Hey, y'all. I hope it's going well and good for you. Students tend to freak out while selecting a career path for themselves and I was too. I hope reading my journey towards Web Development will give you some insights about the decision you might want to make or else you can just observe my mistakes. Let's get started.
Scene 1: Early Childhood
Like every Indian kid in the late 2000s, I was extremely fascinated by computers. I was a little over 8 years of age, but I loved using our family computer to play games and stuff. I was introduced to coding around 2012 and I tried. I went to that only resource we knew, Codecademy and started an HTML tutorial. These were the teenage years of the internet and YouTube was not filled with tutorials for every programming language out there.
I remember starting the tutorial and then getting overwhelmed by all the tags and syntax and I left it in the middle. Years passed and never picked up coding again.
Scene 2: Teenage
It was the time after my 12th class Board Exams and my JEE Mains went bad. I cleared the cutoff, went to give JEE Advanced, fully knowing I'll just be wasting my time giving that exam. Now, since I cleared the cutoff for JEE Mains, parents were hopeful and filled me with hope as well to take a drop year and give JEE again. But all that was in vain. I got accepted into a Food Tech College and I started learning programming with Python in my 2 months of free time before joining college. I covered the basics, conditionals, loops, etc. I remember I had a proper timeline set up for learning Software Engineering through online free material during my 4 years of college. I was very motivated to do this. But then...
Scene 3: Young Adult
The first few weeks I was excited to be in college. I was exploring stuff, meeting new people daily and I was overcoming the shyness I had in school. I had this idea in my head: Nobody holds any pre-conceived notion here about me here, so I can be whomever I want to be.
And I did whatever I wanted to do. I went up on stage, I hosted events, I made a fool out of myself in front of people, I took the lead wherever I wanted to. I was a completely different and much more confident person. I liked all the change and all the freedom I had. But amidst all this, I lost track of my original plan. I was not motivated enough to learn to code.
But then Lockdown happened because of "You know what!". And I was in 3rd year by now. That burden of reality, that life outside college started to make me think How will I survive after this 4 Year Holiday Package?
Scene 4: The Adult Life
I heard about IIT Madras Online Degree (Programming & Data Science) and jumped onto the ship thinking to myself this is my last chance to enter into the field of Computer Science. But then for a whole year, they taught me Maths, Statistics and English for 2 terms and a bit of Python Programming. This term I have better subjects, but back then it felt like a chore, not exciting. So I chose to give CAT for MBA as well. Currently, I am in my Internship Semester and I signed up for a not so work-intensive internship so I could prepare for MBA. I started preparing, gave it a few months. I like solving maths for CAT but there was that spark missing of learning something new or gaining some skills. I was basically polishing up my maths skills from many many years ago so I could enter a reputable MBA College. But then all that felt dull.
Then right around my birthday this August, I found out about NeoG Camp and I started exploring Web Dev. I gave myself a week's time to test the waters and honestly, I loved it. So I stayed. I used to think people say it casually that Do What You Love! but in Web Dev I felt it. I used to code at night from 10:30 PM and I would go on and on till 5 or 6 in the morning. I even did an 18 hours straight coding run. This way, I went through the NeoG Camp Level 0 playlist pretty quickly and I was building something new and something that I could interact with visually every single day. This was missing in Python Programming. In fact, this blog is also a part of the submission for NeoG Camp Level 1 Checklist. I hope I get in. 🤞
tl;dr version:
- Loved the computers and the internet early on.
- Failed to learn to code early but compensated for it by building a plan for 4 years of Engineering.
- Forgot about the plan, started preparing for CAT, felt dull.
- Found my love for Web Dev. I guess this is what they call passion.
Key Takeaway: Don't be like me. Learn to communicate with the machines you use daily as soon as possible.
Thank you for reading this far. I hope I was able to provide something of value to you. Please share the blog if you like it. Connect with me on Twitter (@ChhikaraBRUH).