Here’s a short story: I did not finish that program.
The pace and the time requirements for that program at the time I started it was too much for me to keep up with. It was good, challenging work, but I think I got to week 5 and couldn’t do it anymore. I had a brain block and just couldn’t get myself to watch the recordings of missed classes. It did make me shy away from fully diving into tech, but that just meant it wasn’t yet the season for that.
It made me feel a little more sympathetic too students that are trying to climb their way out of a mountain of work they created for themselves by putting things off, procrastinating and then experiencing a sense of dread and overwhelming, crippling anxiety.
It’s okay to stop, restart or try a different path or thing. And I will. In time. For now I’m trying focus on improving the professional skills in my current realm of work and create systems and schedules that will help me when it is time to get back on my tech journey.
If there was one thing I could change about my academic trajectory before I started college would have been that I should have done something in STEM like computer science or mathematics. I used to love mathematics in my early years of high school. But I remember in the latter years, constantly butting heads with my math teacher (woman in STEM, go her) because every time we started a new concept, I would always ask, “And how do we use this in the real world?” Maybe I have memory bias but I remember more times that this question was dismissed or not met with a concrete answer. This was around 2004-06 so we didn’t have the internet on our phones (we weren’t even allowed to have phones in school) so it wasn’t necessarily a quick search. A part of me wishes that I was more investigative and just looked the stuff up on my own, but there was never a connection between math and the real world for me despite folks touting that “math is used in everything”. Okay then, show me!
So besides being a math teacher, I really had no idea what one could do for work if they studied math as a degree. Heck, despite having many foreign teachers from Jamaica, the thought never connected for me that I could teach outside of my own country, that that was even an option. Yes, career counseling was severely lacking. Anyway, that said, when I was studying my communication degree in Kansas, in one of my com classes was an older lady and every time we had an attendance question that got us to share about ourselves, she would share stories of her wide variety of jobs and careers. This stood out to me because it spoke to giving yourself permission to change, permission to start over, to change careers as many times as you wanted to.
There’s no rule that you have to stay in one job, one career your whole life. In fact, it’s become more of the norm for my generation and Gen X. For the time, I’m good with my current career choice, but when the time comes, tech will be my next big leap. For now, that journey is on pause.
Life of Neu 