I have always been infatuated with coding throughout my teenage years. But like most “savvy girls”, I was more concerned with becoming a stereotypical marketer, playing out my successful version of the “feminine part”. Why business and not engineering? Well, I never saw myself as one that was “naturally” smart. Sure, I was a very diligent and sensible student; taking 7-8 classes every high school year for the sake of learning as much as I possibly could for what my tax dollars were worth, and with a handful of honors and AP classes to show for. Nevertheless, trigonometry and calculus were not a breeze for me. Let me repeat, not at all! Talk about imposter syndrome, I was one of those kids that barely made it into these classes, to begin with, let alone do well in.

But had that not been a factor, I would have graduated college with a CS degree in Software Engineering. This decision was a no-brainer for the simple fact that I won the genetic lottery to have been born and raised in the very place the world coined “Where the future is made”. Not to mention, the Apple headquarters is my neighbor for God’s sake! To squander this opportunity would feel like I have forsaken the Gods and Holy Spirits that gave me this opportunity, shunning my mom who scrapped by to raise me, while condemning myself and the ones I love to a life of mediocrity. I know this sounds overly dramatic, but consciously speaking, we all know that’s true.

During my last semester of college, a classmate introduced coding boot camps as a continued education to “level-up” my business marketing discipline. At the time, coding boot camps were just up and coming and people took a blind faith gamble of what its education was really worth while the tuition cost was far from a chunk of change. I was drawn to the idea but ultimately decided that it was not right for me at the time. First of all, I would have to get into $12,000 worth of debt for tuition. Second, there were no factual statistics of how successful these boot camp alums are. Therefore, I am not only paying to subject myself as an “early-border guinea pig” without proof of fair investment. Lastly, taking my upfront, hidden, and opportunity costs into consideration for the potential reward, made it clear that I could not afford supporting myself through school any longer. I figured that I can work for a few years while keeping an eye on the industry to later decide whether to “level up” or switch careers altogether then. Now, and six years later, I finally decided it was time.