From Tutus To Tech
Tags: wecoded, career, womenintech
Published: 2019-03-06 17:54:24

---
title: From Tutus To Tech
published: true
tags: shecoded, career, womenintech
description: My story of how I went from being a ballerina to being in the tech world in celebration of International Women's Day.
---

If you had told me three years ago that I would be a software engineer at a tech company I would have laughed. It's funny how life works sometimes so I wanted to use International Women's Day as an opportunity to show how I landed in this career and to, hopefully, inspire other women who are trying to do the same.

I grew up doing ballet. When I was seventeen I moved by myself to New York City to train full-time with the [Joffrey Ballet School](https://www.instagram.com/joffreyschool/). I loved my time there and wouldn't have traded it for the world but it made me question if I wanted to pursue ballet professionally. I knew that I'd be lucky if my ballet career lasted until I was 30 so I decided to go to college and put ballet on the backburner. 

![Me at Joffrey Ballet School](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/crkxlvjj612abyk1ml3m.jpg)

I moved back to my hometown of Nashville, TN and enrolled as a public relations major at [Belmont University](http://belmont.edu/). It was hard for me to let ballet go. I even had a brief stint as a guest artist at local professional ballet company but, as I began to focus more on my studies ballet, began to fade away.

I worked extremely hard in college. I wanted to work in the music industry and I knew I'd have to make myself stand out from the crowd so I began interning the summer after my freshman year. It all paid off when I landed a job as a publicity assistant in a music marketing firm after I graduated. I loved my job and after a year I was promoted to being a publicist. I got to attend concerts, hang out with some well-known celebrities and go to the occasional red carpet but I also was really stressed out. 

My **entire** job relied on a journalist who receives *thousands* of emails a day to open mine and say yes to an interview or story. I hated the feeling that how well I was doing at my job relied solely on someone opening an email. I started to look into other career options when I stumbled upon [Codecademy](https://www.codecademy.com).

I began teaching myself HTML and CSS and absolutely loved it. I had been pretty good at foreign languages in high school and college and this felt just like learning another language. That's when I decided I wanted to really pursue working in the tech field. I completed high school online when I was training at Joffrey so I knew the self-teaching route wasn't for me. I began looking for other options and found The Iron Yard, a three-month-long bootcamp. 

![My cohort at The Iron Yard](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/lhvuq4grz242jlusiwqi.jpeg)

During my bootcamp I learned all about HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then focused in on learning [Vue](https://vuejs.org/) and [Ember](https://www.emberjs.com/). It was also important to me to meet as many people in this industry as I could while I was so I would go to meetups in the evenings. I loved going to meetups so much that while I was still at my bootcamp I started the local Nashville chapter of [Tech Ladies](https://www.hiretechladies.com/). I was juggling a lot but it all paid off in the end when I landed my first dev job at an agency in town.

There's been a lot of ups and downs since I graduated my bootcamp but this has truly been one of the best decisions of my life. There are times when I wish I would have discovered coding earlier in my life but I also wouldn't be the person I am without having taken the path that I did and I'm extremely grateful for that.

## I started/continued to code in 2019 because...
I love this career path. I love the feeling of fixing an error after having no clue what could be causing it. And I love seeing sites I'm working on start with nothing and come to life because of what I've written.

## I deserve credit for...
Pursuing this career path even when people doubted me. When I told my old coworkers that I was leaving to go learn how to code the first thing someone told me was "but you don't look like someone who codes." I didn't let that phase me and, in fact, it pushed me even more.

## I hope to see my school/work/developer/tech community...
Embrace those who come from different backgrounds. Don't write someone off just because they didn't get a CS degree or learned how to code a few months ago. That person could bring a completely different point-of-view to your team. Give them a chance.

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I'd love to hear your own stories of how you landed in the tech world in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/karaluton) for lots of tweets about tech, and if I'm being honest, lots of tweets about dogs too.