Why did I decide to study Software Engineering?
Since 2018 I’ve set intentions for my year ahead. My intentions are usually summed up in one word that turns into my mantra for the year. In 2018 it was “Confidence” and I spent the year reminding myself to be confident. It is accurate to say I lived my life apologetically beforehand. I had mistakenly taught myself that to be polite was to apologize for everything. I said “sorry” so often it became a filler in the vein of “um” or “like”. I had always been ambitious and confident, but I would downplay my accomplishments when they brought me attention that made me feel uncomfortable. This looked like me responding to compliments with things like “Oh, anyone can do it” and “Well, you did a ton of the work” even though that wasn’t true. I would regretfully ask for help, or make a statement followed by some sort of apology, all in an effort not to ruffle any feathers. It felt like walking on eggshells. Once I decided that I hated living this way the change happened quickly, and the feeling that I could do anything grew stronger.
What to do was the next question, and so in 2019 I set a reading goal. I planned to read one book per week in order to wake up my brain and do research on a career path. Now that I was a mother, I did not have all the time in the world to explore interests. My time was incredibly precious. I needed to focus my energy on one thing, and it needed to be something that gave me purpose to keep me motivated. Before this goal, though I saw myself as a reader because I had always read for fun in the past, I had fallen out of this habit like you fall off a cliff. After making it through the day with a 2 year old and a newborn, I poured myself into bed and turned on reality tv shows. Zoning out in front of a tv show felt like butter on my brain and it served a purpose for that time in my life. However, by 2019 my kids were 3.5 and 1.5 years old and I was ready to challenge myself again. The first 12 weeks I read one book per week. I chose both fiction and non-fiction. By the end of the year I finished with an average of one book for every 2.5 weeks and didn’t beat myself up about not reaching the initial goal. I spent the year mindfully asking myself what my true strengths were and ignored my weaknesses. In the past I leaned toward creative interests thinking I was more creative, but it took me until the age of 32 and a year of building confidence to see that those were not where my strengths lie. Instead I see now, as is evident in the way I run my house as the Home Operations Officer, that I am clean, techincal, precise, highly-efficient and organized. I don’t reinvent the wheel but I do make it better and more efficient, and then I make it better and more efficient again. It was with this realization that I looked into technical careers and decided to do some free coding courses to see if I would enjoy programming. I can’t get enough! I find that I have to tear myself away, and solving a problem feels incredible! I love that you start with something broken and get to fix it, and then make it more efficient and more abstract. The idea that code can be beautiful…yes!
Essentially, the reason I want to code is because I want to be a part of fixing the bugs in our system. It all comes down to the great amount of inequality in our society and the need for an upgrade. No matter what issue I feel strongly about, I had to ask myself where I could be most useful. I see that the people writing the code for our society are in Government, Finance and Technology. Technology suits my personality best, and it allows me the opportunity to help other people in a myriad of ways. I would really like to help other women especially.
I’ll try to be brief on this next topic but I could go on forever. After being a stay at home mother, I felt disempowered as a woman. For the first time in my life I felt the inequality between the sexes. Watching my husband continue his self-progression while mine hit the wall was incredibly eye-opening. I ruminated on questions about what it meant to be a woman : Why do we carry the burden of unpaid work across the globe? Why isn’t it recognized as work at all unless it’s paid work? This is a complex topic and if you haven’t read anything about it I encourage you to do so. Here’s a link to an article that will give you some insight but I highly recommend Melinda Gates’ book “The Moment of Lift”. Melinda so clearly communicates what I had been working to clarify in my head, and much of it is what motivates me to code solutions not just for women but for any marginalized groups who also feel that something isn’t working for them.
No group alone can code solutions for problems that they aren’t even aware of, and further that they feel no urgency for. We need more of all the underrepresented groups in government, finance and tech. I would love to be apart of a team working together to build solutions for our bigger problems.