Why Coding?
People assume that if you are studying something new, you must be unhappy with your current job. Why else would you invest that time, money and energy into it?
My entire working background is in law. I hold two degrees in law (LLB, LLM) and I passed the New York Bar Exam two years ago. I have always worked in the legal field - from research to capital mitigation. Everything I have ever known and was interested in, was related to law.
After a while, I started to itch to learn something radically different. I still appreciate my work, and I continue to work as a mitigation specialist. My field is meaningful and impactful and I’m grateful I can actively participate in my death penalty abolitionist stance by directly working in the field. But I wanted to challenge myself to think about something that I have never had to wrap my head around. We become comfortable in our work and it is the norm to stick it and climb the ladder for 40+ years. But what if we could shake things up?
I was interested in studying coding for at least three years. My friend kept pushing me to do it but I didn’t take the plunge. I was nervous. It was completely new, I didn’t know where to start, and it felt like it will take me forever (spoiler: it still does!). I also didn’t know where I was going to go with it. I felt like I needed a clear plan if I wanted to invest into it. In the time that I’ve been fretting, that friend started and just finished a mastery-based software engineering program and has opened a world of possibilities to himself.
In the months that I’ve now been studying coding, I’ve found that I can apply the rudimentary skills that I have acquired to my work in law. My existing work can be approached through tech, and I am viewing new projects through this new lens. While I am diversifying my skillset and (hopefully) keeping myself interesting, more importantly, I’m also finding myself increasingly interested. The older I get, the more I appreciate the importance of staying stimulated and changing your status quo.
After working through the mental obstacles of convincing myself to finally do this, I learned a lot of things. There is no reason we have to stick to one field - or the way we approach our fields - for the rest of our lives. The degree we studied at university does not have to define us. If we are happy in our fields, we can learn something different and see how we can integrate it into our daily work. Or just do it just for the sake of learning - which is a really undervalued experience. Doing something new is uncomfortable, but there can be joy in jumping feet first into that discomfort. We don’t have to stress about where something is taking us, or what the next step on the ladder is. The journey is part of the process.
Sometimes, on a free day, I like to put my phone away, jump on a train in a random direction, hop off at an unknown spot and wander around and explore. I crave that sense of a mini-adventure in the city I live in, and the chance to stumble upon places rather than read about it online first. Right now, I’ve hopped off the metaphorical train and I’m exploring tech. I got tired of reading the blogs of data scientists and asking my tech friends about it. I’m uncomfortable, I’m not sure what lies around each corner, and I’m seeing crazy things I’ve never seen before. For now, this is a pretty fun place to be in.