My life plan was laid out by an 8-year-old. It’s safe to say that in general, children haven’t acquired enough life experience to be able to devise a solid career path. Nevertheless, adults commonly expect of children to answer the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And at the age of 8 I decided I wanted to become a marine biologist. A few (like 14) years later I did just that.
With a fresh B.Sc. in Freshwater and Marine Biology (with a minor in Neuroscience) under my belt, I landed a series of jobs working as an aquarist, taking care of sharks and rays. I was lucky to be able to live in my hometown of Toronto and SCUBA dive with exotic fishes everyday. It was a dream. But it was the dream of an 8-year-old, who at the time of its conception had no idea what being a marine biologist entailed. And my personal experience of it entailed being one individual in an oversaturated profession, which translated to an annual salary less than the total amount of my student debt. I loved my job, but it simply was not sustainable. Fortunately, I did not have to devise a plan B, because life threw me a curveball.
That curveball was a deep love for a Cajun that plucked me out of the North and pulled me down to South Louisiana. It was all very romantic, except for the United States immigration process rendering me unable to legally obtain work for 18 months, which made shit get very real. During this time, I started a vintage clothing pop-up shop, and I revisited my high school hobby of web development. I took some free online classes (what up, Coursera), rediscovered my love for coding, and newly discovered a fondness for programming.
The reasons that led me to decide to pursue development as a career are, I imagine, the same for anyone else in the field. I enjoy it, and I’m not bad at it, and it’s a viable career path. The actual steps that led me here are, I’m sure, unlike anyone else’s. But it’s not exclusive to my life experience to start down one path only to be swept to another. In the words of André 3000, you can plan a pretty picnic, but you can’t predict the weather.