She got the job! From Event Organising to Tech — Meet Bola
Bola, a volunteer at our Summer Programme 2019, has successfully transitioned into her first tech role! We caught up with her to ask about her self-taught journey. The full audio clip of our conversation can be found below.
Introduce yourself. How did you get into coding?
I am Bola, and I grew up in London, born and raised, and left home for university. I’ve always loved problem-solving, I loved science, so I just thought I’d always be a scientist and, regardless of what I’ll do, I’ll still be in science. During university, I think you kind of realise that you can do other things and you don’t have to be x y z. So I felt like that was my chance to expand and go into something different, which was events. But I think what was missing from events is kind of that ‘always learning’. You do learn with events but it’s not the same as learning something new and technical. Finding out about coding and being able to actually do it and enjoy it, I was like, hold on, this could be something that I can do long term, like it has all the elements I want, I can be creative with it. I can problem-solve with it, and I can be stretched with it so this is a truly perfect place for me. I think what’s even better is when you kind of launch yourself into the tech world, you can do whatever you want. So if I do want to do events in tech, I can become a product or a programme manager and explore that. And that’s how I ended up in the tech role.
Luckily I was doing a TDD course (and that’s Test Driven Development) with Codurance, and Coding Black Females, so I didn’t feel like I wasn’t doing anything. It still felt like I was doing something, I was learning something new, networking with people. So that was good at pushing me to keep applying, keep applying, keep applying, and eventually got to a spot where I had interviews again which was like, oh my god. Wow.
I was a Logistics Coordinator with Stemettes, part of the job is teaching young girls how to code as well. That was my first instance with coding. My favourite part of the job was a facilitation, like helping the girls understand a concept and problem-solve, so I knew a part of that wasn’t just the facilitation, it was actually what I was teaching. So I thought, okay, as I’m like, trying to redo my life and figure out what I want to do let me at least learn a bit of coding. So as I was doing that and then went and did some volunteering with Coders of Colour for that two week journey and seeing all the kids getting excited, and then also myself getting excited listening to all these people in tech, and seeing just, again, all the different branches, I was like, let me just focus more on this because I actually enjoy it.
Any words of wisdom for those still transitioning into tech?
It’s like really understanding what you enjoy and what you love, because that’s kind of what keeps you going like, it’s sometimes the job just becomes the main focus and you just want to get the job and that’s understandable because sometimes you just need to get paid. But when you’re looking for this job, and it’s not working, it’s like okay then what’s the point and then the point is, hopefully, the reason that you’re doing it. There were months that I just didn’t want to code but I could find something that I enjoyed and like okay maybe I can listen to this thing because I like to this part of. I kind of wanted to learn a bit more about this part of JavaScript or something like that, or I was curious what Scala was, so I listened to that. I didn’t necessarily have to sit down and code because I was like fatigued and that’s totally fine but there’s something that you enjoy it might be like yeah the problem-solving, which is like, Okay, let me just do one kata, a week, if you’re so fatigued, or it’s the, I love that there’s so many different languages which is like okay let me explore another language but you’re kind of tapping into what you loved about it in the first place and that’s kind of gives you that invigoration keeps you going. And so for me it was the TDD, being able to like, learn something new with a group of people, that’s kind of what kept me in the coding because to be honest when I was job hunting there were just times that I didn’t, I didn’t want to look at a piece of code I didn’t want to look at React anymore I was tired, but I knew on the Sundays that I was going to meet a group of women, and we could chit-chat, and we could learn like a new skill, and we could work on it together, it wasn’t just me alone. I think that’s the biggest thing to help you like, keep going, like tap into whatever, whatever you enjoyed in the first place and see if that comes to fruition.
Do you have general advice for anyone wanting to switch careers?
It’s never too late to do anything. You’re going to be happier chasing that dream that you wanted to chase rather than being stuck because of what if. It’s just what you deserve.
Listen to the full clip here:
