on a plane, change my life drastically and reap immense benefits from that change, I was a fairly shy person. But through circumstances in my life I grew into someone who found more courage than she could have imagined. That comes from all the baby steps of creating a source of courage. You need to be courageous in small moments to find the courage for the really big moments. For me that came in the form of coming out to my family (who was not accepting) and declaring this is who I am, deal with it. That first step of tremendous courage laid a ground work for many more small steps towards who I am today. I started living an authentic life which only added strength to getting on a one way plane.
After landing in Thailand I took a 15 week teaching course and faced a huge fear of mine, public speaking. I had always had such a hard time speaking in public but as a teacher I realized this was going to help me stare down this fear and overcome it. I ended up teaching in two different schools, the first job with me having over 900 high school students, and the second job which I stayed in for 2 years, teaching 28 twelve year olds.
I had no idea when I left for Thailand that I would be there for 3 years in all but that is exactly what happens when you step outside your comfort zone. You really have no idea what you will find inside yourself till you are there. I had the opportunity to travel and explore South East Asia, make an incredible global network of friends and I even found coding there. Before I left Thailand I took a trip to Nepal by myself. It was my first big solo travel, other than moving to Thailand, and I wanted to push myself one more time outside my comfort zone. I had decided I was going to trek to Annapurna basecamp with a guide.
Now before this trek I had only done some short 3–4 hour day hikes, nothing like this 10 day trek I was going to attempt. Once again I knew I had to draw upon all the baby steps of courage I had built up over the years, and sure enough that is exactly what I needed. I’ll never forget being on the trail, probably day 2 after trekking for 8 hours a day gaining ridiculous amounts of elevation, I saw how much this was going to be a giant source of courage I have created after I accomplished this trek. And sure enough it is something I even think of to this day during tough moments in programming. I spent 10 days, trekking 8 hours + a day and achieved something I had never even dreamed I could do. So with all my South East Asia experiences in my pocket like this giant well of courage I moved to New York City.
During my time in South East Asia I had met a fellow teacher friend who suggested I get into coding. I had never thought about it, although I enjoyed technology and fixing computers. Unfortunately during my high school time women were not pushed into technology and I think I would have been a programmer a lot sooner if someone had told me about computer science as a degree option, but nevertheless here I am anyways! I started using Code Academy to learn in between my classes I was teaching and soon really loved what I was doing. I had no idea about coding bootcamps yet because I was in Thailand in 2014 and the camps were fairly new still. But upon returning and moving to NYC, where I was teaching English as a Second Language to adults, I had found out about coding bootcamps. I thought if I can push myself so far and learn to be a teacher, be successful at it, then I definitely could learn this too.
I started studying and taking as many free courses as I could to get accepted into a coding bootcamp! I started with Ruby and moved to Javascript. I was accepted into Dev Bootcamp but they shut down right before I was going to start, after that I discovered Flatiron School through a free bootcamp prep with their founder. The energy and excitement I felt from learning to code was unlike anything I had experienced before in my life. It was as if this brand new side of me opened up!
I got accepted into Flatiron Schools in person immersive class and started my full time journey into coding in March of 2018. Despite some initial fears of course, and the rigorous course load, I felt like I had finally found my people. I loved my diverse cohort, I loved the feeling of putting in 12 hours a day, dreaming in code, talking code, solving problems, building projects, I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Without all of my other baby steps of courage to make a change like this and attempt to learn something so far from what I had previously studied and worked in, I know I would not have been able to make this massive life change.
During my time in Flatiron I changed so much, I became the 6 AM morning person I never thought I was, I stayed late, I worked on weekends, I got after it. There were plenty of ups and downs during my time. I failed a coding challenge and that stung, but failing only made me work harder, study more, want it more. They often talked about comfort zones at Flatiron, its how they assessed how you were doing. I had never really even thought about my comfort zone intellectually before, I had obviously addressed other comfort zones in my life previous to this but mentally these comfort zones were totally new to me. And thats what really solidified entering into becoming a Full Stack Web Developer, I knew for the rest of my life I would be constantly pushing mental comfort zones. Not to mention just how awesome it is creating beautiful applications.
Now I am on the job hunt, and this is a totally new mountain to face. Not unlike my 10 day trek in Nepal, there having been many ups and downs already. It’s a whole new work regime, networking, attending Meetups, coding my own side projects, studying algorithms, interviewing. All leading to my dream job, and the start of a new challenge, one that will last me forever. Even if you don’t have a technical background, you can make the career change, you just need to have some courage to make the change and want to push yourself outside your comfort zone continuously.
