A chemical engineer can’t code
What I learned on my journey to become a software engineer
1. People are surprised and mostly impressed
Are you computer science or computer engineering?
That’s a question I’m asked a lot whenever I meet someone new at a hackathon. It reminds me of when someone speaks Chinese to me just because my hair is black and my last name sounds foreign, but that’s a story for another time.
People were surprised that a chemical engineering student would show up to an event where students forgo eating and sleeping to code for 24, sometimes 36 hours straight. Many many students, mentors, and hackathon coordinators, that I talked to, are delighted to hear that there was a non-programmer-by-training in their midst. Mentors help me learn basics and other students ask about my interest in technology.
The community as a whole is generally very receptive to people like me who go out of their way to learn something new. Generally.
2. Not everyone is so welcoming.
Last year at HopHacks, the Johns Hopkins hackathon, I had just finished my project after 20-some long sleepless, shower-less hours when I wanted to explore some more tools available to me. So, I took a look around at the sponsor tables and found IBM promoting their new Watson Application Program Interface, the Watson API. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing. I had access to the same artificial intelligence that had won Jeopardy and was to be used in medical facilities around the country. I downloaded the tools, read the documentation, even wrote up a little script — I wanted to use Watson to power a speech recognition robot. I ended up talking to IBM sponsors to find out more about Watson and IBM’s recent work in machine learning. It was truly a great experience.
Fast forward half a year — I was invited to a semiconductor industry conference, an all-expenses-paid weekend in a fancy hotel with unlimited food and a few glasses of champagne. It was completely unrelated to hackathons and programming; I was invited for a scholarship I had received for my chemical engineering research.
Nevertheless, there was a career fair towards the end of the weekend and what do you know, IBM is a big player in the semiconductor game, so they were recruiting engineers.
I had on my nicest (only) suit like I was clad in shining armor. My portfolio was stuffed with newly minted resumes; I held it in front of me like a shield to deflect the scrutiny of recruiters’ gazes. I confidently walked up to an IBM recruiter and decided to impress him, to set myself apart from every other chemical engineering and material science student in the banquet hall:
Hi, my name is Stan. I’ve seen a lot of the great things IBM is doing with Watson…
Before I could get another word out, the recruiter interrupted:
What is your major?
Chemical Engineering.
So you are a chemical engineer and you want to work on Watson?
It wasn’t a question from an impressed man, but rather one of ignorance. It was accompanied by a tone of willful condescension. Before I could explain my interest in IBM’s latest work, of the time and efforts I had spent to educate myself in technology, he had already made up his mind. A chemical engineer’s place is in a factory making silicon wafer chips by the millions. A chemical engineer can’t work on Watson.
IBM isn’t special in this story. Too often I talk to tech companies just to be dismissed. Gayle McDowell even wrote in The Google Resume:
What really bugged me about representing Google at career fairs were the chemical engineering majors.
A quick glance at their résumé would reveal nothing for which they were especially well suited. Sometimes I wanted to ask them, Is there any reason you’re talking to me other than “Oh-my-god it’s Google”? Why technology? Why you?
I’d politely smile and offer a canned response of, “I’m not sure what the best match would be for your background at this time, but we’ll keep your résumé on file in case anything comes up.” This is kind of like telling someone you meet at a bar, “How about I get your number, and I’ll call you instead?”
This kind of dismissive attitude only perpetuates the myth that a piece of paper defines a person. I believe that I am more than my degree. I also think this kind of recruiting keeps a company from truly innovating, at least as far as their workforce goes. Let’s look at it another way…
3. It was hard work.
I taught myself to program from zero knowledge. Chemical engineering majors at my school aren’t required to take a single computer science course, not even MATLAB. I learned the C language by auditing an online course from Harvard over my Thanksgiving and winter break.
My girlfriend was not very happy that I spent ten hours per day in front of a computer for days at a time. After I got back to school I attended a few hackathons where I built dancing, shy baby Groot and eventually learned to write www.schoolsfor.me. I had many helpful people to guide me along the way, but overall, I had to keep with it myself.
I think recruiters often only think about the issue like a “student is doing coding on the side.” They don’t understand that it’s often more than that. It’s doing a full time degree learning differential equations and then spending all night trying to figure out linear algebra and discrete math.
My projects may have been trivial for a computer science student or an electrical engineer; I am not the most qualified for any software or hardware engineering position. However, if I were a recruiter at a big chemical production company and a computer science major walked up to me and told me they taught themselves catalysis and heat transfer over their breaks from school — spent a few full weekends each semester building small distillation columns, I would at least give them the respect of a mature conversation.
4. I love to learn and solve problems. Period.
Why didn’t you switch into computer science? Why did you waste your time in chemical engineering?
Because my love to passionately learn something is not mutually exclusive from my love to passionately learn all things.
Too often in this world we are labeled. I’m a chemical engineer. You’re a biologist. What do you know about algorithms? An English major? Ha. You can’t possibly go to medical school.
Society becomes black and white to help ease the complexity that comes with trying to figure out which shade of grey matches most closely. Rather, society becomes black and white because we don’t want to admit there is no discrete shade of grey that matches at all. It is important to build credibility, to have depth in a field; but why does having experiences and knowledge of a particular subject subtract from having the same in any other subject?
Life is interesting as a programmer/chemical engineering student. I’ve used python scripts to solve statistical thermodynamics problems and mathematica to design artificial organs. Right now I’m learning MATLAB to even more efficiently solve large complex chemical engineering math. Going the extra mile to learn variables and boolean statements has helped me immensely in my chemical engineering work. I believe that the extra hundred miles in chemical engineering will help my software engineering work.
5. Somebody will appreciate the hard work.
After my episode with IBM and a few similarly minded tech companies, I gave up. What right does a chemical engineer have trying to code anyway?
Fall came and with it, the annual career fair. I was graduating, but I didn’t look for any full time jobs in tech. I stuck to what I knew best — Dow, DuPont, Genentech, all big name chemical engineering companies.
I almost walked right past Capital One’s booth because of the mindset instilled in me by the naysayers. I only turned around because an old friend happened to be their recruiter. I went up to say hello. He convinced me to apply and so I did.
I thought I would give it one last try, after all, the company is making great strides in banking while thinking more like a tech giant. So I made a special resume highlighting my experience and skills. I even listed my major as:
Engineering, Chemical
hoping they wouldn’t notice.
Somehow I got an interview.
Somehow I passed the interview.
I thought long and hard before I took the job at Capital One in technology development as a software engineer. After all, I’m a chemical engineering student. How can I work at an online bank writing code?
I took the job because I realized that Capital One was one of the first companies that respected me as a student, not a degree. They treated me like a student of life, not of a particular major. They were more impressed by the fact that I had a Github account than annoyed that I didn’t really know how to merge properly.
I realized the only person now holding me back from being a software engineer was me. If Capital One wants to hire me, who am I to tell myself that
A chemical engineer can’t code?
