Written by: Alycah Anne N. Villalon
Scholar batch 2021-2022
School: STI College Lipa
IT sector is a diverse field. Remember the “Oh you’re in IT? Can you fix my (not related to IT device)” memes? A meme which is, up until now, is still happening. IT is so wide that there’s a lot of jobs and career paths to choose from. From software to hardware, codes to machine learning, you name it.
A cause of dilemma and somehow excitement for people like me who wants to dive in tech.
I know not only me was fascinated by those hacker scenes when I was a child. The high-tech sci-fi movies I grew up with influenced me choose this field I’m taking now. Fancy graphical user interfaces that floats and can be dragged around, actors fast typing on their keyboard (which are probably random words) that makes the scene intense, and the Linux command line is what made me: SOLD. And thus the 7 year old me vowed to become a great hacker (lol).
However though, after growing up and watching different videos, reading forums, blogs, and anecdotes I am once again, influenced by these things I was exposed with. This time, when I was in high school, I aspired to be a software developer/engineer. It amazed me how people could write code. How the app I am using, the game I’m playing, the website I’m browsing was made by them. Then again, the 16 year old me vowed to be an engineer that could build software (I remember I aimed big and planned to develop a software system for a space station). Ah, youth. Take me back.
Came senior high and this is where my naive dreams dwindled down. I found HTML and CSS annoying, got good at Java and C# but had no plans to continue it further, excelled in Android development but didn’t have any ounce of interest in mobile development. The workload of senior high school (especially minor subjects) made me kinda stray off from IT. My passion disappeared for a while and thought of shifting to medicine (my original dream) when I get into college. And for some reason while I was about to graduate, I suddenly became interested in cyber security. Info sec, penetration testing, cryptographer, and security analyst seem like a very unique job to take on. As you have thought, yes, once I again I shifted from developer to infosec.
Now that I’m in college, my interest then again changed to DevOps and cloud computing (even better since these to go hand and hand). The concept of scaling remote servers, CI/CD, containerization, and automation is a foreign concept to me, yet I see myself in this field. I am now at a point of confusion where I’m second guessing being a developer (may it be web or software). I do enjoy coding and learning different frameworks, but I have a feeling deep inside that I won’t enjoy it as a job. I know I can get good, great even, if I stay to one path but I keep on losing focus and hop from one field to another. In the end, I think of myself as a ‘jack of all trades, master of none”.
I’m lost in IT.
I don’t regret it at one bit. I’m actually thankful I got to dive in each of those fields or topics, and actually got to experience hands on learning about it. It’s fun learning different paths. Though now, I have to focus on this current dream of mine and make sure to stick with it.
Of course, I am taking ULAP.org to this journey of mine. 😉
