Hating your job is not a fun position to be in. Once I decided my days in the teaching field were numbered, I had no idea what my next career move was going to be. I seriously considered getting a MS in Library Science and becoming a librarian, but as much as I love books, that just didn't seem like the right place for me. But that started me thinking, becoming a librarian actually required a science degree, and a lot of computer courses. The World Wide Web was really just getting started when I graduated high school in 1993. Our computer programming class took place on old Radio Shack computers in PASCAL. I managed to get all the way through college using a computer mainly to word process only. I was barely capable of emailing and rarely researched online. My first big exposure to the internet was once I started teaching and encountered the big technology push at the high schools.
The school I worked at had two computer labs - one Mac and one PC, and the library also was equipped with 25 PC's. My students not only used the computer labs to type their essays and reports, they also used them for research, creating Power Point presentations, and even building web pages. All of this I needed to help them do as part of my job as their English Teacher. And while I had utterly no experience doing any of this, I found I took to it like a duck to water. I didn't need training to navigate the web, or help students determine which sites were reputable to use as sources of documentation. I found Power Point intuitive and had no problem helping students when they became stuck, or pretended to become stuck. The kids who ventured into building websites, well, there I became a bit lost. But those kids didn't need my help and were all too willing to teach me all about it. And so it didn't take too long for me to decide that the WWW, and not the classroom, was where I belonged. While it may appear at first glance that the career jump I made was a large one and that there is no linear transition between an English Teacher and a Website Programmer, it turns out that that's not an entirely valid assumption. Being an English Teacher lead me to my current career. It's almost as if I needed to be there in order to get where I was going.
For me, there's a great deal of similarity between the world of writing and the world of coding. They're both about languages that require valid arguments, logical structure and proper syntax. I think that this is part of the reason that my two strongest subjects were always English and Math. History and Science were just not my thing, which I know is a bit odd, because as the stereotype goes - you tend either to do better in English and History or Math and Science. Not that my grades were always great in Math, because they weren't. My highest grades were always in English and then it tended to be a toss up between which class I had a better or easier teacher in. But when it came to all the standardized testing, I always scored way better in Math than I did in English. Which as a teenager, I really didn't understand because I didn't do exceptionally well in Math at school, and English, the subject I loved and excelled at, I didn't test that well in. But what I discovered as I got older is, my real strength, where I always score top of the charts, is in logic - and that's why I scored well in Math on the standardized tests.
Logic is not going to help you memorize names and dates in History, or the phylums, classes, species and periodic table in Science. I hated rote memorization. I liked reading and writing and expressing myself. And while I've never loved Math, and wouldn't want it to be a part of my daily job, I certainly have some capability (though I'm not sure I have the capability to pass Calculus at the moment).
I find myself with an unusual background in my current career. I enjoy it and it suits me, but I am not your typical geek programmer. I haven't been doing this since the internet existed, I am not a gamer, I am not trying to come up with the next billion dollar idea (MySpace, E-Bay, Amazon, Google), I do not custom build computers for fun, or spend my free time hacking. Sometimes I feel like I'm really not enough of a geek for my field, but then building web applications and websites isn't ALL about the coding either. There is also a certain amount of artistic ability and project management involved. And having the ability to communicate and use the English language effectively, well that always tends to be a bonus.
And what I find myself spending most of my time doing, is problem solving. How do I achieve the outcome my client is looking for? Where is the bug that is crashing my application? Where have I gone wrong in my syntax? What is the error in my logic that is causing erroneous results? So I have found a job that puts my logic skills to good use, that constantly challenges me in new ways, where I'm always learning something new. It so beats teaching Romeo and Juliet for the ten-thousandth time.
I love the way you translate geek to English. You're good at it.
Posted by: Polly Poppins | March 26, 2008 at 04:38 PM
Polly - Thanks, I guess it's one of my strong points.
Posted by: Diosa | March 27, 2008 at 11:14 AM