From Business School to Coding Fool

Jack Cornblum
3 min readJun 1, 2021

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Back in January, at the start of 2021, I was beginning the final semester of my undergrad degree at NC State University. Despite being just months from finishing my college learning, I felt lost and terrified about where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. My major was Business Administration with a concentration in Information Technology, but I had no real passion for any of the topics and courses I took. I can’t even count the number of sleepless nights I had fueled by anxious thoughts about my future and the field of study that I had chosen.

My IT concentration courses were what first introduced me to coding and languages like C# and Python. While I enjoyed learning about these things, my education in these topics and languages was very shallow. I never got to experience a deeper understanding of coding as a whole. A few weeks into my final semester at NC State, I started to have serious conversations with my family about what I wanted to do post-graduation. It was during these conversations that the idea of a coding boot camp was first introduced to me by my mom.

A friend of my parents had a son who attended Flatiron’s Software Engineering program and had good things to say about it. My knowledge of coding from college was minimal, but I did have an interest in learning more and potentially having a career in it. After some heavy soul-searching, I decided to commit to the idea and apply to Flatiron. I was skeptical at first of my decision and began to question whether I was making the right choice. Ultimately what gave me comfort and dismissed my woes was reading and hearing the testimonials of past Flatiron students. I read countless stories about the great experiences that former students had learning coding from scratch. So even though I was scared shitless, the testimonials of former students gave me hope. I decided to take a leap of faith and give it my all, because at the end of the day no one could make this decision for me.

Now, a few months later and a couple of weeks into the program, I am more than happy with the decision I made. Despite still knowing very little about coding in the grand scheme of things, the learning process has been actually enjoyable. The journey so far has been challenging, but that challenge is what motivates me to push myself. Working with my cohort mates has unexpectedly been one of my favorite aspects about the program so far. The amount of diversity in terms of everyone’s backgrounds and former occupations truly makes the experience unique. Regardless of what profession each person had prior to the program, we are all working together as a collective to learn coding and software engineering. All in all my first two weeks have been a great time, and I’m excited to see what else is in store for me throughout the remainder of the program.

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