Spokesmodel turned Web Developer : A journey that starts with Flatiron School
Tags: webdev, career, codenewbie
Published: 2020-03-06 15:39:31

…wait what?

I’m right there with you… still trying to wrap my head around my massive lifestyle change.

October 2019 — I just landed home in Austin after working a Ride & Drive Event at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. I was a Spokesmodel for a Luxury Automotive Brand. I traveled multiple times each month to cities across the US; New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale… you name it, we probably had events there.

Despite loving that job and the career that I’d built over the last 7 years, I wanted to take on a new challenge.

This was a familiar pattern in my life. I got my MBA at 23 because I wanted to see if I could. I worked for a Fortune 500 financial firm for a while, eventually taking a risk and switching careers to work for myself doing something I enjoyed. After about 4 years of independent contracts with various Experiential Marketing agencies, I landed a recurring contract as a Spokesmodel in the Automotive Industry. That was the role I left to take on my latest risk: learning Full Stack Web Development.

When I was researching the skills I needed to make a career change into the Tech world, I had my eye on UX/UI because I thought my Experiential Marketing skills would easily translate. It made sense! But it goes against my, ahem “fluctuating” pattern of decision-making…

Enter: Flatiron School
It felt like I’d heard at least 50 radio ads for Flatiron School while I was home in Austin. Eventually, I did a quick Google search and learned that Flatiron is one of the highest rated bootcamps on Course Report for both UX/UI AND Software Development. This seemed like a big deal because Course Report is to bootcamps what the Princeton Review is to universities.

I clicked every.single.link on [www.flatironschool.com](www.flatironschool.com) to learn as much as I could. Somehow, in a matter of days, I’d gone from exploring the UX/UI curriculum to signing up for the free Coding Bootcamp Prep work. Not the track I was expecting, but I went with it.

The Learn.co curriculum was challenging, filled with current pop-culture, and remarkably rewarding. I also felt connected to the community immediately thanks to the sidebar that shows you the names of other students and the lessons they complete in real-time. It was great knowing that hundreds of people were working on the same labs and I wasn’t alone.

Slowly, I became obsessed with working on labs in my free time. We’d be in a fun city and my coworkers would invite me out, but I would decline and say I really needed to work on my labs. This was when I realized I need to jump in head first and see how far I can go with this coding thing…

January 2020 — My last Auto Show in Houston was bittersweet.

It never feels right to leave a good thing and jump into the abyss. But now, 5 weeks into the Software Engineering Immersive program at Flatiron, I feel solid about my decision.

If you told me, this time last year, that I will:

1. Understand the fundamentals of OOP, learn to code in Ruby, and work with Github…
2. Work with a classmate to build a CLI app that pulls data from an API and allows a user to manipulate it…
3. Build a Rails app from scratch that stores data in a DB, then present it to my class…

Honestly, I would have laughed. But now, I feel grateful for my progress in just 5 short weeks and excited to see what the next 10 weeks will teach me.

Take a look at the current Flatiron School courses: [www.flatironschool.com](www.flatironschool.com)