Both of my parents are programmers. My brother went to grad school for software engineering. Why am I, a medical assistant 5+ years out of her Biological Engineering major, just now going into a field that clearly runs in the family?
Priorities shift.
Growing up, my priority was to be my own person, so I wrote off coding as an interest pretty quickly. Going into college, that priority became having a “cool” major. I wanted to be “that girl in engineering. whoa.” After taking a few semesters worth of classes, I quickly found out this particular branch of engineering did not interest me. Shortly before graduating, my new priority was to find a career that directly helped people. The most direct and immediate way I could think of achieving this was to become a medical assistant, an entry level job into healthcare. And for a while, this was enough for me.
Then I got married. To a software engineer.
Hearing someone talk about their work (sometimes exasperately, mostly earnestly) e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y changes a girl. Especially when she has no idea what they are talking about. My husband slowly introduced me to basic coding concepts through the natural progression of our conversations (“huh?” “how can code be ‘elegant’?”) which actually sparked an active interest in…writing more elegant code than my husband (we have a competitive relationship.) However, I didn’t seriously consider a career in coding until the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Hours were reduced for the particular doctor’s office where I was working and my husband started working from home. The fact that his job had the flexibility to contribute to society remotely was highly appealing to me. I would be going back to my engineering roots. Careers in software engineering are so diverse and are only becoming more diverse; I would still be paving my own way. Interestingly enough, it checked all my previous priorities. This is when software engineering became a real option for me and I’m excited to see where it takes me.