My Journey from Spanish Instructor to Web Developer With Udacity

Some 5,000 students have been a part of the Grow with Google Scholarship — a US-focused program offering learning opportunities to a dedicated and diverse group of incredible individuals. Udacity invited students to share their experiences in their own words, and we were delighted to receive some truly powerful stories of transformation and success. Today, we’d like to share one of our favorites.

Over two years ago, in May of 2016, I was feeling fairly confident that I was finally going to get the full-time community college Spanish teaching position I had been actively seeking since 2012. Just a few years earlier, in August of 2009, I had graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with a Ph.D. in Spanish and gotten a full-time job as an instructional faculty member at Pima Community College, also in Tucson. While I was aware that there had been many others vying for the two open positions, what I didn’t realize was that I had just landed my first, and probably last, full-time Spanish faculty role in my career.

This is because, a few years into the position, I left this full-time faculty teaching job to move to Southern California, where my wife had been accepted to a medical residency program. Given my success with both the hiring process and my job performance at Pima, I actually thought that my chances of finding a full-time position in my new location would be fairly straightforward. The first indication that the process was not going to be as easy as I thought came in the form of a rejection email for a position at a private university close to our apartment. Not only did I not get the job; I hadn’t even gotten an interview!

Unfortunately, there would be a string of similar disappointments over the next five years that led me to the painful realization that perhaps it was time to make a change. There were interviews at several different community colleges, including two in which I was among the finalists, all of which resulted in rejection. The final straw, however, was when I was not selected as a finalist at a college where I had worked for several years as an adjunct faculty member. If I couldn’t get this job, for which I had felt so confident, which one could I get? I needed some time to mourn the loss of a short-lived career that I had loved and reflect on what to do next.

New Beginnings

It was May of 2016, and although I was devastated about leaving teaching, I was determined to return to a discipline that I was interested in as a graduate student 10 years earlier — web development. While teaching, I had looked into a web development boot camp, where you dedicate yourself for several months to learning to code. The problem with this was that I was the primary caregiver for our two young children and needed more scheduling flexibility than what a boot camp could offer. After consulting with a developer friend, I decided to enroll in Udacity’s Intro to Programming Nanodegree, an online, self-paced program that teaches the fundamentals of programming.

I graduated with my Intro to Programming Nanodegree in September 2016 with a solid programming foundation. The following year I completed another course, called “The Complete Web Developer Course 2.0”, on the Udemy platform, as well as a related online seminar called the “Complete Web Development Bootcamp.” By this time, I had augmented my web development skills to a point where I needed to decide whether I’d dedicate myself entirely to the discipline or continue teaching part-time. It was also around this time (fall of 2017), that Udacity began promoting its Grow With Google Scholarship program. This was a perfect opportunity to complete the transition I had begun a year and a half earlier when I enrolled in the Intro to Programming Nanodegree. I applied and was accepted to the challenge phase of the scholarship program!

The challenge phase of the Grow With Google program consisted of completing all of the course lessons as well as several projects that basically gave the student a taste of what was offered in the full Nanodegree program. The criteria for choosing the full scholarship recipients for the Nanodegree program was the completion of all lessons and showing collaboration and participation with other students in the program. My work and contributions in the challenge phase paid off and I was selected for a scholarship to the Front End Web Developer Nanodegree program!

Overcoming Obstacles

The most challenging aspect of the program for me has been finding the time and energy to complete it! Taking care of my two young children is a privilege, but it’s extremely demanding and time-consuming! This, in addition to the fact that we moved to a new area shortly after the program began, made it challenging for me.

Thankfully, the program has an active community, fantastic community managers, and a wealth of resources available to help you complete your projects successfully. Even with these many resources, it’s best to try to complete the projects yourself. One of the most important parts of being a developer is having the ingenuity to be able to figure things out on your own; it’s essential to learn how to read online documentation. Udacity shows you where to look–Mozilla Developer Network, Stack Overflow, etc.–but you are the one that needs to make these resources part of your development strategy.

When I felt that I had exhausted all potential avenues for solving the problem myself, I would use MDN, Google, and Stack Overflow, and I would reach out to the student community on Slack. I also made use of several of the project walkthroughs and webinars that were made available to us on the scholarships website. After consulting these various sources for help, I would invariably get back on track and eventually complete the project.

Reflections and Thoughts on the Future

Now that I am in the home stretch and close to completing the program, I am extremely proud of the progress that I’ve made as a developer. When I started the challenge scholarship 10 months ago, I had a firm grasp of HTML and CSS but only very basic knowledge of JavaScript. Now, I have a much better understanding of the JavaScript syntax as well as its vocabulary. Additionally, I’ve developed problem-solving skills by becoming more confident about where to look for answers and how to effectively read and understand online documentation.

I have also built proficiency in Git, the version control tool of choice of web developers; utilized build tools such as Gulp, learned how to use the command line; and built up a presence on the code-sharing platform GitHub. By becoming more active on GitHub, I now feel like a part of the web development community, and I look forward to contributing to open source projects in the future! Finally, I have started to learn React, which is widely considered the future of JavaScript. As a web developer, you are faced with obstacles on a daily basis, and you need to have determination, persistence, and grit to overcome them.

The experience that I have had over the past year as a Grow With Google Scholar has been amazing, and I have absolutely no regrets. When I graduate, I plan on drawing on the many career resources provided by Udacity to get my first developer job. One of the exercises that we were asked to complete at the beginning of the Nanodegree program was to imagine ourselves as future web developers. I answered that I saw myself as an expert JavaScript developer. With the confidence that I have gained from this program, I have no doubt that this outcome will certainly come to fruition.

I was very happy in my previous career as a Spanish instructor, but the difficulty in finding full-time work led me to leave the classroom after almost 20 years of teaching, and dedicate myself to entering web development. Thankfully, the Grow With Google Scholarship came around at just the right time, and it has served as the culmination of a professional transition that I began two years ago. My Nanodegree program serves as the start of a new career in tech, where the demand for developers outweighs the supply. For this, and for many other things, I am extremely grateful. Thank you to Google, Udacity, and, especially, to the community managers and my fellow scholars.

Thanks so much, Matthew, for sharing your story with us! We’ll be publishing more of our favorite stories from the Grow with Google scholars shortly, so check back soon!