My Journey from Accounting to Computer Science
Background
For my senior year of high school, I had the opportunity to finally take courses that really interested me. Since I thought business and technology were my top choices for college programs, I decided to take a general business/management course and software engineering as my electives. At this point, I had virtually no exposure to these areas since they were not required. Reflecting back, it was shocking and surprising that classes like this were not offered since they are very popular programs of study for a majority of college students today.
Unfortunately, my experience with the software engineering course wasn’t good, since from my perspective, the course was too challenging. However, I realize now that I was doing well, but comparing myself to the small portion of the class that had already had years of experience with coding, which is certainly a recipe for disaster. Since CS and software engineering use your brain in such a different way compared to other courses a high schooler would take, and due to the mindset that I had, it makes a lot of sense why I didn’t have the right frame of mind. For the course, we used CodeHS and primarily did JavaScript.
I also was in the mindset at the time that I just wanted to be done with high school and didn’t take the time to really figure out what I wanted to do in college. However, when it came to my business course, I felt that my skills had aligned more at this time, and I seemed to find it relatively enjoyable. Looking back on my experience with both of these courses, I certainly chose the easier path, rather than choosing what I thought would be the most fulfilling, despite the greater challenge.
College
When it came time to choose my major, I decided on business administration, since I thought this would help me decide what aspect of business interested me the most. While I did a great job of exploring the different areas of business, I didn’t consider anything else as an option. I wasn’t letting myself explore other things, since I thought I would derail myself.
Something else that took me longer to learn, is that it’s very beneficial to try out different things, especially when it comes to career options, since it is impossible to know if something is the right choice without having first tried it. And not just try it, but actually give it a chance.
I ended up getting my associates degree in business administration at Hudson Valley Community College, and then transferred to Siena College to better determine which area, finance or accounting, was best for me. I had originally thought about finance before switching to accounting, but soon realized that this wasn’t the right choice for me. Partway through my first semester at Siena, I arrived at accounting by process of elimination rather than feeling excited about my choice.
Despite the fact I was officially an accounting major, I wasn’t able to start taking accounting courses since it was midway through the fall 2021 semester, and was just taking the general business courses I had already been taking at the time. I had to wait until the spring 2021 semester to be able to see if accounting was the right program for me.
There were multiple things that drew me to accounting. This included:
- Work being predominantly logic and analytics based
- Improving my financial literacy and helping towards achieving financial freedom
- Provide valuable skills when it comes to entrepreneurship and investing
- Higher level of demand and jobs available at virtually every company
However, I realized that the aspects of business that I enjoyed the most were actually the aspects of technology based businesses rather than businesses in general.
Since I chose accounting, I really wanted to try to get the most out of it, so aside from doing coursework, I decided to start studying for the certified public accountant (CPA) exam. This is one of the hardest professional exams, up there with the Bar exam. This kept me motivated for some time, but after going through a significant portion of the material, I didn’t know what to do next. During this time, I was just starting to hear more about CS, a program I hadn’t thought about since high school. I was starting to realize that CS was really fascinating to me.
Leading up to this internship, I was fortunate to gain more exposure to CS since some of the courses at Siena required this for the accounting major. This primarily focused on databases, and happened to feature a very small amount of Python. Up until this point, the last time I did any coding was a software engineering course that I took as a senior. However, since I had only taken this single course, it wasn’t enough to make me realize that this could be an option for my future.
In the spring semester leading up until the start of the internship, I had begun to realize that I didn’t enjoy accounting. However, everyone I talked to suggested that I stick it out until my internship, which at the time made sense in order to give it more of a chance.
I had hopes that I would enjoy an accounting career path, and during my internship in this field, I realized very quickly that this wasn’t the right career for me. I didn’t feel challenged at all, and grew more bored of accounting.
My Turning Point
Just a couple days into my internship, I quickly realized that this career wasn’t for me. Still at the start of the summer, I officially switched from accounting to a double major in CS and accounting. While I knew this was a big decision, I began to realize how much I enjoyed CS and spent much of my free time learning to code in Python. This also included taking a Python course through the community college I graduated from, which counted as intro to CS at Siena.
I realized that CS is a field that challenges my creative problem solving skills, and motivates me to learn as much as I can. The degree of technicality blended with creativity is unmatched compared to other fields. When it comes to coding, it provides me the opportunity to create something new, as well as come up with solutions that can be applied to a wide variety of fields. No other field I have learned about has this much opportunity when it comes to being able to create meaningful things, which is very exciting. There is also a wide variety of domains within computer science, so much so that no one would be able to completely explore them all in their lifetime.
Over time, the world is becoming increasingly technology driven, which has transformed the world significantly. Being a part of this field means that you are driving the most change in the world. What makes this even more unbelievable is that only a small portion of society has the skills for this field, meaning that there is an extremely high demand compared to all other industries. There are at least a million job openings left unfilled in the US when it comes to software engineering alone, and this number is expected to continue increasing over time. For the reasons mentioned above, people with these skills are extremely valuable, and often sought out by various companies, aside from having great entrepreneurship potential.
Having a business background is very valuable for this field, since it enables me to think in a more holistic view and combine different skills and knowledge areas together that very few people have.
After talking to one of my closest friends, he told me about “skill stacking” and about how many of the most successful people have a wide range of different skills. Having many different interests makes life more exciting and enjoyable.
There is a quote that I have misunderstood for a long time, since only the first half of it is predominantly used. However, I now realize that this quote really appeals to me:
“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
This quote by Robert Greene was used to describe William Shakespeare, and goes hand in hand with the idea of skill stacking. While there are some that are experts in one thing that are very successful, this is far outweighed by those that are very successful by being skilled in multiple areas. In the information age, this is becoming ever more valued. In order to take the most advantage of this, utilizing your different talents will enable you to stand out.
Challenges
For the next several months after I changed my major, I sometimes felt very frustrated about my past decisions, but over time I began to accept the past, and aimed to make the most of it. This was the hardest in the fall 2021 semester following the accounting internship, since I was only able to take one CS course and had to take 4 time-intensive business courses that were the highest level courses for the accounting degree requirements. I feel that because of this very challenging personal experience, I realized how valuable my time is and have a greater realization for the things I value most.
While I could have given up and said it was too late, I pushed through this in order to do something that I knew that I would enjoy so much more. This was especially tough up until finishing my remaining courses required for my accounting major, but I made sure to always do at least a little learning of some sort when it came to CS each day. After this past spring semester, I finished my last course for accounting, and now no longer feel held back by my past actions. I also have come to appreciate the fact that I stayed focused and became a stronger person in the process.
Projects
As a result of my passion for CS, I have already created several projects on topics ranging from machine learning to web app development. The ones that I’m most proud of are featured on my blog. Aside from this, I have also written about my other most notable experiences and accomplishments so far when it comes to CS such as winning my first hackathon and completing CodingBat. If you’d like to hear more about what I’ve done so far, I’d recommend looking through my various blog posts. After my earliest projects from my blog, I realized that I should definitely be keeping the code somewhere, so I created a GitHub account and have been creating repositories alongside the blogs for my projects.
Biggest Achievement Yet
9 months after this significant decision, I got accepted into the USC Institute for Creative Technologies REU program! I am an AI and software engineering intern for the Learning Sciences team. More specifically, I am working on some of the Intelligent Tutoring Systems projects. Achieving this goal has completely changed my outlook on life, and what I thought was possible. It’s even more crazy to think that despite the fact I had to devote a lot of time to complete the business and accounting courses, I still managed to achieve this incredible honor. This program started at the end of May, making it just under a year since I officially changed my major. Overall, I am really excited to see where I’ll be in another year from now.
