Many kids grow up wanting to break the mold of what their parents do for a living and find their own path– I was no exception to this. My dad is a software engineer who runs his own website and I used to think that I wanted no part of computers and coding– I just thought it was boring. However, after working in a field which is very labor intensive and time consuming, the appeal of computers started to make sense to me. The freedom my dad was able to give himself by being an internet entrepreneur and being able to work remotely is something I took for granted before but can now appreciate. I came to understand that happiness in life is not just from doing a job that you love, but also from doing something you enjoy which also gives you the freedom to pursue other aspects of your life.
Having realized that I want to take a different path in life, I decided to come back to school and learn a new set of technical skills. I settled on mechanical engineering because I knew it would give me lots of opportunities and take the least amount of time for me to get another degree in STEM. Since I had to take a programming class to satisfy a requirement for engineering, I decided to take ICS 111. This class was my first real introduction to programming and I loved it. I found it provided all of the problem solving and higher order thinking aspects that I enjoyed about engineering, but with less stress. I was sold that coding was the thing for me.
In the future, I would like to blend my engineering and software skills to potentially work on programs which engineers use to design products and simulate interactions. These kinds of projects could include CAD design, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, etc. I am also equally as interested in web development.