Taking a few classes and learning a bit about computer science is nice to have. But in order to succeed in my new career path, I knew that I had to get some sort of validation. For me, a little validation, like getting paid to code, should be enough reason to believe that I have officially made the transition to a new career. During my first quarter of the OSU program, I knew that I had to gain as much outside experience, in form of internships, as possible. There was no way that projects alone would be sufficient post BS when applying to jobs. The way I saw it was that I needed to also get internship experience in order to further my candidacy for after school. Not going to lie, I was not ready for the first rounds of interviews that I needed to go through in order to prove that I was going to be a good fit for internships. I first applied to Amazon in 2019, in the first quarter of school. Little did I know that besides knowing how to code in Python, it was also very important to get a grasp on different sorts of algorithms and data structures. Not having that under my belt at the time, made me fail the interview/coding assessment. Knowing that I lost my window for internship applications for the summer of 2020, I knew that I had a whole year to prepare even more. In fall of 2020, I was applying like crazy to try and get an internship before my program ended. This meant that I had to get an opportunity and nothing less. With some luck, I was able to pass the interview and received an offer to intern for AWS during the summer of 2021! I would say that this step made me become more confident in my dedication to this OSU program and career change. At first I couldn’t believe that I would be able to thrive in the tech industry, but after going through the internship, I can safely say that anyone, including myself, is able to thrive. I got to know a bunch of people during my internship. The most interesting part about getting to know all these different people, was to get to know how some of them started in the tech industry. A bunch of them had double degrees like myself and decided sometime in their past careers that a change must be done. This reassured me that changing careers paths is something that is normal when the need presents it self. During my internship, I got to onboarding my team onto an internal service. This service was necessary because while using it, I was able to wrap existing operational tools into safe and easier to execute CLI commands. I got to work with a lot of AWS services via API calls. This experience solidified what is expected of Software engineers in the real world. After summer of 2021, when my internship ended, I can safely say that I feel less like an imposter and more like an entry level SDE. Currently I have started applying to companies in hopes to get a job before I end the program. After the internship, I felt like I needed to get a job just because of the awesome experience that I had at AWS. I wanted to continue feeling awesome about my job. So far there are a few leads but nothing past the dreaded 3 rounds of interviewing. Fingers crossed!
