When I started my first job at an investment bank in South Korea, the advanced technical tool that I knew how to use was Microsoft Excel. You can imagine how technically savvy I was at that point. I was a new hire straight from undergraduate studies in mathematics and economics. Excited about becoming a trader, I was ready to tackle any challenges that came my way. With a turn of events from the power that be, a few of my analyst classmates somehow ended up in a rotation program in financial engineering. None of us had Ph. D’s in a STEM field. We all wanted to be traders. As a result, being a quant was not on our list of things to do.

Little did we know that we would be asked to make code in VBA and test code written in Python, C++, and Java. You can imagine how much I struggled. It was like throwing someone who does not know how to swim into shark-infested waters. Maybe it was the intention of the leaders to make one of us cracked and quit. However, instead of hating having to understand code, I began to respect the developers who worked beside me. I wanted to learn more from my peers and them.

Besides the mathematical wizards with PhDs, the talented developers on the team, who translated the theoretical financial derivative models into readable lines of a program, could sift through hundreds and maybe thousands of lines of code and produce working tools and models within a few days. It was an inspiring sight to see. Instead of being distraught and discouraged at what I had to learn, I wanted to learn more.

Just so I could begin to understand code quickly, I went through Freecodecamp, Codecademy, Dataquest, Datacamp, and many Udemy courses. However, like many of my peers in Oregon State University’s Post-Bachelors program, self-learning could only take me so far. I knew that I lacked the fundamental building blocks in computer science. I had no idea what memory management was, nor did I understand what an algorithm did. Becoming a software engineer on my own was not only challenging but time-consuming. It was only years after this experience in financial engineering that I found OSU’s post-bachelor degree program in computer science. It was a long road of learning and working full-time, but that spark that I obtained working in financial engineering never faded.

It was the best experience that I could have had. I learned to appreciate developers by briefly working next to them. Though I ended up being in a different department, as did my colleagues, the months I spent with quants were invaluable. If I hadn’t been oddly transferred to financial engineering, I wouldn’t have been here writing this blog post on my final course in the program. At some point in the future, I probably would have desired to become a software engineer regardless of what work experience I had, but that timing would most likely have come later rather than sooner. I always thought being a software engineer was a farfetched idea that was too technical. Yet, here I am. I went from being an economics and mathematics student who never touched code to a student working on a capstone project for his computer science degree.

I’m sure many or all of you can relate to the journey of enrolling at OSU and finally being on the last course in the program. It has been a long journey that took years to get here. Here are the words I have for you all. “It is only the beginning of our journey!”