So it’s my last day as an undergrad student and probably my last day as a college student ever!
Decause told us we could write about whatever we wanted for our “final” blog post (read: last required post) for the Advanced FOSS class. So I guess I’ll talk a bit about what I’m doing now that school’s over. That’s the question everyone keeps asking after all.
Before I get to that though, I’d like to start at the very beginning.
During my junior year of high school, my friend asked me to sign up for a class with her and I agreed. I’m not sure how the misunderstanding occurred, but for some reason I registered for an Intro to Programming class…which was apparently not the class she told me to sign up for. I get to the class on the first day and my friend isn’t there. I’m also the only girl in the room and have no idea what I signed up for.
We spend the first day learning about how the class is going to teach us a programming language called Java. Not wanting us to get too bored with just a lecture, the teacher does a quick demo at the end where we create a Hello World console application. Okay, so I made some words print out on the screen. That’s cool I guess. Then we change it to take in input; it asks for the user’s name and then prints out “Hello [your name]”. I’m not sure why, but I was really entertained by that.
That, in combination with how thrilled the teacher was to have a girl in the class for once, led to me staying in the class. I have always been the type of person who hates letting others down, so for me to switch out of the class after the teacher said that it was so cool that I was in it…didn’t really seem like an option.
The year goes on. I get A’s on all of the programming assignments and enjoy messing around with Java. None of the other students talk to me, and I do the projects on my own. I finish the two courses in programming that my school offers during my junior year, and go on to my senior year.
At this point I have to start thinking about college. I didn’t really know what I wanted to after high school other than go to college. Not going to college was never an option I considered, because I very much understood that in our society its expected that everyone pursue higher education.
Growing up I had a couple of different ideas for careers. When I was really little, I wanted to be a librarian. This is likely due to the fact that my mom would take me to the library multiple times a week and we were constantly reading. As I got older, I started reading books by James Patterson, Lincoln Child, and Douglas Preston. At that point, I decided I would definitely become an FBI agent or some kind of criminal psychologist. It was very depressing the day that I learned that FBI agents, even the ones who focus more on psychology and profiling, had to pass all kinds of physical tests and carry guns. Gym was always the bane of my childhood and teenage existence, so I gave up on joining the FBI.
Then towards the beginning of high school, I had two more ideas. Comic book artist and zookeeper. I enjoyed drawing, but I wasn’t very good at it. Definitely not good enough to get into an art school. I loved animals, but there wasn’t much of a higher education pathway to most animal-related jobs. And even if I did go to school for something related to animals, the salaries most of those workers get wouldn’t be sufficient for paying off loans.
So both of those options offered very little job stability, and I wasn’t sure how I could turn a college degree into those jobs. It was around this time that my mom suggested working on video games. I had been playing games for most of my life and they were a pretty big part of my life, so I considered the idea. My mom posted on the forums for the MMORPG she played at the time, Lord of the Rings Online. Several employees from Turbine responded to her question (basically, what should her daughter pursue in school to become a game developer) and the consensus was computer science or software engineering. I remembered that I did really well in the programming class during my junior year, so I figured why not? It was the only thing I felt I was good at.
We then looked at the job opening pages for different game companies and noticed that the title was usually “Software Engineer” and decided to look at schools with a software engineering program. Conveniently, RIT not only had one, but had the very first undergraduate software engineering program in the United States. I attended open houses where I learned about the different majors, and although the Game Design and Development program sounded more attractive to me, I was assured by students in the software engineering program that if I wanted a job, I should enter the software engineering program. So I did.
Time passes, I start off bright eyed and bushy tailed thinking that in college I will be able to work on things that excite me. That wasn’t really the case though. Although I aced my computer science and software engineering classes, I didn’t really care about the projects we made. I thought it’d all be worth it though, if it meant I could graduate with a magical piece of paper that would let me work on things I did care about. But that belief was gradually worn down. By upperclassmen telling me that getting a job in the game industry was impossible, by other students in the program mocking anyone who said they wanted to work on games, by all of the people I looked up telling me I needed to be like them and go apply at places like Microsoft and Apple because “that’s where smart people work” apparently.
So I spend the first 3 years at RIT making software I don’t like, forcing myself to interview at companies that I wasn’t a good fit for, and then hating myself for not being able to get those jobs. It’s funny because, in hindsight, of course I didn’t get those internships. I didn’t even really want them. I could care less about word processing software. But at the time, it was such a blow to my self esteem. I had given up on something that I actually wanted to do, to spend all of my time trying to get a job that I wouldn’t even like, so that people who probably don’t even remember me now would respect me.
The breaking point for me was towards the end of my third year when I co-oped at a local company that made access control software. In addition to my not being invested in the product at all, I was also one of only two female developers, and the rest of the employees were significantly older than myself- mostly married men with children.
I’ve always struggled a bit with social anxiety, but it became very extreme during that internship. I didn’t feel like I could relate to my coworkers and since they were all a generation older, I felt very intimidated talking to anyone or asking for help. Even worse, they could tell that I didn’t enjoy what I was doing and I was too tired to fake it any more.
I was very depressed during the 6 months of that internship and the summer afterward. I was very lonely, very unfulfilled, and I felt very stupid. I debated dropping out of college entirely. I had put all of my internship money towards student loans and if I had stopped at that point, I would have had everything paid off. It’s funny because, when you say you are thinking about dropping out of school, most people assume it’s because of grades. But I had close to a 4.0. I wasn’t bad at programming. I just didn’t love it like everyone else seemed to. And I hated having to pretend that I did in order to get jobs I wouldn’t enjoy.
My academic advisers in SE asked me to come in and talk with them, but I refused because I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want everyone to know that I was a fraud. Luckily, one of my friends in the Game Design and Development program convinced me to switch majors instead of drop out entirely. My boyfriend at the time (now husband) also proposed and told me he would be supportive if I wanted to give game development a shot. I submitted an application for a change of major, and was accepted, I think mostly due to my grades and history doing research projects in the SE department.
I held off on telling people for a long time. I was very afraid of people in SE making fun of me for switching. Not without reason, I had already heard students who changed majors being made fun of, and almost any GCCIS student knows that some people in CS and SE condescendingly refer to the IT program as “I tried”. Add in the extra hostility the GDD students get since other GCCIS students sometimes blame them for “stealing lab space”, and I think I had a good reason to be nervous.
When I did finally come out with my change of major, most of my friends were supportive but there were, as I expected, quite a few people who told me I wouldn’t be able to get a job, that I made a mistake, and so on. For my first year in GDD, I avoided the Society of Software Engineers. This was the club that I had spent my first 3 years at RIT participating in as a committee member, an officer, and a primary officer. It was also where most of my friends were.
After the first quarter in GDD I realized that, although I was enjoying my homework for the first time at RIT, I was still very lonely and afraid of talking to people. I joined the social anxiety group in the counseling center, and started seeing a doctor in the health center for escitalopram. From that point on, my mental health and happiness improved dramatically. I enjoyed college, started making some friends in GDD, and was eventually able to go back to the SSE lab. People still bothered me occasionally about the change in majors and whether or not I’d be able to get a job, but for once in my life I didn’t care more about what other people thought than I did about my own well-being.
And that takes me to this year. My senior year in college. All I had left to complete was my advanced electives for the GDD program and one last SE class to complete a minor. I was able to choose what I wanted to take, and since I was nearing the end of my time at RIT, I decided to focus on 3 completely different areas to get an idea of whether any of them resonated with me. Those three areas ended up being game audio, open source development, and iOS development. I took 2 classes related to each and I think ultimately all of them were valuable experiences and will end up being relevant to what I decide to do post-graduation.
So that brings us to the big question, what am I doing post-graduation? The truth is, I still don’t know. What I do know is that almost immediately after graduation I’m going on my honeymoon to Kauai and for the first time in 5 years I’m going to spend some time away from technology and just enjoy nature again.
Then I need to spend some time getting some health problems sorted out. While I was able to spend a lot of time during the past 2 years taking care of my mental health, I put off a surgery that I need because I didn’t want to deal with it while I was still in school. I had already had surgery during my second and third years at RIT, and I was tired of losing my Christmas vacations to getting poked at with scalpels.
After that I’m going to spend some time getting my house situated. Installing a fence for my dog. Pulling out bushes we don’t like. Maybe make a custom table for our table top gaming groups. Etc.
And then I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m still not sure if programming is something I want to do 8 hours a day 5 days a week for the next couple decades of my life. I don’t know if it’s good for me. But I do know now that I enjoy making software I’m interested in. I plan on developing games and apps on my own once life has settled down again, but I don’t know if it’s something I’m going to do as a full-time job, or something I will do as side projects.
Looking back, I have some regrets. I wish I hadn’t come to college until I had my mental health sorted out and until I had more of a backbone and could commit to my own dreams without letting others opinions scare me away from them. If I could do it again, I’d have liked to have gone into GDD from the beginning and been able to really become a part of that community at RIT and get involved in making games outside of classes. I think if I had done that, it would have been more valuable to me.
On the other hand though, I’m still really proud of myself for trying to sort things out and get on the right track, even if it took me 3 years to figure it out. I might not be coming out of RIT with a job at Microsoft or at a triple A game company, but I do have the skills I’d need to do indie game development on my own and my open source classes showed me that I can make things that real people will use outside of academia. I may not be as sure as my friends/classmates about what I want to do in life, but I’ve come really far the past 5 years.
♫
I can’t run all that fast
And I’m not very strong
So I’ll just go steadily at my own pace
♫
Tickets finished this week:
nerdy world problems 