Why I Applied to Coding Bootcamp at 35
When I was growing up and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never had a decent answer. I never found that one thing that I would get totally lost in and become obsessed with. I always assumed that it would find me one day, like the great love of my life. So when I was about to graduate from college without any plans or goals and my sister offered me an unpaid internship in New York City, I thought “Yeah, I could try out Brooklyn for a few months”. Of course one thing led to another and somehow I ended up with a thirteen-year career freelancing in reality television.
When I was young, the industry was so glamorous. Yeah, I was getting paid horrible money to work insane days, but I was 23 and paying my dues. Eventually I met my mentor who took me under his wing and brought me up from Production Assistant to Director of Photography, and I got to travel all over the country and the world making all sorts of ridiculous television. The adventures were amazing, from filming camel rides in Morocco to go-kart races through the streets of Tokyo. Each show was like summer camp where you become super close to a group of strangers only to scatter into the wind six weeks later and then do it again with a whole new group of people. I thought that this is what I was meant to do for the rest of my life.
What no one ever tells you when you get into freelance production, however, is that it is an industry that has little regard for personal boundaries. You are expected to work twelve hour days and travel out of town at a moment’s notice. I always thought that once I “made it”, I’d be able to pick and choose where I work and for how long. Like all of a sudden, the shows I worked on would be eight hours in a studio two blocks from my apartment and once 6:00 came along, everyone would agree to call it a day. I was waiting for a job that would never exist.
To say 2020 was a year of juxtapositions would be an understatement. It was an emotionally taxing, socially isolating and financially draining year for me. It was also the best year of my life. I proposed to my girlfriend in January. We travelled to New Zealand before the pandemic hit (she’s a Kiwi). We eloped in March (for love and insurance reasons, not the pandemic). She got pregnant in October. I was blessed with so many life achievements I had wanted for so long and it wasn’t until early 2021 after work started up again that I realized my old model of work-life balance was incompatible with what my life had become.
And so it was while I was traveling for a shoot in January of 2021 that I decided to apply to a coding bootcamp. I was able to do some of their free pre-entry courses which led to my admission and I have finally found the thing that I love to do. There have been multiple nights of waking up at 4:00am and realizing where that bug was, or starting up VSCode after dinner and finalizing some CSS. It has been demanding and at times overwhelming, but also one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
I’m not saying my story will be your story, but I can tell you that a coding bootcamp can be an avenue of change if you’re looking for one. I haven’t graduated yet, and job interviews are their own future nightmare, but for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m becoming who I was meant to be.