Why I left my job to start coding.

Introduction

Hello wonderful person, my name is Lawrence, I am 28 years old, I live in the Philippines and this is the story of why I quit my job to become a Web Developer in pursuit of a better future. For a long time in my life I was always determined to become a doctor but as life would have it, it was not meant for me. So I chose to become a developer, . As far as I can remember, I have always wanted to become a doctor. With that dream, I entered into a state university and took a biological course as it was a great choice as a pre-med. Unfortunately, after spending 3 years at the university I failed and was kicked out of my college. Surpassingly though, I didn’t feel as sad as thought. I was still in my teens so I didn’t really realize the sad and bad part about wasting the years away. When I got kicked out of my college in the university, I found it hard to tell my parents as they were expecting great things of me. They were expecting me to make it through easy and then become a doctor. I told my father that I could still go to the university but just take up a different course. I told him I’ll take up psychology but he said that was a bad idea and then decided that I should go to a private community college near my home. He decided that the best course would be to become a Medical Laboratory Scientist as my pre-med.

Both of us were still determined for me to become a doctor. So I entered the community college, took Medical Laboratory Science, graduated and got my license. After that I started working in a lab. However, even though I regarded my job as a very important role in society, the pay was horrible. Medical Laboratory Scientists here in my country that were working in private labs were getting wages of around $165/month. This made me realize that continuing the work was of little gain for me so I decided to quit. I then decided to focus studying for the National Medical Admission Test or NMAT for short. I was still dreaming of becoming a doctor even though I was already way behind my highschool batchmates. I didn’t think much of how much I was behind though, I just kept moving forward and picking myself up whenever I got down.

However, after I took the NMAT, I only got a percentile score of 50% which generally qualifies me for some medical schools however the chances of me getting a scholarship with that score, as well as with my horrible record from the university, were very slim to none. The state university, which was free, only accepted students with a minimum percentile score of 60%, I was 10% off so that was no longer an option. Private medical schools accepted a minimum percentile score of 40% so I still had the possibility of taking up medicine. However, the private schools would cost around $83,000 to $84,000 for the full program and that was something that my family could not afford, plus they would only offer scholarships for students with percentile scores of 80% or higher. As you can see, it was over for me. I thought to myself “what were all of those years of preparation for?” I was in a state of not knowing what to do next but I still had to accept that becoming a doctor was no longer possible.

However, on the same that I was crushed by the realization that I could no longer become a doctor, I got a chat that would change my direction and start me on a new path. It was my cousin, I told him of what had happened and he said to me “You should become a programmer. After a few years you’ll earn as much as I do.” I thought to myself “My cousin earns a lot of money… around $1000/month(which is a lot in my country), and if I can become like him, then yes of course I’d want to.” and with that my path to becoming a Web Developer started.

With a new goal in mind, I asked him what I should start doing and he responded by giving me a link. It was a link to a tutorial about HTML and CSS. So without wasting anymore time I got to it, I spent 6 hours everyday learning about HTML and CSS from the tutorial and what I can say is that it’s not as easy as it looks when you first start out. There were many times that I had to watch a lecture again and again to understand what the teacher was talking about. There were also times where I had to ask my cousin to teach me cause I really couldn’t understand what my teacher was talking about.

After three months though, I finally learned HTML and CSS. I finished the course of what was meant to be finished in 2 weeks, in three months. Yes, it took me a while get it done but for someone who had no background about programming, it would have been too much if I didn’t divide the lectures over a longer period of time. I would have gotten an information overload otherwise.

As you can probably tell by now, I am not a very smart person but I am a determined person and that’s all that kept me going. I realized that there was nothing for me to go back to if I went back to the medical field, so I decided to take my chances and take on programming. I had no background about programming and I was not a very smart person but I had faith in God, my cousin and faith in myself. I didn’t know what the future would hold but I knew that I could try my best to write it the way that I want it to be.

With that mindset, I just continued learning how to code. With each passing day, what was once an alien-looking language soon became more and more clear to me. I was getting better at coding. As the months kept rolling by, I learned a few more languages. I learned PHP and SQL, and a bit of JavaScript, and I started feeling like my luck was finally turning around and after one year, my cousin decided that I would intern for him and help him work on the website he was working on. Basically, he wanted me to focus on the frontend of the website by learning about ReactJS.

So that is how things are going for me, everyday I wake up and code. There are many times when friends would message me to go hang out or send a party invitation for an online game but I decide that it’s makes more sense to code now and not waste time so that I can become a Junior Web developer for a big company as fast as possible.

So if you are like me, someone who got crushed cause your dreams are just out of your reach, then take my advice, and try programming. You may not love it now but who knows maybe you will learn to love it and it may just turn out to your passion after all.