It’s been seven years since I sat in a classroom, face to face with subjects I knew nothing about. Yet I fled the classrooms of my college years with haste as soon as I fulfilled my degree requirements, only briefly to even look back.
The years since I achieved my BA in Architecture have been wrought with searching for “just the right field.” After the economy crash of ‘08, I resigned myself to moving up the Starbucks ladder, which seemed fairly common among us ex-designers who just couldn’t find a job. It worked for me, for a time, as did many other managerial positions that kept me busy and paid my bills.
But nothing spoke to me quite like the calling I felt to pursue Tech Talent South. See, I’ve always been an artist…one who unfortunately held a lot of assumptions about “computer work” and all things technological. Yet it wasn’t until I started talking to the women of TTS, Betsy and Abby, that I really opened myself up to the creative opportunity that technology work is.
The shadow felt lifted from my eyes. I started doing my research, and found the job descriptions, the companies, the work, and the people that felt like me. I found that technology is saturated with creative license, with one problem to solve after another, and with the means to truly identify and address real issues that exist in our world today.
Every day that I come to class at Tech Talent, it feels as though I am being handed a new medium that I’ve never used before. As someone who grew up surrounded by art, inundated by paintbrush, colored pencil, charcoal, watercolor… I can hardly explain the excitement of learning that there are creative tools that I never knew existed. I love that every topic builds on the previous lesson, yet when I go home I can tinker and play with whatever excited me most about the week’s lessons. The options are literally endless.
Learning technology is also teaching me so much about myself! There are even fears to face when it comes to computers! But this is what I love. I LOVE that at one point in time, “code” was a complete and utterly mundane mystery to me. Now, it is just one brush on my palette.
