How I Ended Up in Tech!
From Equations to Expressions: My Accidental Journey into Tech
Right after finishing high school, I chose Foundation in Engineering because I thought being a mechanical engineer sounded cool. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure what I was really interested in at that time.
Once I started foundation, I realized something important: I didn’t enjoy physics at all even though that’s a core subject if you want to be an engineer. But at the same time, we got to learn computer science, and I was instantly hooked. I played around with Arduino Uno, made simple projects in C, and genuinely enjoyed it.
Still, for some reason, I stubbornly continued with mechanical engineering for my degree. I guess I was chasing an old dream, even though my heart wasn’t in it anymore.
When I started my degree… well, you can imagine what happened next. Physics? Struggled a lot. Math? Also rough (although I still passed, it never really clicked for me). To make things worse, I never actually understood what engineers really do. Even during my internship, I felt lost and didn’t feel like I was contributing much and I hated that feeling.
In my final year, I decided enough was enough. I wanted out. I started sharpening my programming skills again, and even picked an FYP topic related to coding because I didn’t want to deal with engineering stuff anymore. The problem was, at that point, I only really knew Python and C, and had no idea what jobs actually required those languages. All I knew was I wanted to code.
Fast forward to my first ever programming-related interview: I had to prepare HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That was literally the first time I’d ever heard of them and wow, I thought they were super cool. That’s when I discovered web development, especially frontend work, and honestly, it was love at first sight.
After that, I went all in. I researched, studied, and started applying for jobs. Even though I didn’t make it past the final interview stage, I was grateful because through that process, I stumbled into the world of frontend development.
Sometimes I wonder what if I’d known all this earlier? Maybe things would’ve been smoother if I’d chosen computer science straight away. But it’s okay, because I believe everything happened for a reason. I’m grateful I found my passion through all those struggles.
And that’s how I ended up in tech.