Wow, I can’t believe this is happening! I am going to graduate this winter crosses fingers. But seriously, it’s been quite a road. A 15-course road. And, I have a job offer waiting for me upon graduating.
I never imagined I would go into a career as a software engineer. In college, I studied philosophy and then went into a teaching/tutoring gig for a bit, then into healthcare project management and quality improvement.
For a long time, I told myself a story. That story was that you’re not good at math, and therefore you wouldn’t be good at engineering. Your brain doesn’t work that way. The highest math I took was statistics in college, and I thought I took the ‘easy way out. However, I got the programming ‘bug’ when I took Havard’s CS50 and realized how fascinating programming was. I can build stuff from my imagination with nothing else but a computer in front of me.
I found out about OSU through Reddit. However, I didn’t have the math requirement set out. I then enrolled in precalculus. I realized that I sucked at math because I was missing a foundational concept that changed my approach to math from a rule-based process to a concept-based process. Things started clicking. I then took calculus and passed with a good grade. Hazaa! I was changing my story.
I was intimidated by taking the two challenging courses 162 and 255. Spent many nights late at night doing homework, turning down social events, turning down movie night. But it was worth it. I got As in both courses! Yozaa! Now the A itself isn’t intrinsically worth something. It was the fact that I was changing my story.
It was a story of telling myself, “You can’t do this because of fact a, b, and c.” And after almost completing the OSU CS curriculum, successfully completing an internship, and now being given a job offer, my story is now that of telling myself, “You can do this; you only have to put in the work”. So it is now a story of change and possibility — as corny as that sounds. But… I’m okay with being a bit corny, haha. I feel happy and content with what’s happening.
