The Journey Part 1

My newfound career into the tech world was long and winding for sure. Let me bullet point some important dates for you to show you it is never too late to figure it out.

• 2009 - Started College at age 23. I thought I was too old to go back to school because I was always under the impression you have to go to College straight out of High School. I’ve already been out of High School since I was 17 years old. I’m the first person in my family to attend (and eventually graduate) college so I had no one to seek advice from or no one to reassure me that 23 is not old at all to go back to school.

• 2010 - Started an unrealized career as a visual merchandiser. To this day I have over 10 years of visual merchandising experience.

• 2012 - Graduated with an Associates of Science degree in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Broadcast Electronic Media Arts. I always wanted to be in the entertainment industry one day and always had at least 1 foot in the door. During my time at City College of San Francisco I acted in theater, hosted radio, assisted with TV production, and attended many events and shadowed a radio host for NPR/KQED public radio, held 2 internships at the San Francisco Opera House and a Talent Agency. Throughout all this experience, I never got hired in the entertainment industry. Part of it was my fault, I will admit. The 2 internships I had I learned nothing because I was just doing the typical internship work such as sorting files, cleaning, and organizing. I didn’t exactly have hands-on experience with how to do the job of a talent agent or production assistant. The most hands-on experience I had was hosting a radio show (a few years later in 2014 after I graduated) but I was very insecure and did not want to work in radio as a personality.

• 2015 - Attended a University to get my Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management. I thought this would be a great degree to pursue because every business is a business and I thought this would get me hired somewhere.

• 2017 - Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Management. Had no internships the entire time I attended College. Golden Gate University is designed for the working adult. Which was great for me at the time because I was an adult student working. One thing I never realized until after the fact is that internships were not promoted here. Probably because this school was made for working adults so we were all already working. I guess it was an assumption that we were working in the fields we were studying.

• 2017 to 2018 - Lost af! I was still working in my respective field of visual merchandising but with this position, there is not much opportunity for advancement. We usually have one boss that covers a big region so a management position was not an option. I finally got a job working for the City of San Francisco in the local school district. I applied because the pay was great. I wanted to work for the actual school district’s main office. They put me in different school sites which was something I did not want to do. I had absolutely no interest in working in schools. I went along with it anyway because the pay was good and I would be a City employee.

• 2018 - Working at a school site was the most toxic and boring job I ever had. I won’t go into too much detail but I will tell you that I was never trained. It was also a very boring job just sitting there answering phone calls, responding to like 2 emails I’d get a day, faxing paperwork, marking attendance which took like 10 minutes to do. All this for 9 hours a day. It got to the point where I would completely black out at work because I was staring into space and had that moment where I forgot where I was. It was the easiest and most highest paying job I ever had in my life.

Because I was so bored, I decided “fuck it” I’ll work on a Master’s Degree. It wasn't a smart decision because I didn’t really do my research. I was debating on pursuing a Master’s as a College Counselor or Marketing. I thought becoming a College Counselor was too narrow of a field to study and if I don’t get hired, I’d be fucked since this degree was so specific. So I decided to get a degree in Digital Marketing since there’s many opportunities to make money online with digital marketing. So I enrolled in an online college, Walden University.

• 2020 - I finally graduated with a Master’s Degree in Marketing. I graduated the last day of February right before shut downs started happening because of the global pandemic. I got 2 internships during this time but it didn’t take me far with marketing because I didn’t learn in college or in my internships how to use industry tools. I tried to get a Google Analytics certificate but it was so boring and tedious for me. I realized Marketing wasn’t what I expected it to be. I always thought marketing was interesting from a psychological and creative point of view. Marketing isn’t about that anymore, it’s all about digital analytics. Gone are the days where you get paid to be creative because you can find any freelancer on the internet to do that type of work.

• 2021 - Started my journey to learn about tech…