Time to Make a Change: TripleTen Students On What Made Them Rethink Their Careers

Have you ever felt like the time had come to take a new path and follow your true passions? Making a career switch can be challenging, but nothing is impossible. Here are the stories of TripleTen grads who reached a point in their lives when something had to be done. And signing up for a coding bootcamp turned out to be a great solution. Let’s look into how they turned their decisions into actions that led them to victory.

“As a mother of three at 40+ and overqualified for most jobs, I needed a fresh start” 

Marina Kingsbury found herself in a situation that hits close to home for recent Ph.D. graduates looking for jobs in a dwindling academic job market. After the 2008 financial crisis, the number of full-time teaching and research jobs in her field was declining, while at the same time, departments continued recruiting and graduating PhDs.

Marina’s race to stay competitive, however, was even tougher. The mother of three couldn’t publish papers as fast as her colleagues, which was a key metric in her field. “I just couldn't make it because I had too many gaps on my resume. I had the kids as I was working on my dissertation, so it took me longer than usual to finish it. And academia is really harsh. When they see that you haven't published for a while, or it's taking you so long to finish a dissertation, then you’re not as lucrative a candidate,” she shares.

At that point, many would have suggested that she shift into a business career — with a Ph.D., she ought to be a top-notch candidate. Yet so many companies saw Marina as overqualified. “It's really difficult to find a job,” she says.

I have all these credentials, but they’re looking for experience with these resume engines, and my experience is very specialized.

Marina decided to take another path and joined TripleTen’s Data Science Bootcamp. After enrolling, she was able to cast her research skills and passion for data into an in-demand profession. “I’m in my 40s, and I'm transitioning into a completely different field, and it's terrifying,” she admitted. “I hope that I can be a role model for someone in the same boat.”

 “My manual work would soon be automated”

For over three years, Pedro had been working at an international consulting company, where his tasks involved drawing up financial data for corporate pension funds. He was responsible for manually sorting through large Excel files to check how much money companies needed to invest in their pension funds and which employees had the rights to their pensions. "[Manual search] took a lot of time," Pedro recalls.

I used to work 10-12 hours per day and I was like, This is awful, I need something different.

He also noticed that financial analysis jobs had started requiring technical skills he didn't have, like proficiency in Python, R, SQL, and Power BI. His company didn't provide any learning opportunities to its employees, and Pedro realized his role would eventually be automated. As prospects of unemployment started to loom over him, he decided to do some research to see where he could take his career.

Pedro’s search led him to TripleTen’s Data Analytics Bootcamp, so he anticipated the threat that inspired him to look into a new profession in the first place. Shortly after graduating, he was able to switch to a new field. He started working on a project for a social media company.

“I need something more intellectual than my mundane job” 

Melissa Raje felt like her personal development had come to a halt. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in animal science, she got trapped in a chain of increasingly mundane jobs, the last of which was customer service work for a pharmaceutical startup. 

“Even though I had a tech and science background, my job was very mundane,” she recalls, “People calling to ask, ‘Where's my order?’, ‘Where's this?’, ‘What kind of products do you have?’. I was getting tired of just relaying information. I wanted to do more investigating and presenting information rather than just looking it up and passing it on".

I needed something more intellectually challenging.

Melissa’s frustration had already been building up for a while. She tried learning Python in 2015 during her first maternity leave but discovered that combining learning with childcare was hard to pull off. But after having her second child in 2018, she realized this might be her only window of opportunity. “In January 2020, [my younger daughter] was about a year and a half old. I felt stuck and I knew then that I had to do something while I still had a little more freedom.”

She decided to enroll in TripleTen’s Data Analytics Bootcamp. Once Melissa started her studies, she could then automate tasks she once did as a customer service representative. Her life gained the security and structure that she was missing.

 “I hit a dead end and needed to make more money”

Tristan’s journey into software engineering started from afar: the music industry. Having worked as a music teacher for over a decade, he was starting to feel like he’d hit a wall. On top of that, he'd just welcomed two babies into his family. Driven, Tristan knew he had to reconsider his career prospects.

“I like music. I didn’t want to drop it entirely, but I was kind of tired of teaching. You can only progress so much in that field pay-wise before you hit a dead end. Besides, my wife and I recently had twins, so I thought I should probably make a little bit more money doing something that I’ll enjoy," he says.

It was a combination of me wanting to shift from my personal interests, and in the process of shifting, find something more lucrative.

He sifted through many possibilities, but nothing felt right. Until a friend suggested trying an online software engineering course. “I took this course purely like, ‘I’m gonna try this stuff, and if I like it, great, but if I don’t, I’ll explore something else.’ And I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, so I just kind of continued down that track.” Moreover, Tristan knew of several other music teachers who had successfully transitioned into the industry. With those examples in mind, he was ready to pursue his new passion and joined a bootcamp.

After graduating from TripleTen’s Software Engineering Bootcamp, Tristan landed a job at Remind, an EdTech company that creates systems for schools to keep track of all their student information, and facilitate teacher-student interactions. Tristan’s responsible for handling and fixing issues with internal tools, like customer support modules. So his experience in teaching gave him a starting point for his tech career.

“I decided I needed to settle down”

Isabelle never imagined she would be a software engineer. During her 20-year career in the fashion industry, she had worked for many luxury brands, helping them drive product desirability and creativity while staying profitable. Isabelle loved what she was doing, but her job also involved commuting all over Europe. So, once the pandemic started, she decided to sit down and reflect on her future.

I decided, Okay, let's stop this crazy life. I need to choose where I want to live and find a way to stay there.

[...] I also needed to own something, a kind of craft that I could develop where I could continue to learn day after day. And where I could enjoy working in a quiet space. I think at some point I was really craving that.”

Isabelle decided to launch a small fashion project with her friend, and began discussing website ideas with designers. Unexpectedly, the talks compelled her to build it herself. “The more I [delved] into those conversations, the more I felt hooked by this new world and eager to discover more. I ended up doing our website myself on WordPress. That was the entry point [into web development].”

A couple of months into TripleTens Software Engineering Bootcamp, Isabelle got a part-time job offer in the fashion industry and accepted it. At the same time, she realized she didn’t want to stop at simply building a website for the project she had originally intended. Instead, her software engineering skills could also help others get credible and vivid images online. So, Isabelle established her own web design and development studio that makes websites for independent consultants, artists and designers. 

“I lost my job”

Nathanael Anderson worked as a bartender before the pandemic. “I loved the job, it was worth it for me,” he says. However, things changed when bars closed due to the pandemic.

He needed to find a way to pivot and get back into the workforce, as well as to have something to do during the day.

Fortunately, an opportunity was right beside him: his girlfriend was working in healthcare data analytics and was learning R for her job. Nathanael realized they could do it together.

“I decided that if she was going to be learning how to code in this R language, I would sit down with her and learn as much as I could, just to have something to do. I loved it enough to start studying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and [more].”

TripleTen inspired Nathanael to pursue software engineering as a career rather than a hobby. He began to explore it as a job after creating a handful of web pages. 

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