My story on what lead me to become a software engineer is not the most usual path. I am relatively new to tech and software engineering. In college, my goal was originally to work in medicine or become a professional golfer. However, fate seems to make me befriend a lot of individuals pursuing tech, which in turn made me start a career trajectory change towards it. So far I have absolutely no regrets about this career change since I am love everything about it so far!
I remember in the beginning, I did a lot of self-learning first before I started taking classes so that I could get the feel of whether or not I would like it and if it was even doable. Since my roommate was a software engineer while I was in college, I remember he would help me in the night while I began my self-learning journey. That me a great jumpstart in the software engineering world, which led me to start taking classes at my former university, and then OSU.
After a couple of months of self-learning and beginning an introduction CS class at UCLA, I decided to enroll myself in a hackathon, which was very daunting to me at the time. One project I worked on was an educational React web app developed at LA Hacks 2021 as a game to help educate young students about the diverse range of situational hardships they may face during the pandemic, which focused a lot on working together as a team, meeting a strict deadline, and Object-Oriented fundamentals. Since C++ and Python were the first two languages I learned in college, I also have good backend knowledge having worked in many C++/Python projects in my data structures, computer architecture, and operating system courses in college.
After taking more computer science classes at UCLA and OSU, I was later offered an internship at Digital Dynamics, where we focus on their embedded device called the Fusion.IO controller, so I get a lot of exposure to C in that job while learning the common workflow of a company by working under very experienced embedded software engineers.
After that, I was offered another internship at Dolby, which I am still currently a part of today. My current team that works on Dolby Vision, which is the world-leading HDR technology featured in the newest televisions in the world!
Overall, it has been an amazing ride so far and I have been loving every part of it. I couldn’t imagine what I would be doing today if I did not decide to make this sudden career change!
