My Math Story

There is a lot of discussion about how much math you need for learning to code and working to transition to software development. This post isn’t to agree or disagree with that. But I’d like to share my own story:

I finished my 6th grade math book ahead of the rest of the class, so I worked well into the 7th-8th grade math book with some guidance from my 6th grade teacher. Then I almost failed out of 7th grade because… you guessed it — I was failing math.

I worked hard and redeemed myself the next few years, the dropped out of Pre-Calculus because “I was terrible at math” and I didn’t get it.

I did enough college math for a Bachelors in Business Management, but swore off math because I still felt like I was bad at it.

Later I learned to code. I learned the basic math involved — brushing through linear algebra and discrete mathematics only to have some idea of what I was coding.

Despite my lack of formal math/CS education, I found people that believed in what I could contribute as a software developer.

Then I thought, I’m a professional developer now — I should probably do more math! This lasted until I failed out of Calculus at Johns Hopkins.

But I didn’t give up! I embarked on a Data Science journey working through curriculum in Probability, Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus.

Which brings us to the present day. Did I master all the concepts to be come an elite mathematician? No. In fact, my name still does not belong with the term “mathematician.”

But I continued to push myself to learn and grow beyond my comfort zone. It’s a journey and adventure that is still going. And thanks to Dr. Carol Dweck I’ve learned that I’m still not the greatest at math… YET.