back to school

A look back on the journey

This week is the first week of classes, and what very well may be my last first week of school ever. It’s weird to think that this may be the final chapter in my academic journey, especially since I had the same thought in 2018 when I graduated college the first time. To say that my career goals have changed in the last five years would be a huge understatement.

When I first entered college at the University of Washington in 2014, I had plans to major in Mechanical Engineering. I was good at math, really enjoyed designing and building things, and it was a stable career option. Makes sense, right? Well, in winter quarter of my Freshman year, I decided I wanted to join a club to let off some steam from my heavy course load, and signed on as an Assistant Lighting Designer for a student-ran production of Cabaret. Theatre had been my main extra-curricular in high school, and I missed the artistry and camaraderie. I’m a very artistic person, and I needed an escape from the rigid class structure that an engineering degree requires. Fast forward to the end of my Freshman year, and suddenly I was majoring in Drama with a focus in Lighting Design. A bit of a shift, to say the least. Lighting Design was my passion, and I decided that I owed it to myself to at least try to carve out a place for myself in the entertainment industry.

Over the next four years, I threw myself into every opportunity possible. Not only was I the lead lighting designer on at least three shows per year, but I became the Technical Director for the Undergraduate Theater Society, a lighting tech for UW’s School of Drama, a technical improvisor for Jet City Improv, and briefly a second assistant at the 5th Avenue Theater. I was invited to take graduate level lighting design courses, and to assist graduate students on their capstone projects. I did everything I could to build my portfolio and become a respected name in the Seattle theatre community. Within four years, I was credited in over 45 productions in the Seattle area. But it all came at a cost.

During these years, I was lucky if I was able to get four hours of sleep a night. I had classes starting at 8am and production meetings that more often than not went past midnight. My grades were barely adequate, and I had almost no time to work my actual paying job (did I mention I was “paid in experience” for a majority of these productions?), so I was constantly struggling financially. I felt like I was constantly two steps behind all of my responsibilities, and I never had any time to invest in myself. My mental health was in shambles, so when graduation came along, I decided to take a year off from doing Lighting Design full time so I could recover.

After graduation, I took the first job I was offered, which happened to be an Office Assistant position at an AR/VR startup incubator associated with UW. I was a little nervous about such a major industry shift, but I thought it would give me an opportunity to earn some money and still be surrounded by generally artistic people. And ya know what? I loved it. I absolutely fell in love with the environment, I would volunteer to be a “rubber duck” for developers to explain their problems to, and I voraciously threw myself into all of the new technology around me. My personal favorite was the week where my job was the learn everything there was to learn about the Magic Leap, which had been gifted to the incubator for our developers to test. I was beginning to think that maybe I should make this industry shift permanent, but I had spent so many years building myself up as a Lighting Designer, and I couldn’t just let that go.

And then COVID.

Through a series of unfortunate but ultimately timely events, I had made the decision to leave Seattle and move back to Vancouver, WA temporarily in early 2020. Well, we all know what happened in March of 2020. With everything on lockdown, non-essential services such as live performance were put so far on the back burner that they weren’t even on the stove anymore. People I knew who had been working steadily in the theatre scene for 20+ years suddenly couldn’t find work. It was becoming increasingly clear that if I really wanted to break into the professional theatre industry, I would have to wait 5+ years for the market to reemerge, and well… I was tired of being broke. So, on a whim, I enrolled myself in some Computer Science classes at Portland Community College, and ya know what? I fell in love again. Writing code felt as natural as a first language to me, and I was constantly fascinated every single topic we were taught (including pointers in C++! I mean c’mon, who likes pointers??). I was finally where I was supposed to be.

And here we are, three years later, and I’m only a few short months away from graduating with a second bachelor’s degree. The road to get here was long, exhausting, heartbreaking, and beautiful. I’m so excited to be in this next phase of my life. Obviously it’s hard to capture all of the nuance of such a crazy life change in one blog post (sorry for how long this ended up being!), but ultimately I’m happy with all of my experiences, and I can’t wait to bring them all with my into my new career.

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