When I first entered this program I had this grand idea where I would marry my expertise from my first degree (real estate/finance) with the post-bacc CS degree. I wanted to showcase all my years of experience as an analyst so badly on my resume that I sacrificed at least a quarter of the “one-page max” in lieu of putting more CS-related experience. I even marketed myself as having commercial real estate experience to show how suitable I was for the Capstone project I’m currently working on (which worked on a dataset related to real estate). Being on a project for a company in a software development capacity really opened my eyes to how wrong my approach was.
My Capstone project utilizes deep learning to analyze data sets as opposed to when I was an analyst and made conclusions based on interviews and simple trends in the market. My previous experience with spreadsheets, simple cleaning of data sets, and how properties with specific characteristics were researched was completely useless for machine learning–and by extension, computer science. The only way it would be useful would be if I was applying to work at a REIT and even then the position would go back to ‘analyst’. If I hadn’t taken this project with this company I would have still been completely clueless as to why I haven’t gotten any interviews even though my application was ‘gold’.
Combined experience in two fields would probably better suit a project manager than a software developer. If I want to succeed as a developer I need to let go of my past work and embrace the experience I gained in the post-bacc program; even though it’s just student work it’s more relevant than what I was putting on my resume before. Just briefly putting a previous position title and your first degree is enough–if the company is interested in it they’ll ask and you can expand on it. Leave the limited space on your application for computer science related experience.
