I currently attend the University of California, San Diego and will graduate with a Bioengineering: Bioinformatics degree in June 2020. I have only one class left to take Spring Quarter 2020. This class meets once a week for one hour and will be completed after 6 weeks of class. Due to COVID-19 online instruction and my light course-load, I felt like now would be a great time for me to take an immersive online coding bootcamp to improve my coding abilities and widen my career opportunities.
After an internship in biotech this past summer, I realized that I would also like to be able to explore other opportunities in the software realm. In fact, if I could change my major (or had the ability to in the past 2 years), I would have tried switching to computer science, but UCSD did not make this possible. The reason I chose bioinformatics in particular was because of my interest in computer science and learning to code. Initially, I thought it would be cool to combine medicine and biotech with computational and programming experience. I always wanted to take as many computer science classes as possible, but was hindered because UCSD limits most computer science classes to computer science majors only. This made it extremely difficult and frustrating to take any of the computer science classes I wanted, and I would have to make special requests that often got denied since I was not in the major or the class was already filled.
I have tried applying to multiple software engineering jobs with the very basic fundamentals I have from the courses I have taken, but all applications are fruitless. Reading the qualifications is usually discouraging because I do not know most of the skills (SQL, Ruby, React, JavaScript, etc.). Therefore, I would be extremely enthused to be able to learn these skills and have more qualifications for software engineering job opportunities.
I have a passion for devleoping and creating things, and I would love to have the skills to create an interactive app or software program to do something meaningful. I also just love learning new things and tackling new challenges, so learning more about software develompent seems like a perfect way to do just that.