If you’ve found your way here, welcome! My name is Lauren Ruff. I am a soon-to-be-fully-fledged software developer currently finishing up my last quarter at Oregon State. I’ve experience more than a few major life changes in the past few months and graduating will be no exception. So to start my “beginning of the end” I’d like to share a little about me and how a “guardian angel” changed my life trajectory.
I grew up on the east coast just north of D.C. but I had known since middle school that California was where I wanted to be. I was accepted to the University of California Santa Barbara and promptly left my family in Maryland to pursue a degree in marine biology with plans to be a doctor or a vet for aquatic mammals. I still can’t believe that my parents let their oldest child attend college 3000 miles from home without any friends or family within hours of where that child was going to be, but hey, I think it all went alright!
Two years into my degree, while absolutely failing microbiology, I came to the sad and life changing conclusion that I was not meant to pursue medicine – human or animal. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no plan, was too far into my current degree to try to switch or figure out something new, and I felt like I was letting my parents down (now is a good time to mention that my mom is an ICU/OR nurse and my dad is a Plastic Surgeon, both very accomplished in their fields). I did know, however, that I could keep my promise to my parents and graduate in four years, so I did. I graduated in 2018 with absolutely no plan and no prospects – yay (sarcastically).
Six months after graduating, struggling to stay motivated in my job and probably depressed about not knowing what I was going to do with my life or how I was going to afford to stay in California, an old friend from high school contacted me out of the blue. We hadn’t spoken in years. He reminded me of the programming class we had taken in high school, how aweful of an experience it was, and how after years of not knowing what he was going to do he decided to do bootcamp for data science. After a long chat and catching up, the first thing I did was look into boot camps and the field of software engineering/computer science – I was hooked from the beginning
This friend was my “guardian angel”. The idea of a “quick fix” peaked my interest, but I new my brain didn’t work that way, so instead of a boot camp I pursued formal education. This all leads me to today, with an A.A. from my local community college in computer programming and am now finishing up at OSU with a degree in computer science. I’m excited to finish this chapter of my life and start the next one – but first we have a capstone project to finish!
Quote of the day: Ends are a means to beginnings.