Or “KP’s CP Journey” for short.

I honestly never thought I’d be here right now. And I mean that in many ways. Heartwarmingly, I’m a child of immigrants and the first in my family to attend college. Never did I think I’d have one college degree, let alone be on the verge of receiving my second. On the sadder side, I thought getting one degree would be enough. But one pandemic, a layoff, and two years of unemployment later, here I am.

I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Technology Management. Upon graduating, I moved to Seattle, Washington to begin my new life as a full-time design engineer at an aviation company. The team I joined was very disorganized and operated via spreadsheets and manual data-entry. This became such an organizational nightmare that it impeded the actual designing that needed to take place. That’s where I stepped in.

As the most junior member of the team by far and the only one familiar with programming (I took the one mandatory computer science course in my curriculum), I was tasked with writing scripts to automate processes, clean up the team’s data, and power dashboards. I learned new technologies and made a new best friend (Stack Overflow). I created a role for myself on this team where I learned a plethora about computer science and had an immense impact on the program. Although I was barely using any of my mechanical engineering skills and had done zero design work which was what I was hired to do, I was still very much enjoying learning about and doing this work. Then 2020 happened.

As COVID took off, aviation crashed. Layoffs were imminent, but I was reassured by my manager that since I hadn’t even been at the company for a year, I wasn’t eligible for the chopping block. Oh was she wrong. My last day was two weeks after my one year anniversary. Needless to say, I had an existential crisis of sorts. But after doing some soul searching, I came to terms with the fact that that’s just life and there’s nothing I could have done about it. The priority now was getting my career back on track. With only one year of work under my belt in an industry that was going to be a dumpster fire for the foreseeable future, I was in a tough position. I was a mechanical engineer by education but had done very little mechanical engineering in the past year. However, my one year of programming wasn’t enough for me to break into tech in such a competitive market like Seattle. Since I was already graduated for a year, I wasn’t eligible for entry-level positions either.

Luckily, my friend had heard of this Post-Baccalaureate Computer Science program offered by Oregon State. With very little other options and a genuine interest in computer science, I applied on a whim and was accepted.

The next year and a half was a whirlwind of late nights, banging my head on keyboards, segmentation faults, data structures and algorithms, building web apps, bombing technical interviews, feeling like an imposter, interning at a big tech company, and signing a full-time offer for after graduation. When I look back on who and where I was almost two years ago, I can’t help but chuckle. As a fresh college graduate with a full-time engineering job, I really thought that was it. I really thought that life was going to be relatively smooth sailing from there on out. I had plans, big plans for my mechanical engineering career and a timeline to match. I felt on top of the world, but life humbled me very quickly. This is not a lesson I’m going to forget any time soon.

I don’t consider myself a religious person by any means, but I now have a favorite saying that’s something similar to this:

You know how you make God laugh?

You tell him your plans.

So as I begin my final quarter of this program and this capstone project, all that’s left to say is bring it on!