Faye Bridge
writes on June 12, 2015
Laura had dedicated herself to a career in fitness and health when an unexpected injury forced her to walk away from the fitness industry. Her future derailed, Laura was faced with the need for a drastic career change.
Although she had no prior experience in tech – and considered herself terrible with computers – Laura researched the industry and found herself increasingly drawn to it. What started as a hobby and interest for Laura swiftly transformed into a career aspiration. With her mind made up, she decided it was time to invest in learning the valuable coding skills that would equip her for a career on the web.
Laura joined Treehouse and found the learning experience a perfect fit for her. With newfound direction, Laura was able to focus and dedicate time to learning to code. Today, Laura is creating apps and sites, building up her portfolio and is well on her way to an exciting and bright future as a front end developer.
We caught up with Laura to hear more about her experience of transitioning into a new career in the tech industry.
After graduating college with a Fitness and Health Promotion diploma, I spent three years working in the fitness industry. My jobs included fitness instructor, circus coach, and owning a personal training business. I had spent so much time focused on my future in the fitness industry that when I had to walk away due to injuries, I felt completely lost.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2014 that I stumbled upon tech. Up to that point, I had convinced myself I was terrible with computers. The thought of touching Excel had me running in the other direction!
I decided I had enough of being “bad with computers”, and started spending a whole lot more time on Google. The more I read, the more interested I became.
By the end of the summer I had made up my mind – I was going to learn programming!
It started as a hobby, but my goal very quickly became a career as a developer.
Using a variety of resources was getting me nowhere. I found myself quite lost when trying to figure out what I should be learning. That’s when I decided to give Treehouse a shot, and it was a lifesaver! I finally had direction and knew exactly where I should be focusing my attention thanks to the Tracks. The whole team at Treehouse really cares about the success of their students.
Currently, I work as a community moderator for www.slant.co. My free time is spent learning new skills and building web apps and sites. I can honestly say that this is the happiest I’ve been in a very long time! I get to spend my days learning new things and working on projects I’m passionate about. I hope in the near future to start working as a front end developer!
My advice to aspiring developers: Keep at it and code like crazy! It’s no secret that programming can be overwhelming and discouraging at times. Work on projects that excite you as you learn and don’t worry if you don’t understand things right away. Keep working at it, keep coding, and things will click.
The dreaming in code thing? Don’t worry, that’s normal too.
To read more awesome student success stories, check out the Treehouse Stories Page.
Awesome story! I went from fitness to programming as well so I can totally relate!
I will be next!!!
I had a similar career change a few years ago when I jumped from working in Food and Beverage into the Tech world. It’s never too late to make the switch and working with technology is always fun and exciting because there is so much innovation in our industry. Things move fast and that’s sorta cool.
On top of “coding like crazy” I’d add one more thing, break stuff. Do it constantly. I gained a lot more confidence with code when I would create test environments to purposefully comment out parts of code, or change certain properties just to learn and understand how everything behaved on the front end.