Discovering a New Spark in a New Country: Marin Umegane’s TripleTen Story

Your job’s fine. No, really — it’s great. Sure, you do the same things every day, and the monotony has started to wear on you, but that’s what work is, right?

Right?

Well, what if it doesn’t have to be? Marin Umegane broke from the routine and discovered that there’s much more to work than the slog. Here’s how she did it.

Moving beyond security

Marin had an established career in vulnerability management in her native Japan. Over her three years in that field, she would look through digital infrastructure and report if there were any holes that needed patching up. It was a role in maintenance and customer support, and it wasn’t necessarily stimulating. “You get a request from the person in charge to scan the system. Then you scan the system, analyze the result, and report it,” she said, summarizing a typical day.

It wasn’t a situation that allowed for much variety. “There wasn’t anything new going on in my daily work. So I felt like I was getting stuck, and I felt like I wasn’t learning.”

So she started checking out what skills she could gain on her own to bring some life to her career. She thought picking up a coding language could be useful, but she found self-guided learning to be inadequate. “I taught myself Python, but I couldn't master it,” she said.

She was professionally stuck, and her capabilities were at a standstill. But then her personal life came in and changed things up. See, Marin had spent a semester abroad in America, and during that time, she’d met someone. They started dating, and her partner eventually moved to Japan, where they spent the pandemic together.

As Marin’s work repeated itself day after day, she and her partner began considering a return to the United States. Once they got married, that option turned into a plan. “We decided to move to the US, as we thought there was more opportunity to get a job or experience.”

It was time for a new adventure.

From certification to creation

Part of that adventure involved relaunching a career in a new country. At first, Marin thought she would just augment her know-how to fuel a career in the States. For that, she was looking for a program that would help her build a cohesive whole out of the coding she was struggling to interrelate. “I knew the principles of HTML and CSS_{Becoming an HTML/CSS Developer}, and I taught myself Python, but I couldn’t put everything into one project,” she said.

In addition, she was realistic about the time she could dedicate as she transitioned into life in a new context. “I was coping with a different culture, different country, different language.” So the program would have to be flexible. That led her to TripleTen. “You can adjust your learning schedule, chore schedule, and family schedule to easily fit your life. That was a huge merit.”

She enrolled.

‍Definitely, I’m not bored anymore. Marin Umegane, TripleTen grad

She found exactly what she’d been looking for. As she learned new tech, she applied it, and this unified her disparate knowledge. “When I joined the full-stack project, it was really an ‘aha’ moment. Like, ‘This part is going here, this part is going here, and this part works like this.’” 

It went beyond that, too — she found new inspiration in applying her new, cohesive knowledge.

I was really feeling great when I found I could make things work, not just part of HTML, not just part of CSS, but everything all together. It was really exciting. Marin Umegane, TripleTen grad

New country, new direction

This redefined the path Marin wanted to follow. She was no longer focusing on a job in vulnerability management. She wanted a job in software engineering.

I found a different passion for coding to make new stuff that makes people's lives easier. Marin Umegane, TripleTen grad

But she was still nervous about finding a job in the United States. “I suspected that job hunting in the US was different from job hunting in Japan,” she said. And after she gained the new skills and was paired with a career coach, her suspicions were confirmed. After all, she was in a new culture, and it had its own ways of doing things_{What Immigrants Need To Know About the US Hiring Process}. 

Specifically, in Japan, job hunting was much less dependent on connections. “Like 80% of the job hunting in Japan is just sending a resume and cover letter. If they like your documents, then they will invite you for the interview,” she said.

So the best piece of advice she got from the career coach was to get out and meet people. In addition, the coach helped her develop the confidence that could make her networking fruitful. “The meeting with the career coach was really encouraging,” she said. “I am not confident about my English or my tech stack, but when I talked to my career coach, she found my strengths.”

And ultimately, it was through one of these connections that she found her first opportunity. She started in a tech support position, but even when she was brought on in that role, the company was clear about its intentions. “They told me that they hired me looking at future promotion already,” she said.

She was only in support for four months. The plan for promotion came through, and now she’s a Junior Front End Developer at TelWare Corporation, a telecom company. Reflecting on the difference between her previous job in Japan and her new one, she sees a stark difference. “The work life balance is definitely better,” she said.

Best of all, though, her work is no longer tedious. When asked what she enjoys most about her new job, her answer was immediate. “Definitely, I’m not bored anymore,” she said, laughing.

Discover your new spark in tech

Want to break out of your routine and get a new stable, rewarding, and interesting job? Then it’s time to consider a pivot to tech. Take our career quiz to see which path is right for you.