When I was in kindergarten, I wrote that my future career would be as a veterinarian. Given that my two bachelors have 0 involvement in biology, I’d say that plan didn’t pan out. However, I’m closer to finishing with a CS degree and looking at programmer roles. The interesting part is that I don’t know what I want to do. I’m a generalist, which recruiters have pointed out, is not good. Why? Probably because it makes their job more difficult. Where do you put someone who doesn’t have a definitive area of interest?
However, I love learning and trying new things. You see this in my resume. I have a 50/50 split in both academic and professional experience. Research experience with papers and experiments. Professional experience with a software engineering internship and QA full-time work. Rounding out my jobs are being an undergraduate learning assistant for(162, 225, 325) and customer service stints.
Great! But, what about your future?
🤷♀️*shrugs*
I still don’t know. I’ve been enjoying the graphics courses done by Prof. Bailey, so that’s a possibility. I’ll keep searching for jobs on my own leisure too. (The difficult part is that I’m locked in the Midwest region due to my significant other’s job.)
CodePath’s Android course is starting up in February, so I’ll use that as my last elective of sorts and continue learning Android programming. It looks like it has a new format too.
Before signing off, I should say that in the process of being a generalist, I have identified things I don’t and do enjoy.
Things I don’t like
- Data analysis
- Statistics 🔥(#RIP first degree)
- Machine Learning
- Cybersecurity
- Upper division mathematics
Things I do like
- Tutoring
- front-end (full stack?)
- documentation and QA
- Doing programming questions(even though I’ve been slacking)
- problem-solving
- Possibly academia, if I could find a research area I truly like
- video games 😅
I hope this blog post doesn’t come off as me complaining. Because it isn’t! It’s just another person in this big world being lost at what to do. I’m still grateful at the opportunities this program gave me. Now, the onus is on me to do the follow-up work.
