January 29, 2016
When I graduated from UCSC in 2013, I told everyone that would listen to me that I was never going back to school. Two years later, I decided that I needed to do something to change where my life was headed. While I loved (and perhaps was addicted to) research, I had significant reservations about the academic lifestyle that I really could not get over. However, doing all the things that would facilitate a career change was really daunting to me. In my mind, I believed it would take me about six months of seriously motivated part-time studying before I could make the jump into the real world.
2015 was not a great a year for me, particularly on the self-motivation front. The free and near-free learn-to-program space right now is seriously saturated, and being an outsider, it was hard to differentiate decent content from great content. I basically fell into the paralysis-by-analysis hole; I was trying to "optimize" my learning when I probably should have just chosen one thing and went with it.
Struggling by one's self is not particularly encouraging, and at the same time, I kept saying to myself that I should be able to do things by myself. On one particularly miserable day in the summer, it clicked in my head that I was not in any way re-inventing the wheel and there was likely a solution to my learning/motivation problem. I had heard of bootcamps, particularly in the context of data science, and, via Galvanize and gSchool (sorry Jeff!), ended up finding at Turing. I fought with the "do I really need more school" issue, and the "should I pay a lot of money versus pushing forward with free options" issue. I thought about the non-existent progress I had made in six months, and got over myself (and that fancy piece of paper on my wall) and decided that I could not go another six months wallowing in despair.
I am now 25% through the Turing program, and I would say that I am not regretting my decision to return to "school." The people, students, staff and visitors, at Turing really impress me on a daily basis. Everyone is consistently working on improving themselves and the level of self-empowerment is quite high. What is the most encouraging is how willing people are to help when support is needed.
I am struggling with pushing my learning to another level right now, but I know that I will get shoved out of my comfort zone soon enough. I mean, I'm writing a blog post and tweeting now! There are definitely a ton of projects in the pipeline, and I feel so excited for all the things that I will do over the next few months.