For today’s blog, I want to take the opportunity to reflect on past experiences in work and education, as well as my thoughts on my upcoming career shift.

Before starting the program at OSU, I attained a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Western Washington University. While I was there, I worked as a caregiver at a nonprofit that primarily served the developmentally disabled. After graduating, I worked for three years as a representative at a call center. I learned a lot from those experiences, both about things I enjoy when it comes to my work life, as well as some things I wanted to change. One key commonality to my experience studying psychology, working as a caregiver, and working at a call center is that I really enjoy collaborative work. Whether it be group assignments in school, taking care of clients alongside other caregivers, or working together with a customer on a call to resolve a problem, the collaborative process is one I derive a lot of enjoyment and motivation from. Probably tied to this is the takeaway that I want to do work that feels meaningful and solves problems for people.

While I enjoyed my previous educational and professional experiences, I also found that I was ready for a change. For my (hopefully successful!) career in the tech industry, I hope to continue finding opportunities to solve problems for people and work in a collaborative fashion. I think this career change will introduce a lot of new experiences for me. Up until starting school at OSU, I haven’t had any experience with building things. I have used a lot of software as a student and professionally but creating new software to serve as a useful tool for someone else to use will be a new experience. I think that working as a software developer will offer a chance to immerse myself in something more technical, with more emphasis on understanding complicated systems rather than just purely on working with people. I have found many of the assignments in this program to be very interesting and satisfying to work on. Writing code often allows me to experience more of a flow state compared to other kinds of work.

I think that my previous experiences will hopefully serve me well when it comes to developing soft skills in the tech industry, while the more technical side of a career in software development will be pretty much entirely new to me. This strikes me as a good balance between building on skills I already have and value in myself, while also opening opportunities to challenge myself to grow in new areas.

Ultimately, all of our experiences have the ability to teach us something, and that means that previous work has value for new adventures. Thanks for reading my second blog post, and I’ll see you next time!