Hello, welcome to my blog! My name is Katherine Roll and I am currently a student in a software engineering boot camp at the Flatiron school. It is a 15-week course that teaches the skills required to become a full stack engineer. It’s a bit of a crazy story, how I ended up here, writing code for hours every day.
To start, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts in 2019. In the back of my mind I had a long-term goal of going into the software or the actuarial science field. There was another part of me though, that wanted to go out west and work cows and horses on a ranch.
And I did just that. I moved across the country to Colorado 4 days after graduating and moved back home nearly three years later, ready to learn about software engineering, with a slightly edited goal in mind: I want to work remotely on my own farm/ranch and make the money through tech to sustain it, and the animals.
Going into the Flatiron school, I was not so sure of what to expect. I had taken a few computer science courses for my undergraduate degree, and a data structures course through Continuing Ed at CU Boulder during the pandemic. But, at the end of the day, I had no real grasp of how everything tied together.
With three weeks of Flatiron to have already flown by, I think I chose the right path for me when it comes to learning all this stuff. It is very self-taught material, while also giving guidelines and help along the way when you get stumped. Working on my first project this week has been rewarding to see that I can apply what I’ve have been learning to a real thing: myself and two others, wrote a functional dictionary app using a public API.
I am excited to see where the next three months at the Flatiron school brings me.