Hello to everyone! My name is Andrea, and I’m excited to be working on the final capstone project this term.
I am originally from Northern Arizona and received my first bachelors degree at the University of Arizona back in 2017 for Psychology. But after determining that I did not in fact want to become a therapist or get a PhD I entered the work force in office administration roles which was stable if not a bit boring. I dabbled in community college CIS courses for a little while before biting the bullet and entering the OSU post-bacc Computer Science program in Fall 2021 to pursue a full career change.
Until this term I have been working my day job full-time and working on school part-time. It was difficult at times, especially when my husband and I decided to adopt an Australian Shepherd puppy as I was heading into my second term (intro to CS 2 & architecture and assembly) and my husband was headed into his busy season as an accountant – would not recommend! For this last term I am working on intro to security, defense against the dark arts, and this capstone course. No job but I will be in Arizona through December to assist my grandparents while my grandpa is going through chemo so I plan to be on point with my time management for the term.
My ultimate career goal is to go into the field of cybersecurity. Most positions require some level of engineering experience first, so my main focus right now is to get going in the general realm of software engineering. To this end I completed an internship this past summer at Farmers Insurance as a Salesforce developer intern, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was an excellent chance to work on user stories within the Agile framework and get proper experience working on an extensive code base with senior engineers and architects, as well as have some exposure to new technologies and a new programming language.
Lastly, I wanted to mention the name of the blog is not just a pun, although I am a big fan of puns much to the chagrin of family and friends. The Yellow Brick Road is defined by Oxford Learners Dictionaries as “a course of action that a person takes believing that it will lead to good things.” It was quite a leap for me to jump back into school and make this career change, but I was ready to make a positive change and try something I was much more interested in and passionate about. Nearing the end of my journey at OSU, I still believe this to be true for me and I hope that my fellow students feel the same.
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