James
My Background
I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international management in 2014. I couldn’t find a full-time career position with it, and I struggled a lot because of it. I worked customer-facing roles until I found my current job where I write code and manage a database for an administrative office of the Massachusetts General Hospital. I was never formally taught how to code, so a lot of my early work was messy and undocumented.
Bridge
The Align program was a way to formally train myself in the work I found myself enjoying most. It also allows me to get a master’s degree rather than another bachelor’s degree. I learned how to use GitHub and write more refined SQL queries, and I’m already seeing tangible improvements at work. I can’t wait to see how far I go once I graduate. The program recently relaxed its requirements to allow a part-time master’s course load to still qualify for full financial aid. This has been huge for my mental health as balancing full-time work and full-time school was becoming quite difficult. Now I can continue working to pay for the program and my living expenses while still having time for self-care. The Align bridge courses were a great way to give me the base of knowledge I needed to begin the master’s courses. All of the bridge course instructors were very kind, and the lesson plans were well laid out.
My Future
For the future, I am interested in data science and management and/or software engineering. Through my current job, I have seen first-hand how a tailored data management solution can save many hours of administrative work. So many offices are still copy-pasting the same data by hand into the paperwork they must fill out over and over again. I have played a hand in automating this redundant data entry for my workgroup, and I see that there is still so much potential for this to be done for many other groups. Workers who are freed from data entry work can instead spend their time on analyzing processes, trends, and errors. Our office has transformed from a group of paper pushers to a group of thinkers and project leaders thanks to our implementations of these automated data management applications. Once we convince other managers to do the same, there will be plenty of work writing and maintaining the custom applications for those with enough knowledge of computer science and database systems.