When I started this program, I had a very vague idea of what I wanted out of it: namely, a new job as a software developer, but I didn’t really care much in what discipline or language or field it was in. It just didn’t matter all that much to me at the time. I knew that I liked that feeling when the code clicks into place and the program runs. It was like magic–it still is to me. I knew, probably like a lot of others in the CS post-bacc program that I wasn’t happy in my current job, which was beginning to feel positively Sisyphean to me, and I knew that I didn’t want to keep doing it forever, never mind for another couple of years. And I knew that it was time for a change.
My dad, whenever he was asked about his job (retail pharmacist), he would say that “A job is a solution to a problem” and that he liked solving problems for people. Then he would ask me what problem I wanted to solve when I went out in the world to work. And I never really had a good answer for him.
Like a lot of the little nuggets of wisdom from my dad, that phrase has always stuck with me and I’ve spent my whole working life with it echoing around in my head. It’s made me question what the problem I was solving was and was it something really worth solving. I think this echo is what always leads me to looks for extra things to do in my job–not necessarily for accolades, but just because I’m bored and looking for something new or interesting. Looking back at my childhood, I can see the same sort of restlessness in my dad, the never being satisfied with the work that they’re doing, that I see in myself now.
When you think of the pharmacist who works in your local CVS or Walgreens or wherever, you probably think that what they mostly do is put pills in bottles and talk to people about the medication they’re taking. And for the vast majority of pharmacists, that’s probably a pretty fair summation of what they do for the vast majority of their working time.
My dad was never content with that sort of rote, machine-like work of filling prescriptions, he was always looking for something else, some sort of cure-all or some new therapy. One year he told just about every customer about Magnesium supplements and how they could help you with anything from constipation to insomnia. Another year, he might be talking your ear off about hydrogen fuel cells. The next he would be talking about probiotic supplements and how they affected your mood and other aspects of your health. And these topics weren’t random, per se. These were things that he’d heard about on the radio on his drive into work. Things that he’d found interesting and had gotten his teeth sunk into and started chewing on; making connections and thinking about.
As I’ve catapulted myself through this computer science program, I’ve also been making connections and chewing on problems. Always looking for something extra like I’ve always done in my job. Restless, really. And in capstone, the ultimate–in the sense of being the last, not the best–class of the program, I think I’ve finally found something interesting that could be a problem I’d like to try solving for many years to come: machine learning.
At this point, it’s hard to say why machine learning has captured my attention, but it feels like something has clicked in a way that nothing else in the program has for me until now. It’s something exciting and challenging, so maybe it’s just difficult and somewhat mysterious and that’s the whole draw to me. Maybe it’s because I can finally put linear algebra to use after learning it almost 15 years ago. It’s early days coming to grips with the material for my team’s bitcoin trading bot project, so maybe I can nail down this feeling in the next 8 weeks and say what it is that’s so interesting about the subject. Or maybe this is just the new obsession for me and next year there will be something else to occupy my attention. Who’s to say right now?
But I do know that when I fill out an application now, or write a cover letter trying to convince this person why I’m a good candidate or why I’m a good fit, I finally feel like I can actually be excited and write something genuine about the job, which is something that I haven’t felt able to do before now.
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