Tech Jobs Academy (TJA) is a full-time, four-month training program formed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, sponsored by Microsoft, and hosted by CUNY’s City Tech.
Lum Murphy, Ezra Undag, and I were the top three picks in the class for speakers. I voted for Lum and Ezra (and Tin!), so they know who to blame. No idea who voted me into this…
…anyway, a lot of the things in my speech were things I was sharing for the first time with my classmates and the TJA staff. I’m glad my parents weren’t there; I’m glad my little brother was.
So I shouldn’t be here. For a number of reasons. My parents grew up and were educated in Hong Kong, but I was raised here. Dad made it to the sixth grade and mom graduated high school. I remember my sixth grade graduation cause mom surprised me by saying, “Congrats, you’re now smarter than your father.”
I later became the first in my family to go to college, and then the only one to graduate with a degree. In high school, in 2002, I taught myself how to build websites through library books. This was back when tables and frames were still a thing and I was web-surfing with MetConnect and NetZero. But coding felt like a toy. I didn’t know what else to do with it once I finished my website. And I couldn’t see how I could earn a stable living from it. Money was something my parents and relatives always fought over.
I graduated college after seven years without debt. But after not finding steady work for two years, and even trying to join the Navy, I began looking for opportunities to level up. The place that first changed my life wasn’t TJA, but the Brooklyn Adult Learning Center. The unemployment office never mentioned it. No one I knew had heard of it. I stumbled upon their Facebook page at 3:00 a.m. while I was researching free schools. It’s been around for over a decade and run by the Department of Education. You just have to live in New York City and they’ll take you. Very little questions asked.
When I got there, I had a choice between Medical Coding or IT. I went with IT cause the medical billing codes were scheduled to change in two months. IT turned out to be a good call. My teacher Andrew was an amazing guy. He was working five days a week, three of those had him teaching CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+ from 9 to 9. He identified all the exceptional students in his classes, made sure we knew it, and tasked us with helping the people around us. So IT is where I found my value. It’s where I discovered that there was something I enjoyed, something I could do well, that also helped people.
Within six months, I passed my A+. But I didn’t feel ready for the job market. So I went looking for more schools. Two months after that, I got into TJA.
Now my classmates have heard all about my theory that TJA is secretly a reality TV show. Something like HBO’s Silicon Valley, which I still need to watch. Maybe it was all those jokes the staff made about the hidden cameras. More likely it was signing away our likenesses and our right to be filmed to three separate parties.
But the uniqueness of this program cannot be overstated. Back in May, I had the choice between this and a coding bootcamp at Flatiron School, which was also sponsored by Tech Talent Pipeline. But I chose TJA because when you think about it, the barrier to coding is very low. This isn’t even because coding boot camps are so popular right now. You want to code, you can do it with a text editor and an Internet connection. But IT and system administration require things that the average person is not ever going to touch. Our lab machines were quad-core, dual-monitor setups with hyper-threading and SSDs. I didn’t have the money to invest in something like that. Nor the experience to direct myself. The average sysadmin has 10 to 20 or even 30 years of experience. And even if I had the money and could find the know-how, I’ve learned that the hardest thing about trying anything new, was to do it alone.
So the casting crew — erm, TJA staff — did an excellent job selecting the most diverse people around. Our ages range from 24 to 52. We’ve got people with CompSci degrees and without. We have 7 women. We have people from finance. And art. Marie runs a band. Emaj helped manage his dad’s KFC restaurant and I see him as the best PowerShell Scripter in the class. But unlike a reality TV show, we were selected for our ability to collaborate and work in teams. We all went through a unique experience. And many of us are now friends.
In conclusion, I want to follow on what Lum said. Thank you to the TJA staff for teaching us how to build the future. And in doing so, empower us to have a better future for ourselves. Also, thanks to the tech sector’s crazy obsession with free t-shirts, I’ll never have to buy clothes again.
That concludes my speech.
Special thanks to Amy Babinchak’s Women in IT Scholarship, which reimbursed the cost of my A+. To donate to their fund, click here.
If you want to help with my certs, you can use my PayPal.
Updates:
- Got an IT internship at a municipal agency in November 2016.
- Officially an MCP after passing Windows Server 70–410 on March 1, 2017.
- Studying for the 70–411. Aiming for an MCSA.
- Got a salaried IT position at a NYC museum in June 2017.
- Certified with CompTIA Security+ in July 2018.
- Accepted a full-tuition scholarship to a full-time cybersecurity bootcamp in August 2021. Graduated in October 2021.
- Ranked 41st nation-wide in the US Cyber Challenge (USCC) CTF in December 2021.
- Certified with CompTIA Network+ in May 2022.
- Certified with Amazon AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner in December 2022.
- Accepted a full-tuition scholarship to SANS in the summer of 2022 and completed three certification exams in cybersecurity (GSEC, GCIH, and GFCE) by February 2023. GFCE is Windows Forensics, my chosen elective.
- Invited to the GIAC Advisory Board for scoring over a 90% on the GCIH.
- Participated in the week-long USSC Cyber Camp Western in July 2023, which included SANS presenters (such as Jaime Lightfoot), a virtual job fair, and a CTF.
- Ranked 63rd out of 467 players in the WiCyS Target Cyber Defense Challenge CTF in June 2023.
- Ranked 129th out of 1000 players in the WiCyS Security Training Scholarship CTF in September 2023. Completed 33/45 of the total CTF and is amongst 6% of all players to have completed the Group 4 challenges.
- Completed a NYPL TechConnect program that taught Swift programming in December 2023.
- Got a salaried IT position with more hands-on networking and MacOS system administration in January 2024.
