My background:

Growing up I was always set on a career in the medical field. My goal was to be in a profession that would allow me to help and have an impact on people. I'll be honest that medical school was not appealing to me due to the amount of years you have to put into schooling. Thus, I chose the pharmacy route, which led me to graduating with a biochemistry degree. While trying to pursue pharmacy school, I was working at a Virology clinical research lab as a researcher. Slowly, I began to notice that I enjoyed lab work more than pharmacy. I dropped my goals of being a pharmacist and have been working in the biotech field for four years. I've done my fair share of academia research, but now I'm in the biotech field. Working for a giant biopharmaceutical company doing cancer research couldn't be more fulfilling, but I'm ambitious and want to learn and build new skills outside my comfort zone.

Now I think it's time for me to take the bio out of biotech and go the tech route.

My time in the biotech field has exposed me to what coding can do. I've seen how other scientist can take some data, analyze it with code, and put it through software they designed. I've seen engineers build a request scheduling program for my team that helped with the productivity and organization of my team at work. I'm a curious human by nature, so the curiosity got the best of me. I want to be able to do that. I'm going to learn software engineering to gain these skills.

Creativity is limited by me.

I can start from scratch with software engineering and build it up to a complete product designed by me. Software engineering gives me a sense of ownership of my creations and also allows me to be creative. I can build applications that are useful to me and others. I always strive to feel fulfilled in my job, so I need to be in a career field that allows me to feel this way. I want to know that the work I'm doing has a positive effect on others. The technology we use has been developed by engineers and many websites, software, and programs have been beneficial to our everyday lives. I want to be a software engineer and build applications that can have a positive impact and benefit people. The programming field also has an abundance of jobs with different skill sets. There are programmers in all fields, like the biotech field and the business field. Being a coder doesn’t hold you in one field or one “profession.”

Time to hangup my lab coat and start coding!