I honestly kind of started looking into software engineering on a bit of a whim, if you will, from someone who's neurodivergent. And I, like, randomly on, like, Instagram or TikTok, ran across a video where, like, this woman was talking about, like, that she had looked up, like, what some of the best careers were first, like, someone who had, like, ADHD or something like that. And it was, like and some of them were, you know, like working with kids or being an artist or being a teacher, like something like that. And she was like, I'm a young I'm a art teacher for young children. So I accidentally did all the things. And that just got me thinking like, and I was like, okay, so what are some good careers for people with autism? And in looking that up, like one of the big ones that I kept seeing like over and over and over again was software engineering. And so that kind of kick started that little bit of like, let's get into this. I just realized that I needed to make a change in my life. I was not doing what I wanted to be doing and going staying on the path that I was on was not going to get me anywhere near doing something that I wanted to be doing. Very early on in my, bootcamp, really wanted to hit the ground running and just start networking as much as I possibly could, kind of trying to get ahead of the game in terms of like meeting people and creating those really important relationships, you know, getting their, you know, knowledge from people who have been in this industry for a while. You know, I kind of just created a list of like, okay, here's a bunch of companies that I have some interest in, and then just went through and found people that at various levels in those companies that felt interesting, like they would be interesting to talk to. Me specifically as, like, a woman, a neurodivergent woman, a queer woman, I was like, I specifically looked for that in people's profiles. So, like, if there was someone who specifically, like, mentioned any of those things, I was like, so I think that's really important when you're looking through things is, like, trying to find someone who's gonna have a similar experience to what you're probably gonna experience. This is what I can look forward to. There is nothing to lose. Either you're gonna have a good interaction or they're probably just gonna ignore you and then nothing bad happens. The likelihood of someone like getting furious at you for, you know, reaching out and being like, hey, I have a question. Very low. I would definitely say that the support of like the Career Success Services, as well as like my instructor and my, the other members of my cohort supporting me has definitely encouraged me to keep pushing, keep driving instead of just being like, well, this isn't working. It's like, no, you kinda just gotta keep going. One of the things that I've done that I would highly recommend, is especially once you get through your capstone, like, you're gonna build what you're gonna build and it's gonna be fantastic or it's gonna be working. Seeing everybody else's presentations, I saw like, you know, oh, here's this, other member of my cohort and they have like a couple of features that I think are really cool and that I wanted to implement into my project. And so we also, my cohort, we created like a Discord server so we could all stay connected and chat and, you know, help each other out. And so I messaged that one person. I was like, hey. Would you be willing to share, you know, your GitHub, repo for your final project? You had a couple things that I really wanted to implement in my project as I keep working on it. And he was more than willing to do that. So that was really cool. Lean on the people around you and lean on, you know, your cohorts, the career team, lean on your, you know, your LEM and your instructors and just, you know, find your people and learn as much as you possibly can from them. And especially with the bigger corp like, if you're going to, like, a bigger company that you're looking at, those are especially gonna take a long time. And so just know that going in and be prepared for that and just don't give up.
