On Tuesday, November 14, 2017, I quit my comfy fifty-two thousand dollar a year job as an environmental engineer to learn to code at Flatiron School. Flatiron is an intensive coding ‘bootcamp’ with a money back guarantee. I’m currently completing the Online Full Stack Web Developer program with scholarship, full time. I code all day, Mon-Fri, and have picked up a restaurant job for some pocket cash. By the time I ‘graduate’ in 4 to 6 months, I will be qualified to work as a Junior Web Developer and my savings account will be completely drained. Although this was a huge leap of faith, I decided I needed to invest in myself, and my happiness. For the next year or so of my life, I will be catapulting myself into the tech world and sharing my journey with you. This is my story:
Why I left:
I graduated from Ohio State University in 2016 with a BS in Environmental Engineering. I’ll readily admit to being completely misguided when I chose that degree at Ohio State. Turns out, my idea of the degree was more along the lines of humanitarian engineering. Anyways, upon my acceptance in the program I realized quickly what environmental engineers concern themselves with; water quality, treatment, distribution, and treatment facility design. But, alas, I was still misguided as to what people in my field do.
Flash forward to June 2016. I have my $100,000-dollar piece of paper (my degree) and a job as an engineer for a small consulting firm in Cincinnati. Consulting was the industry I had quietly worshipped in school. Before this job, I had completed a few different internships; one as an engineer in a manufacturing facility, another in a corporate setting for a chemical company. This new job, in consulting, was going to be the real deal. No more ISO audits, no more regulatory standards, no more dreadfully insignificant universal waste programs (for office materials like batteries and light bulbs) to concern myself with. Nope,as a consultant, I’d be working with a variety of clients, helping them reach their environmental goals or helping them go above and beyond the bare minimum so they could become environmental leaders in their industry, or helping them happily embrace their responsibility to the environment with innovate solutions and research.
But for the following 18 months, myself, and everyone I worked with, including the clients, only concerned themselves with essentially one question:
What is the least amount of money and least amount of effort required to follow the environmental regulations?
Mind you, most of the environmental regulations in place today were written almost 30 years ago, and they have only changed marginally since. Our clients, more specifically, were asking for us to figure out how they can follow the rule exactly, without doing a drop more or a drop less. How we would do this was almost so obvious, I don’t want to say it: —- We did exactly what the regulations required, step by step, detail by detail, while interpreting the law to it’s minimal, least involved translation.
That is why I quit environmental engineering.
There is only one ‘right’ answer for environmental engineers and that can really stunt your engagement, problem solving skills, and creativity. All our clients cared about in the end, was the bottom line. What is the cheapest way to deal with regulations regarding our facilities and have the EPA leave us alone? I was incredibly disenchanted. On a professional level, I became unengaged and unmotivated. I did not find my work to be meaningful. Please note that these thoughts are a result of my own personal experiences. I tried to find other aspects of my work to highlight and hold onto, to find meaningful, but the averseness I’ve just described was impossible to ignore.
How and why I picked Web Development:
I realized I was unhappy in my field in January 2017. So how and why did I decide to learn to code? Well after completing some online classes in data science, interviewing professionals in marketing analytics, months of job searching and a class at Cincinnati State, I had finally found something that had stuck. I was certain I would like web development. I had learned MatLab and C++ at school and enjoyed it. Also, my research alluded to a few attributes to programming that I gravitated towards. Since beginning my journey at Flatiron, I’ve distilled them a bit, so I’ll list them for you.
## What I like about Web Development Here are the variety of aspects that drew me to a career in coding, in no order;
- Immediate feedback
- Demonstrable results
- Solutions to real-world problems without an explicitly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ solution
- Allows for creativity
- Scalable and modular apps and code
- The industry and technology is constantly evolving. The only constant is change.
- For a successful career in tech, being a continuous, life-long student isn’t just suggested, its critical to survive.
- Language and syntax
- Patterns and behaviors
- Incredible job market
- Coding boot camps that can propel you into the industry without requiring another 4 years of school and/or another $100,000 dollars
- Aesthetic websites
- Powerful applications that solve migraine problems
- An opportunity to ‘build’ something that others will use
And so, with more research under my belt, some trial classes, 18 months of work in a field I hated, and a month or so researching boot camps, I decided it was time to go for it. I applied to Flatiron and my journey into web development began.