Journey of a Junior Developer - Lessons from a Career Switcher

Transferable skills are the greatest asset of any career switcher. There's the usual resume advice. People suggest you use past experience to prove that you have the skills necessary to fulfill a job role - even if you didn't have the right job title. I think what that concept is missing is that transferable skills also tell you what jobs would better suit you.

I didn't study to work in computer science. My academic career was fully rooted in medicine. I was on the med school track, but switched to nursing. I went so far as to even get a masters in nursing. However every step of the way, I was picking up and practicing skills that told me I'd do well in computer science. Besides the usual blog editing that happened amongst millennials in the early 2000s, my first real exposure to programming was making a game for an fMRI machine.

I was a psychology major in undergrad. Part of that degree was writing a thesis within a research lab. I had jumped around a few labs, but never really did much beyond statistics and basic data entry. During class one day, my classmate was telling me about her research lab and how they were having issues moving forward with the study because no one in the lab knew how to code. What they were trying to create didn't seem that complicated. The study was replicating a well-established experiment, and the only modification was that they made the images more age appropriate for children.

I am a lazy person, and had just figured out how to make excel formulas do my stats homework. Despite never having done anything like programming, I thought I could figure it out and told my classmate I could code for her lab.

Luckily, the fMRI software used E-basic, a beginner friendly language that was very similar to VBA but built for research purposes. Participants would play the experiment (game) while we scanned their brains. There was a screen on the inside of the fMRI machine. Pre-rendered images were shown one by one and participants were given a set of buttons to respond to the images. The button presses as well as the timing of each press was recorded. While I was in the realm of excel macros, this was my first introduction to the basics of programming. I learned about loops, if-then-else statements, and even a little about memory and frame rate. Really, I made a glorified digital picture frame that happened to work in a fMRI machine.

Today I work as a Data Engineer, and every day I use the exact same skills that helped me make that glorified digital picture frame. I started with a task and a deadline. Then I stumbled through the internet a several in person sources of information to organize what I needed. What I was left with was a new found understanding of the basics of how code works and how to apply that understanding.

My strongest asset as a developer was something that I always had: the ability to be given a task, and the skills to be able to learn whatever I needed to get the job done. It's not possible to always be up to date, to always know best decision, or even to always have the skills to do everything. What we can do is practice being uncomfortable, to be unafraid to explore something you don't have the answers to, and to always keep getting better.