{"id":36,"date":"2022-05-06T06:57:28","date_gmt":"2022-05-06T06:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/?p=36"},"modified":"2022-05-06T06:57:28","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T06:57:28","slug":"one-month-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/2022\/05\/06\/one-month-left\/","title":{"rendered":"One Month Left"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I can&#8217;t believe we&#8217;re already halfway through the quarter. It&#8217;s flying by! And as much as I truly cannot wait for this program to be over (I&#8217;m ready to have my free time back), a small part of me is going to miss it. This program has given me a bit of a purpose over the last two years. It&#8217;s remained constant throughout a lot of change. If there was ever a time where I felt overwhelmed by other things going on in my life, I could always tell myself, for better or for worse, to forget everything else and go do some homework. It&#8217;s forced me to sit down and learn things I probably would never have learned otherwise. It&#8217;s pushed me way out of my comfort zone. It&#8217;s humbled me while simultaneously given me confidence. It&#8217;s stressed me out while simultaneously given me peace, knowing I was on the right track to achieving my goals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Through a lot of this program, I&#8217;ve had anxiety that I wasn&#8217;t good enough. I was worried that I&#8217;d never get a software job and therefore never live the life I wanted to live. I put a LOT of pressure on myself to get everything right. Looking back, I definitely didn&#8217;t need to put that much pressure on myself the whole time. It led to a whole lot of unnecessary fear and panic. But now, it&#8217;s kind of funny to reflect back on the various topics that at one time, seemed super scary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h6 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>March 2020 \/\/ Applying to OSU<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>I heard someone say they &#8220;wrote an API&#8221;. I had just recently learned <em>what<\/em> an API was. I had to know how to WRITE one?! Oh no.<\/li><li>Linked lists, because I saw a Glassdoor interview question about linked lists, and I thought they were this big scary elusive thing that would plague me for years. <\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h6 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>July 2020 \/\/ First quarter<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>C. Yes, the programming language, C. I wanted to learn it because there were jobs available in it at my current company. C scared the crap out of me, and I ended up giving up.<\/li><li>Mergesort. Again, I saw someone mention this on Glassdoor, and panicked because I didn&#8217;t know what it was. Maybe I should have spent less time panicking on Glassdoor.<\/li><li>The spread operator in JavaScript. I had no idea what it did, or why it looked so weird. Instead of looking it up, I psyched myself out and thought it&#8217;d be too complicated for me to understand, so I just tried to avoid and ignore it.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h6 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>December 2020 \/\/ second quarter<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Acquiring the skills needed for an entry-level software job. I really wanted to have the skills required and be ready to interview by summer of 2021. I annoyed the crap out of my software engineer boyfriend by asking him almost every day if he thought I would be able to get a job the following summer. I would follow up my questions with justifications like, &#8220;I&#8217;m learning *insert topic here* at school right now!&#8221; in which I was mostly just trying to convince myself that I&#8217;d be ready. I&#8217;m pretty sure his answer was always that I was doing great and shouldn&#8217;t have any trouble finding a job. That would appease me for a day or two, and then I&#8217;d go right back to worrying that I wouldn&#8217;t be able to find a job.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h6 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>February 2021 \/\/ third quarter<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Buzzwords. Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, RESTful APIs, Back-end, Front-end, Full-stack, React, Redux&#8230; I had finally found an internal opportunity at work, and was trying to get exposure to as many of these buzzwords as possible so that I could throw them on my resume and try to make myself sound super intelligent and skilled. (Although, just because someone on your team mentions Kubernetes once in a meeting, doesn&#8217;t mean you can list it as a skill on LinkedIn.)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>MAY 2021 \/\/ FOURTH QUARTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Leetcode. Man, I really worked myself up over Leetcode. I wanted to spend the entire summer Leetcoding so I could feel like there was a 0% chance of messing up any interviews in the fall. So I did that. I really wanted to work at Microsoft. I pretty much joined this program because I wanted to work at Microsoft. I had deemed Microsoft the holy grail of companies. (Spoiler alert &#8211; I don&#8217;t work at Microsoft, and l&#8217;m still very happy). So I spent my entire summer freaking out over Microsoft Leetcode questions. <\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEPTEMBER 2021 \/\/ SIXTH QUARTER, APPLYING FOR JOBS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Picking the best job! In a surprising turn of events, my anxiety had driven me to overachieve and I received not just one job offer, but 4! One recruiter even said my interview performance was one of the strongest for SWE I candidates they&#8217;d ever seen. I then had to pick. This was a good problem to have! And though it felt scary to choose at the time, there really wasn&#8217;t a wrong choice.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>After I got several job offers, I realized that I truly <em>was <\/em>good enough. And not just was I good enough because the job offers had validated me, but I was good enough this whole time! I realized how capable I was. And once I gained a little more confidence and trust in myself, software stopped seeming so scary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the record&#8230; I now know how to write APIs, and I actually find it fun. Linked lists only took about 30 minutes to learn. C wasn&#8217;t too hard to pick up. I&#8217;m a big fan of the spread operator in JavaScript. And if anyone asks me an interview question about Mergesort, they&#8217;re insane, and I probably don&#8217;t want to work there anyway. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t believe we&#8217;re already halfway through the quarter. It&#8217;s flying by! And as much as I truly cannot wait for this program to be over (I&#8217;m ready to have my free time back), a small part of me is going to miss it. This program has given me a bit of a purpose over [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/endofmybreakingintotechera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}