How did you pivot to Tech?

TRIGGER WARNING This article contains information about suicide or self harm which may be triggering. A notice prior to mention is noted so the reader can skip the section. 

So for those who are unfamiliar, my undergraduate degree was in Sociology and a minor in Education:Applied Psychology. So I was very much in the space of people and working with others and making an impact on the world. And with that degree, I ended up working and non-profit for 10 years and it was super fulfilling and exciting and I learned a lot but I was also, it was intense and it was a lot. The first five years, I worked with at-risk female youth and that was really rewarding. My focus was on sexual education, so teaching not only young girls about menstruation but then also teaching their mother about menstruation and giving them the tools and the space to talk about expectations, which was really exciting. My last 5 years in non-profit, I worked in mental health and I worked with folks who have mental challenges. And that was again, very rewarding, I learned alot, but it was a very intense, emotional labor was a lot. 

TRIGGER WARNING This section contains information about suicide or self harm which may be triggering. You can skip this paragraph to continue with the article.

Any given week I would have somebody who had seizures or somebody who was planning on or talked about suicide, hurting themselves, and was intense; it wasn't a lot. I learned so much from working there and at that time…

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I was feeling the burn out, I considered, I was looking into getting my Master's Degree, which was always my plan. I was looking into two different fields which was organizational psychology and marriage counseling. I was leaning more into organizational psychology, I really like the idea of how groups of people work and how to create processes that support everybody. I had lunch with one of my partner’s friends and she had recently gone to Google IO and went to a women techmakers dinner, where she sat next to somebody that had just attended a software boot camp. And when she told me that, I was like I’m not looking into working out, I’m looking for a career change, or at least continue my education and looking for a different avenue. Then she explained to me what software boot camps were and they are intense programs and they vary. This was back in 2015, that May, or maybe the year before. They were 12 weeks long, so 3 months long, they were full-time intense where they took you from a very very basic understanding of programming to where you could actually build a web application. I looked into it, I did not think I was to do it, at least that wasn’t the plan. But I was encouraged by her and also by my partner, who had just got his Masters in computer science. I took a class or two. I took a class at our community college, one being a math class, I think was calculus, and then the other one was an actual computer science class. I remember stepping into the local community college and pretty much everyone except the professor was 16, 17, 18. They were very young, some of them still in high school and doing some college credits. I think I was one out of a handful of women too, I want to say there were five women who started and I believe only three of us finished. So that wasn't very exciting, but I did end up really enjoying the class, I was learning C++ and I really enjoyed it. I was like “oh I can see myself doing something like this to be able to be creative.” After that, I looked back into the software boot camp and the one that my friend originally told me about was called hackbright which is an all female or all woman bootcamp. I’ll try applying, it cost alot, but I’ll apply “I guess.” So my partner was great at framing this as “You could just you can just you can just apply and not accept and just go through the process and see how it is.” So I did and at that time I was also taking a summer course at the local college too about web development. I couldn’t take the whole class, I think that one was 12 weeks and it was free. But I couldn’t afford taking time off from work because I hadn’t planned for htat. But I took that class and I was applying. Throughout the application I got really excited, I thought “Yeah, why now? I really want to do this.” So when I got closer to finishing the interview process, I ended up attending Udemy’s web development course. I really enjoy that. When I got accepted, I was like “Yeah.” Me and partner sat down to try to figure out our finances. I ended up moving to San Francisco. We first moved into his parents’ house, to save money since I wasn't going to be working. We readjusted our budget. I moved to San Francisco and I attended the bootcamp. And I was a very eager to do as much as I could. And that meant really focusing learning and applying, and actually blogged everyday, that way it help my own I'm learning. I networked with lots of people, I attended all the meetups. One, to network with people to get to know them; two for the free food. So that was so amazing. I ended up being offered a job to work at that boot camp, which I accepted; I was like “I just paid you a lot of money, now you're going to pay me to teach this? This is great!” So I end up staying at that bootcamp for two years teaching and I think that was one of the best decisions because I really was able to understand the contents way more and how to deepen my understanding in regards to how to build, how to connect with others and communicate with others. So I highly recommend some folks if you learn something share it and if you know you don't have someone physically to share it with, write a blog; do both! That's the best way to really solidify your own understanding too. So I ended up doing that, working at the software bootcamp, I taught with Girl Develop It as well, I also was part of the Google developers group, Techqueria, any meet up; I attended everything and I will try to be as helpful as possible. That included going to meetups early, talking to the organizers, asking how I can help, to eventually applying for technical talks with my blogs, and I started doing technical talks. That's when Google found me, someone at Google was at one of my talks and referred me. I got an email from a recruiter, I freaked out when I got my email and I deleted it. I had to google “how do you undelete email in gmail” to figure that out. That’s another story.