From Healthcare to Software, How Covid-19 changed my life
Covid-19, is a contagious disease that was first discovered in Wuhan, China in December 2019. It’s been 2 years since it first showed up and it has since impacted billions of people in the world. It seems like writing about how covid-19 impacted the world is such a cliche now, even though it has only been about two years. So in this post, I am sharing how it has impacted me and prompted me to pursue a career in software development.
When covid-19 first showed up, there were mostly two kinds of people. Either you were terrified of a pandemic, or you thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, and I was leaning towards the latter. Growing up in Taiwan, this wasn’t the first time we were affected by a contagious disease that originated from a foreign country. In 2003, SARS descended upon us, and it was hectic. Hospitals were locked down, doctors and nurses died. I was a child back then, in the first grade of elementary school. Obviously, at the time I didn’t realize the severity of the situation. I just thought making face shields with my parents, and seeing my mother going to the hospital in a hazmat suit with an air conditioning unit was cool. Those few months were probably the most time I had stayed home together with my parents during my childhood. After a few months, SARS disappeared, people mourned for their loved ones, for their colleagues, and people went on about their lives. So when covid-19 first appeared I thought, well it’s another coronavirus, it’s probably going to disappear as SARS did. So I started wearing a mask and hoping for the day covid-19 disappears. Obviously, at this point, we all know covid-19 didn’t disappear. It stayed and mutated. At one point, we probably will have to learn how to live with it.
How did it change my life? I was a medical student and my parents are doctors, so I know the best way to prevent catching a contagious disease. Schools started shutting down, classes turning online, and people were encouraged, or it became compulsory, to stay at home. Unless you were an essential worker, for example, like healthcare workers. Being a medical student, death wasn’t new to me. I’ve seen, worked on, and learned from many cadavers over the years. Whether they were healthy or sick, complete or incomplete, I’ve seen them all. What I didn’t realize was, although I was comfortable with death, I wasn’t comfortable with the process that leads to death, and that is what covid-19 has shown me. You feel helpless, you feel despair because there’s nothing you can do. This virus, although old but also new, although common but also different. There’s nothing you can do when a patient isn’t responding to treatment. There wasn’t a cure, there wasn’t a universally agreed-upon treatment. You can only dream that the patient isn’t suffering even though you know intubation is insufferable. And then I had a revelation, maybe this isn’t the right field for me. In healthcare, there will always be death, there will always be a patient that you were unable to help, there will always be, unfinished business.
And that is when I discovered Software Development.
It all started with freeCodeCamp and Codeacademy. One day, I stumbled upon an ad on Instagram, it was from Codeacademy. It said something along the lines of, “want to work from home? Try software development!”, and I was intrigued. I remembered that when I was in elementary school, I wanted to become a computer engineer because I loved playing computer games. So I checked out their website and went down the software development rabbit hole, and it was overwhelming. Different parts of software development use different languages. Which language was beginner-friendly, which one was better for getting a job? How well are software developers paid, and how hard it was to break into the field? It was a lot, and I couldn’t find the right path. That is until I saw a post on Reddit that someone made about freeCodeCamp, and their 3000 hours Full-Stack curriculum. So I decided to try it out, and I was hooked. I couldn’t stop doing the exercises, I completed HTML and I went on to CSS, I just kept going. I discovered my new passion, thought to myself, wouldn’t this be a great career for me? Sitting in front of the computer all day and writing code sounds like a dream.
After a year’s worth of on and off, I finally decided I want to make this a career. I wasn’t sure self-taught was the right path for me, and figured it’s too late and costly to get a computer science degree. So I decided to sign up for Microverse.
After nearly 3 months in the program, I think I am doing well. I have completed 10+ projects using various different languages such as JavaScript. HTML, and CSS. And used frameworks such as Bootstrap and libraries such as React and Redux. It has not been without challenges but I am confident enough to say with enough practice and consistency, I can tackle whatever problems lie ahead of me. Software development really has been a great experience so far and I can’t wait to dive deeper and deeper into it. I look forward to the end of the program and working in one of the most important fields of the future.
