It’s pretty crazy to think that I am now coming to the end of a journey that changed my life. I entered this program with essentially zero coding experience and now I am taking my last class of the program. I started with such little technical knowledge and now just over two years later I have completed a software development internship and started a full-time job as a software engineer.

I originally graduated college with a degree in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. I then proceeded to work in finance for the following three years after my graduation. While I enjoyed working in finance, I wanted a little bit more as it got a little but stale. A couple of my friends from college had been working as software engineers and they showed me what they worked on. This piqued my interest as they both worked on teams that were fairly involved in building new features for their companies. I thought that it was super cool that they were able to build stuff, which led me to take a really basic online course in HTML and CSS. I built a really simple web page and felt so proud that I was able to build something that looked so aesthetically pleasing from just some words on a page. Shortly after I enrolled in OSU because I felt getting the fundamentals for programming was critical to switch careers and I thought the structed environment of university classes would be the best way for me to learn.

I have learned so much since starting the program. Like I said earlier I didn’t really come in with any knowledge at all. Now this new knowledge has really changed my life. Even beyond the career change I have a much more deep understanding of how computers, the internet, and electronics work. I also have made use of automation in python in a variety of different ways to make my life easier. I look forward to this quarter to end my time at OSU well. I want to make a nice portfolio piece using everything that I have learned so far. I think that would be a good reflection of just how much I have learned.

Until next time

Nathan Ramos