Woo boy! This is the first post to my blog, so I figure a little background into who I am and how I came to my decision to become a developer is in order. It’ll be a fairly lengthy one so get comfy!

I graduated from San Jose State University in 2013 with a B.S. degree in Chemistry, with a concentration in Biochemistry. I was geared towards med school and was well on my way. I had the lab research experience with a publication underway. I had the GPA for it. I had pretty good MCAT scores (minus the verbal reasoning section, which I was going to retake to improve). I had an incredible internship shadowing surgeons in various specialties at the UC Davis Medical Center. I went on mission trips to Vietnam and Honduras, and provided medical aid and pharmaceutical supplies to rural villages. When it came down to it, I pretty much had the model resume for a pre-med student.

While I was studying, I worked as a fine dining server. I had massive amounts of exposure to successful people and to people who lived that luxurious lifestyle I always wanted. At the time, I also got into reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki, which fueled my desire to become successful and to escape the rat race. That was when I decided to delve into the word of real estate investing. I did a bunch of research on ways in which I could invest and realized that frankly, I didn’t have the capital to do traditional investing, and so I sought mentors who could teach me to invest creatively, through terms and leveraging contracts. I found Phil Pustejovsky and his Freedom Mentor program, a program that offered quality creative real estate investing education, as well as partnerships with you on real estate deals. I truly believe it to be a great program, but I wasn’t in the right mindset to succeed from it, so I didn’t. I fully intend to revisit real estate investing with Phil and his team, but have recently learned that there needs to be seasons for endeavors instead of trying to juggle everything at once.

That said, where did med school stand in relation with real estate investing? I was trying to do both at the same time. It was my intent to take my profits from real estate investing and save for my medical school tuition.

A year later, while I was working on my real estate business and studying for my MCATs, I had to slowly draw back from my real estate business due to running out of saved up funds since I had quit my job as a fine dining server. I was spending a lot of time being busy with my business, but not being productive. In short, I wasn’t doing the things that were needed to push my business forward, I wasn’t focusing on the right actions. This factor, coupled with some private matters, meant that I needed to find a job since I was in a financial bind. This was the point in which I decided that instead of heading back into the hospitality industry, that I would go and find a job that utilized my degree.

Enter Genentech. A couple months after I started the job search, I was lucky enough to have a friend refer me to a team in Genentech where I eventually got a job. It was around this time that I started to lose my passion for medicine. I started to realize the magnitude of time and dedication required to be successful as a surgeon, and realized that the work-to-reward ratio just wasn’t what I wanted. I also started to consider other options: Conversion to Full-Time Employee at Genentech, get a PhD, move to a different company within the industry, etc. The options were many, and yet, I didn’t quite feel that this was where I belonged and where my passion was.

I sat down with a couple good friends of mine over lunch, who were also co-workers at Genentech, and we had a deep discussion about where our futures were headed. At this point, I had expressed my inner turmoil, and it was just one question that made me realize that I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, and I was headed in the wrong direction: “Where do you want to be in five years?” Now, this question USED to be easy. When I was pre-med, this question was simply, starting my internship after graduating med school at so-and-so hospital. Now that I had lost my passion for medicine, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew what I wanted out of life, but how to get there was completely unanswered.

After a couple days, I found my answer when I was presented the opportunity to work with Team Beachbody as a Coach. It was also around this time that I had amazing results from using Shakeology and Insanity, and was constantly sharing my progress and methods with whoever asked. So I started devoting time to Team Beachbody and working towards creating my own personal brand in health & fitness, as well as gaming through YouTube content and Twitch livestreams. This of course, was all the while I was also working at Genentech. It was definitely a lot of work, working the job in the morning and working on my side hustle at night.

After a year at Genentech, I left and worked at Agilent Technologies as a Software Test Engineer and Chemist. It was at Agilent that I started to develop an interest in software development. I had the incredible opportunity to speak with developers and see the love for their work. I had expressed in learning to code before during my interview at Agilent, but I never really pulled the trigger. I finally decided to do so Summer 2016 and after trying some coding hands-on through Codeacademy, I discovered an excitement for coding.

That’s it for now! In the next post, I’ll be going into how I’ll be pursuing my career as a developer, and the resources I used to get me to where I am right now, so stay tuned!