As I enter what will be my last term finishing up my second undergraduate degree at OSU, the first thought in my head is “how am I going to get through this?” We have to pick a project, make groups, and deliver a finished project in just 10 weeks. And then it occurs to me that 2023 marks 12 years since the first time I stood on the very edge of receiving a college diploma.
And things couldn’t be more different.
I was born and grew up in Corvallis Oregon, back before Portlandia was a show, before we had a Winco or Home Depot, and before I had any idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.
My first stint through college was a path of least resistance. I remember in high school a motivational speaker coming to our school and proclaiming at an assembly in front of the entire student body “There are those people who are lucky in this world to be blessed with the abilities of a pro athlete or a prodigy musician. For all of the rest of us, there’s college”. I have never to this day heard a less motivational speech in my life.
I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born relatively poor, and my father was hospitalized for a major knee injury the year I was born. However that was also the year he went from moving furniture to software engineering as a profession, and a lot of things dramatically improved because of it. At 5 years old in 1993, I was sitting at a very expensive and rather primitive desktop computer making tiny little programs on QBASIC in Windows 3.2. I had all kinds of reasons to grow up to be a software engineer. But by the time college came around, having already been through a few programming classes, I wanted to see what else there was, if I could do something different than my dad and brother did, and if I could make a different life from the obvious one in front of me. And for the next decade or so I did.
In my first foray through college, I spent the first two years with an undeclared major. I went to parties, I dabbled in a bunch of different classes, and I worked part time at the alumni center. A trip to Japan with my brother and his wife pushed me to start taking Japanese as a minor, and I ultimately went to Japan for a study abroad program in my last year at OSU. I cannot describe what its like to have lived in Corvallis, Oregon your whole life for 22 years, and to suddenly move to Tokyo, Japan, the largest populated city in the world. The food, the people, the language the culture, all of it just opened the world up for me. Unfortunately, that happened to be the year of the massive Sendai earthquake that ravaged the country and lead to a hasty evacuation for myself back to the US.
I landed back in Portland waiting on the term to end as I suddenly had no school, no diploma (yet), and no job or prospects. A friend I met in Japan and I went to a bar and over a few beers I was convinced to take his advice and travel and work in a few national parks across the US. After a brief period of joblessness I managed to spend a few incredible seasons working at Glacier National Park in Montana and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Traveling was wonderful but tiring and after my second park job I tried to settle down into a real job for a while. I found temp work in a warehouse through family and eventually went to work as an employee assembling printers for a small tech company. Time moved on and I started to stagnate. I wasn’t really making very much money and I wasn’t seeing much future simply assembling things on the line in a warehouse. When a merger came through the company I jumped from assembly to research and development and started looking back at programming again on the side. It had been many years since I had touched it and I had to start over again. A friend sent me a link to a 90% sale on a web development course online, and $10 later I was back to making javascript games in the browser. Back at work, I started to notice a lot of repetitive and time consuming tasks that I new I could automate with programming. At first it was a way to keep myself from getting bored and to learn some basic Python scripting along with web development. But when I was given a folder full of files to update that normally took days worth of time for data entry workers to do and I ran a script to do it in less than 5 seconds, my manager took notice. One conversation later and I was approved to go back to school and begin working towards a career in software development.
So what has changed from my early 20s to my early 30s? Well, a lot. The first time I went through college, I went because I didn’t know what else to do. I was trying to see what the world had to offer, what was possible. In my 20s I wasn’t worried about buying a house or paying a mortgage, I was worried about how to travel to places I couldn’t afford to go. The second time through college I had a plan. I wasn’t there to go to parties, to meet new people, to go to football games, or to explore the world. I went this time to get a career. And as of March of 2022, I started my new role at my company as a software developer, so in that sense I’ve already accomplished my goal. But for all the difficulties and spent time it took me to get here, I feel like its given me a unique perspective I would not have had if I simply stayed in Corvallis and took the obvious road from the get go. If there is anything I could offer as a life lesson or advice I’ve gained from all this, its that you never know what’s out there or what’s possible until you try. Sometimes figuring out what you want to do is really about marking things off the list. There are endless possibilities both in life and in programming. The only way to get to a solution that works is to try take the first step, and to see where it leads.
