Participant story: Yingjie

“I’m excited to gain hands-on experience in real-world projects and to collaborate with my cohort classmates and mentors to develop team projects.”

1) Tell us a little about your life.

I was born and raised in Shanghai, China. Before immigrating to the USA four years ago, I worked as an investment manager in a venture capital investment company in Shanghai. This brought me great opportunities to work with programmers and engineers on projects mainly in the IT industry and high technologies. I was very impressed by their work and their passion for creating a better world through tech innovations. Since then, I developed a great interest in tech industries and always wanted to learn to code if given any opportunity.

2) What made you decide to apply for Techtonica?

Motherhood inspired me to decide to change my career to be a software engineer. After my daughter was born, she was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease. I had to quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom to take care of her. Being a first-generation immigrant myself is not easy. I want to find a good job so I can be a good role model for my daughter and create a better life for her. I have self-studied basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript after putting my baby girl to sleep or whenever I have free time. It’s not very realistic for me as a mom to a toddler to go back to a traditional school for a computer science degree, so I came up with the idea of attending a coding boot camp. By chance, I got to know Techtonica. I realized immediately that it is where I should go. I appreciate so much that I found the organization and look forward to starting the journey of becoming a software engineer.

3) What are you most excited to learn while at Techtonica?

I am excited to learn full-stack development and build solid knowledge in JavaScript and the React framework. I’m also excited to gain hands-on experience in real-world projects and to collaborate with my cohort classmates and mentors to develop team projects.

4) What do you want to contribute to or change about the tech industry?

I want to help moms who have quit their jobs because of caregiving roles but want to get back to their careers. Working moms are proud, and they are an essential group in the tech industry. Also, I want to bring my knowledge in investment to working as a software engineer to help improve the value of the products from business perspectives.

5) What’s your dream project?

My dream project is an app for parents looking for daycare centers and other childcare services locally. It includes features about daycare center availability, meal services for different age groups, individual childcare services, second-hand market places, parenting communities, etc. It also includes healthcare resources and an immediate consulting service that is accessible to the parents.