My first computer was a Macintosh SE II, I\u2019m not really sure why we had it at home at a time when personal computers weren\u2019t really all that prevalent, but we did. It didn\u2019t really do much either, but I loved playing on it; I always longed to learn more about how to use it, but there wasn\u2019t really anyone around to teach me, so I relegated myself to playing brick and messing around with random programs. My love of technology, however, strengthened throughout the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first experiences programming\u2013unless we\u2019re counting creating crappy fan sites on GeoCities in elementary school\u2013was in high school, when I took Intro to Programming. We used Visual Basic and created widgets that performed basic tasks such as calculation. I really enjoyed it, but for some reason came to the conclusion that it wasn\u2019t for me. I\u2019m not sure if it was a combination of trying to not appear to be a computer nerd in high school or if the class I was in was too rowdy, but I decided to drop computer science\u00ad\u00ad\u2013besides, my goal at the time was to become a veterinarian and I would never need programming for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My degree 1.0 was in biology and there was no programming involved. As a biology degree is really nothing but a springboard to some other health sciences degree, I decided that pharmacy would be a rewarding career with a 100k+ guaranteed salary. Though, I knew that retail pharmacy wasn\u2019t exactly what I wanted to pursue. During pharmacy school, I was introduced to programming again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pre 2010-ish pharmacy was the\u00a0it<\/em>\u00a0career. Having recently required a doctoral degree, there was a national shortage and companies were throwing money at new grads. It was at the top of US News World Report best professions. It was the \u201cmost trusted profession\u201d. In response, pharmacy schools began opening up across the country. Enrollment skyrocketed. The trend quickly reversed. Gloom and doom set in. Reddit and the Student Doctor Network forum filled with \u201cthe sky is falling\u201d type posts. Would I be able to find a job after graduating?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This fear, a desire to learn something new, a public push that \u201ceveryone should know how to program\u201d led me to try programming again. This time with a focus on web development. I\u2019m not sure where I started. It might\u2019ve been Stanford Open Courses or Codeschool.com but I started learning and building things in my spare time and really fell in love with programming again.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly into my career as a pharmacist, it was evident that the profession is slowly being suffocated by corporate greed, PBMs, and poor public perception. Eventually, the only thing getting me through some days was a mantra of \u201cone day I\u2019m going to be out of here and working in tech.\u201d I thought that I could self-study my way to a job but no luck. I racked up online certifications but that didn\u2019t help either. I even attended an online bootcamp, but still wasn\u2019t able to find a job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this frustration eventually brought me to do the one thing I swore I wasn\u2019t going to do, which was enroll in school again. But I\u2019m glad I did, because OSU Post-Bacc program, and the community that it provides, gave me the tools I needed to finally break into a career in tech as a Software Engineer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A love of tech from the start My first computer was a Macintosh SE II, I\u2019m not really sure why we had it at home at a time when personal computers weren\u2019t really all that prevalent, but we did. It didn\u2019t really do much either, but I loved playing on it; I always longed to… Continue reading What got me started with computers or software<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11530,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11530"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/cunnicor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Love of Coding and Technology Reignited <\/h4>\n\n\n\n