Sometimes I wonder about how the whole career choosing standard works. Generally, every 18-year-old entering college has to pick a major that will define so much about their career and their future and that\u2019s just normal! I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was 18. I\u2019m certainly not using anything specific to my first degree now. But when considering this program is meant for people changing careers, I really feel we have a leg up.
First of all, just generally being a bit older than most new graduates and interns gives us a big advantage. Along with the extra years we have comes more maturity and general life experience. Also, at least for me, I am so much more confident now than I was the first time around. I think that gives a huge boost when it comes to performing at an internship or even during interviews. In a lot of situations, I am more confident speaking my mind and explaining the things that I am working on or having trouble with. I don\u2019t think that would be the same for 19-year-old me.
In a similar vein, I think coming from a non-STEM background helps when it comes to this. My first degree was in Political Science, which the only skills I really keep from that are in reading, writing, and speaking. I feel that a lot of engineering students can easily skip over these skills as they aren\u2019t nearly as focused on in a STEM degree and I think that\u2019s an oversight. At my internship this summer with Amazon, my manager said multiple times that one of the areas that I really excelled in was communication. Without my first degree, I don\u2019t think I would have had the same experience, and I also honestly feel like getting that internship would have been a lot harder.
All this to say, even though a lot of us here might not be in a position again where we will be using the skills and information specific to our first degrees, there are probably still a lot of things that we can take from them and internalize to help us in this new career path. And if I had chosen Computer Science at 18, I don\u2019t know that I would be as successful as I am now.
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Sometimes I wonder about how the whole career choosing standard works. Generally, every 18-year-old entering college has to pick a major that will define so much about their career and their future and that\u2019s just normal! I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was 18. I\u2019m certainly not using anything specific […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12683,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12683"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/posanteb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}