From No Code to Pod Leader in 3 Years
When you spend time on my LinkedIn, it can seem a tad confusing that I found my way into the role of MLH pod leader given my educational background. For the past four years, I’ve been pursuing a degree in Finance at American University. As we can all agree on, my path to tech has been untraditional.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I even encountered coding. I was spending my time building my resume (as many students do) and started my school’s very own investment club. No small feat, I realized that I spent too much time analyzing data in Excel and wanted to find a way to streamline my work and save myself time in front of the screen. I thought there had to be a better way, and as it turns out, there was! This was how I found the world of coding and stumbled upon Python. Without the classes laid out in my schedule, I had to find the time to teach myself and learned it through Automate the Boring Stuff by Al Sweigart. With just a couple of weeks of experience, I was able to turn hours of Excel work into minutes with only 200–300 lines of code! This code was the definition of a hack: overly complex and not very efficient. Yet, it was this discovery that springboarded my passion for computer science and started my journey into tech.
Satisfied with my new solution, it wasn’t until nine months later that I had another run-in with CS and had to teach myself a new application for coding. In spring 2019, my girlfriend needed help on scraping data for her internship and asked me to build a web scraper for her. I had never used programming for anything outside the narrow scope of finance, so I had no idea how to do it. Challenge accepted!
It took a week or two, but I found out how to use BeautifulSoup, how HTML works, and how coding had massive applications outside of my previously narrow uses. From then on, I spent the next year creating more and more small projects, such as solving class problems in Python instead of Excel and web scraping voting sites during the last U.S. election. I gathered as much information as possible, taking workshops, reading tutorials, and consuming every bit of CS information I could gather, and then I found the MLH Fellowship.
I applied to the MLH Fellowship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost immediately, I received a rejection email saying it was already full, but to apply for the next batch in the fall of 2020. When the application opened, I applied immediately and hoped for the best after growing my skills through trial and error on personal projects. Having received so many automated rejection emails previously, nothing could’ve prepared me for the joy of seeing the email at the top of my inbox saying it was time to book an interview. After several rounds of interviews, I was accepted into the open-source track which was a huge milestone in my quest to land a job in tech! For me, those months of learning at home only furthered my desire to carve out a space for myself in tech. However, it can be difficult to break into the field without a degree in it or prior professional experience, and the MLH Fellowship provided the first formal avenue I had found to get that experience.
While in the program, I learned invaluable skills: how to collaborate while coding (I had only ever worked by myself), how to work with open-source projects and their maintainers, and how to write code in a safe and scalable way. I was able to build projects using technologies I had never used before such as the Voting Information Project that I built at the MLH Fellowship Orientation Hackathon which helped users find a polling station nearby.
After working on Fellowship Projects in addition to my own, I started to get some software engineering and developer interviews. It was a shock when I first got an interview; For months, I had been applying to companies for internships and full-time jobs without any responses. Now, they were coming to me to talk about what I had built and in that moment I knew my hard work was paying off. When I took the interviews, a surprising number of questions were about the Fellowship — “What did you do? Tell me more about this project you did? Oh, you won a hackathon, what made your project the best?” Recruiters were asking questions about the projects I had built, and it was an amazing feeling! As I learned from this experience, I realized I don’t want to pigeonhole myself to roles specifically in hardcore software engineering, but the fellowship has expanded my horizons into the many different roles in tech and how my degree in finance could make me stand out from other hackers. My growing coding skills gave me multidimensionality that recruiters were picking up on.
Having gained a ton of experience and confidence in my coding abilities, my time in the MLH Fellowship made me want to give back to the hacker community and help others get their start in tech. I began mentoring more kids in Python and computer science through a couple of different avenues, but I couldn’t provide the same kind of experience I had in the fellowship. Four months after our Fellowship graduation, I got an email from Will (the MLH Fellowship Manager) in April 2021, asking previous Fellows if they had any interest in becoming a Pod Leader. This was exactly what I was looking for: an opportunity to help people gain experience in tech! I jumped at the chance immediately and was interviewed by Will and various members of the MLH team! I was offered a position to help run the Production Engineering Fellowship for the Summer 2021 batch. I gladly accepted and now I’m able to help Fellows build their careers in the same way my Pod Leader helped me. This can be as small as a paired coding sessions and hangouts to reviewing code and helping with resume review. The hackers in my pod have grown so much in the short amount of time I’ve worked with them, it’s truly inspiring and makes me so happy to know I’ve been a part of their journeys.
Three years ago, I didn’t know what MLH was and could never have imagined that I would be a Pod Leader for their computer engineering fellowship. I highly encourage anyone and everyone to apply to the MLH Fellowship, a program that has given me so much in such a quick timespan. I can’t wait to see where I’ll be in another 3 years, hopefully in an even better position to help others get their start in tech.
If you’re interested in connecting, you can find me on LinkedIn.
