My non-traditional path to became a software engineer for under $200
From serving clients to client servers: A memoir of my transition to tech.
When I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in May of 2015, I had no real career prospects. Truth be told, I struggled for the first half of college deciding what major to pursue and eventually settled on biology. I knew the only way I’d make a living in that field was with a PhD. So, I embarked down the prescribed academic track, gathering lab and field work experience and hoping to land co-authorships in scientific journal articles. My plan fell apart my senior year of college when I got cold feet. I was doing voluntary lab work for my mentor — a PhD candidate in quantitative genetics — who was absolutely miserable. She convinced me to explore career opportunities outside of academia before committing to this exhausting and frequently unglamorous life. In my final year of college, I decided against applying to graduate school and instead stepped into a job industry for which I was woefully unequipped.
My post-graduation job search was brutal. Networking is exceedingly important in academia, and as a lowly undergraduate, I was still an outsider. In addition, the field jobs I was competing for were often physically demanding or involved working in extreme conditions, yet they…
