​At this moment, when I was 17, I was in the middle of applying to college. I remember getting into a huge fight with my mom about my essays; for some reason I had written a supplemental essay for a school whose deadline was in January, but I hadn’t finished my personal statement, which was due in a week. Suffice it to say, I’m a better manager of the college application process now than I was when I was 17.
 
For those of you who are well out of high school and don’t have teenagers, the date November 1st probably means nothing to you. But for anyone involved in the college admissions process, November 1st is the equivalent of the melting scream face emoji. Early action, early decision, priority deadlines, scholarship deadlines – it’s a lot to juggle. All of which is to say, this is the worst week of the year to be 17, and also the worst week of the year to write a blog about being 17. So like many high school students, I’m writing this the day before it’s due, and I’m going to ask my mom to read it to make sure I didn’t misspell the word “persistence.” Aside from that, I’ll be back next week on November 2nd, when everything will be a little bit better. 

Robyn Russell is the Director of Programs & Innovation for the Universal Access Project at the UN Foundation, and a fellow Loyola University Chicago alum. I haven’t kept close tabs on what Robyn has been up to since we graduated, but the snippets I’ve seen on Facebook and Instagram always intrigued me, especially in our current political moment. So I was delighted when Robyn gamely agreed to fill me in on the last 11 years of her life. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I did not know. Is that an answer? Yeah, I had no idea. I grew up in a small town in Missouri and it was like doctor, lawyer, nurse, teacher, the things you learn about in kindergarten. I was in theater and debate and student council and dance and advanced academic programs, all that. I went to see my counselor, like, "Give me some advice. What should I do?" And my counselor said, "Oh, you should be an actress. Haven't you heard that Brad Pitt went to Mizzou? You should do what he did. I think you're really talented." And I thought, "What? Why would you give me that advice?" Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of guidance. So I thought I wanted to work with people and make the world a better place, but I didn’t even know the term social justice at that time.
 
How did you decide to attend Loyola University Chicago?
 
I was from Missouri, so I looked at schools in the Midwest. I thought I wanted to be in a big city, so we went to Chicago and looked at some schools. I liked Loyola because it had a really urban feel, the campus is pretty, and I liked that it was by the lake. And for me, it was very different from my small town. It was the diversity. And being a political science major, it was the internships. Loyola helped people get real-world experience and that was really appealing to me. Plus being in a city is fun.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I think I was an English major and a theater minor at first, and then I added the political science major later and dropped the theater minor. Chicago was such a political city, and I took a class that showed me how you could make change on a large scale through the political process and policy and laws, and it was a new thing I hadn't thought about before. So I took one class and really liked it and decided to change my major.
 
Growing up, I was very sheltered. I was from rural Missouri. I didn't know any people of color. I didn't know any people from other countries. In Chicago, there were Filipino people and Turkish people and Spanish-speaking people and immigrants and brown people and black people. There are poor people in rural Missouri, but I didn't fully understand poverty until I got to Chicago. So being exposed to so many different challenges and so many different perspectives and so many different types of people, political science was a way to act in response to a lot of things that I had been unaware of previously.
 
I did a lot of internships - I'm a huge proponent of internships. I interned for a state rep and worked in the district office. For the first time, I understood what benefits the state could provide to people like electricity, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, social security. So that was great. And I interned for EMERGENCY, which is an international NGO focused on rebuilding health infrastructure in post-war countries. I did a lot of work in Southeast Asia where there were leftover land mines, so they set up land mine rehabilitation centers and trained people to go out and find them, and helped them make prosthetics.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
My first job out of school was working for Greenpeace. It was a ton of fun, but I only did that for about six months before I ended up getting a job with Mike Quigley. I actually have Loyola to thank for that. I went to meet with the head of the political science department, and he said, "I have somebody I think you should meet." He called Quigley, who was an adjunct professor at Loyola, and said, "I've got a student here I think you should talk to."
 
At the time, he was a county commissioner, and I came on as a junior staffer.
I was a legislative lead, but there were four of us, so I did a little bit of everything. What was cool about working in a super tiny office was that he was very trusting and would pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. It was great because I didn't even understand my limitations at the time, and I would go to these meetings with the Cook County Bar Association about digitizing all the court records and say, "Well, Commissioner Quigley thinks this." I was fresh out of school, this young girl with all these old men lawyers, but he had total trust in me.
 
When Rahm Emanuel went to work in the White House after Obama won, his congressional seat opened up and there was a special election. So Mike ran in the special election, and I got to work on that which was tons of fun, and he won. Then he said, "What do you want to do? Do you want to stay in Chicago and work in my district office, or do you want to come to DC and do legislation on the hill?" And that was a no-brainer. So I moved to DC in 2009.
 
When I was working on the Hill, I worked with the FDA on changing the lifetime blood ban on men who have sex with men. It said, essentially, that if you’re a man and you've had sex even one time with another man since 1985, you cannot ever donate blood. I worked really hard for about two years to get that lifetime ban lifted, and to change it to a five-year deferral, which is not ideal, but it can ramp down to a one-year deferral, and then eventually a behavior-based approach, which just means only deferring people from donating blood who engage in risky behavior. That was something I was quite proud to work on.
 
I left the Hill almost five years ago, and I went to the United Nations Foundation to work on international health with a focus on gender, on girls’ and women's health and rights. It's a little bit convoluted, but the US government is the largest funder of international women's health programs around the world, and funding for those programs is incredibly important for global development, particularly in low-income countries that really rely on US assistance to provide basic healthcare like contraception and prenatal care, and programs to end gender-based violence, genital mutilation, and child marriage.
 
Because I had worked on that portfolio when I was on the Hill, I knew how things worked there so I could design successful strategies to move the needle on those issues. What I mostly did for three years was grant money and think through strategy and go up to the Hill and do direct advocacy with congressmen and senators. But for the last two years, I've been working on a project with big international companies, so sort of shifting my focus. I work with companies that have large supply chains around the world to implement workplace health and wellness programs; think textiles, apparel, electronics, some agriculture like tea, coffee, cocoa, companies that employ a lot of women in developing countries.
 
The idea is that for a lot of these big brands, there's a return on investment when their workers are healthier; they're more productive, there's less turnover, less absenteeism. The thinking is that a lot of women have unmet health needs, so what role can the private sector play in helping to make sure that they have access to basic health information and services that they need to be healthy, productive people, and of course, healthy, productive workers.
 
I was really proud last year to secure 10 private-sector commitments to implement workplace women's health and wellness programs that we're now seeing come to fruition. There are tens of thousands more women who will now have access to care because these companies are stepping up in a big way. I'm excited to take that work forward, because I feel like I've really just dipped my toe into it.
 
I think a lot of jobs, you're technically performing, but are you doing anything that will actually make a difference? I try to challenge myself to really answer that honestly, and if I'm not happy with the answer, to change what I'm doing. That’s part of why I've changed jobs every two to five years in search of an impact. I have secured funding to do this work for two years, so I will stick with it for two years, but I'm also getting a second graduate degree. Here's a lesson for students: lifelong learning. You're not just going to go to college and then you're done, especially in today's economy. There's always skill-building that you can do, whether it's data analysis or AI or whatever the new thing is.
 
I'm getting a second master's in public health from the Bloomberg School at Johns Hopkins. It took me a while to figure this out and it actually took me doing work at the UN Foundation to figure out that I want to work on designing and reforming healthcare systems to improve outcomes. But I didn't figure that out until I was 30. And luckily I have a job that I can work full-time and do this at night, and I have a partner that enables me to change careers, and I have an income that enables me to pay for this. So I acknowledge it as a luxury, but I'm not satisfied and I'm looking to change.
 
Without getting on my soapbox, I think anyone who has done anything on public policy or healthcare knows America's healthcare system is broken and it's going through a time of really exciting upheaval. Compared to other sectors, healthcare is so behind on electronics, it's behind on customer service. There's a revolution of sorts going on right now to move from a system that is extremely expensive and delivers really poor outcomes, to one that can actually reduce costs and produce better outcomes. So that's a really exciting space to be in.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I think that our society is moving toward an increased importance of data and the availability of data in all fields. One disservice I see is that women and girls are not taught to focus on math and science as much as we should. Or at least I wasn't. I think that making sure that students have a fairly deep understanding of statistics and data analysis, and the ability to use Excel and not just Word is going to be increasingly critical in any job, and I wish I’d had a stronger base. If you're in school and you're going to get a degree, focus on those hard skills. Those are harder to learn on the job.
 
And I wish I had been given a structure for how to think about what I wanted to do that was not so focused on a topic, like the way we have majors, but was more focused on a skill set. It would have been helpful if someone had asked me, "What type of work do you want to do? Do you love to just sit in a library and research?" Or, "Are you a super extrovert, and you love being around people?" Or, "Are you a big-picture thinker and you're really good at systems thinking?"
 
We don't necessarily design coursework around that, but I feel like so many people come to me and say, "I want to work for the UN." And I don’t know what that means. Do you want to work in the field? Do you get a lot of satisfaction from being with people? Okay. Then you should run a program. You should get program skills like how to run a budget, how to execute deliverables, how to design a timeline, program management skills. Or do you want to be a researcher at the UN? Or are you a mover and shaker and you want to be on the political side of things? Or do you want to go through laws with a fine-tooth comb? You can have a passion, but it would be really helpful if earlier on people started asking, "What type of work do you want to do?"
 
People change careers five to seven times in their lives, so just go and do and try, and you change later. It's fun. I've done that and it's challenging, but you can do it and it's more dynamic, I think. If you’re going to college, you’ve already got a leg up on so many other people, so understand your privilege and do something with it.

​Bethany Buchanan is a newly minted realtor, a writer, a world traveler, a burro racer, and one of my best friends from our master’s program. She also wins the award for most unusual interview location, chatting during reflexology foot massages. Because Bethany and I overlap so much educationally, it has been exciting to see how she has forged her career path, taking different risks that have opened her up to different opportunities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I thought I wanted to be an ambassador or a diplomat. I thought I wanted to work in the foreign services. I don't know that I really knew what that was. It was probably just an idea that I had, sort of James Bond inspired, with all the ambassadors and diplomats you saw in those movies. I was in student government all through high school and I knew that I really wanted to travel internationally. It seemed like that was the most direct way to do that. And I liked the idea of contributing to some greater good through diplomatic action.
 
How did you decide to attend University of Colorado, Boulder?
 
My parents were not that involved; they just wanted me to do whatever made me happy. But I had a mentor who was very invested in helping me figure out what school I wanted to go to.
 
I was the student representative to the school board, so I would go to all the school board meetings and they were sometimes boring, and sometimes very cool. I got to influence votes and influence policy and help make major decisions, and I got to be friends with all the school board members. One of the school board members was kind of a renegade; I sat next to him and we would pass notes and stuff. He gave me this big book of colleges, and made some recommendations. And two of his recommendations were William & Mary and Georgetown
           
My parents and I went out to William & Mary and Georgetown, and toured them. Coming from a small town in Colorado, Georgetown being in Washington D.C. was very exciting, but also kind of scary. Then we went to William & Mary, and it was kind of sleepy and we stayed at this funky motel. It was really pretty and I really liked the teachers. They did a great tour and they were good at wooing students there. Those were the only two out-of-state schools I applied to.
 
I also applied to Colorado College, CU Boulder, and Denver University. I got waitlisted at Georgetown and then I got into William & Mary. I got into this cool volunteer program at William & Mary that had its own curriculum and its own little community. I also got selected to be a part of this student leadership foundation at William & Mary, which was really cool. There were some really interesting students that wanted to make a difference who were really involved in various causes on campus.
           
So I had some really good experiences at William & Mary, but overall it was not a great fit for me. There was a little bit of a clique atmosphere among the in-state students and I was a fish out of water. I had a hard time finding my niche and finding my people at William & Mary. And I was always a straight-A student and I loved school, but the emphasis on academics was almost too much. There wasn't enough of a balance of social activities and school activities.
 
So I ended up transferring back to CU Boulder, and at the time it seemed like this huge decision, like it was going to change my life and it could be really bad. But once I transferred to CU Boulder, it was really positive, it was really fun; I didn't have any regrets. It made me realize that we spend so much time spinning our wheels and stressing out about what school to go to, and in the end, it's an important choice but you can always change your mind and you can make the most of wherever you are.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
As soon I got to CU Boulder, I realized that the foreign affairs classes that I would need to take were really boring to me. And if the classes were that boring, then the career was probably not right for me.
 
I always knew that I wanted to major in English because I loved reading books. And then I had an extra spot in my schedule that I could fill with anything, and there was a costume technologies class where they taught you all about sewing and you got to be in the costume shop stitching the costumes for the productions. I took that class and loved it.
 
I had inherited both of my grandma's sewing machines, and I had been sewing things for a really long time. My mom and both my grandmas were amazing seamstresses, and I sewed my own wedding dress. But at that point, I just knew how to sew, but I didn't understand it on a technical level.
 
They taught us how to make beautiful headdresses and make a pattern off of a dress form and dye fabric and mold a felt cap to someone's head. It was so fun and I wanted to take all of those classes, and the only way to do that was to be a theater major so I did it. I got to hang out in the fashion shop, and I got this balance of analytical English people and then really creative, fun theater people.
           
We got to design an entire show, so I chose to do an Arabian Nights version of Romeo and Juliet in which the Capulets were the Moors and the Montagues were Spanish. For my final project, I did a 1912, Titanic-era evening gown; I got to build the corset and all the undergarments and then the dress from scratch, which was really cool. And then for one of our other classes I got to build a Vegas showgirl headdress with all these sequins and rhinestones and ostrich feathers. It was really cool.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
           
At the end of my senior year, I was applying for the Peace Corps. I really wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country, but I got into this disagreement with them about whether I was fluent in Spanish or not. Which I am, because I had lived in Spain when I was 16. They told me, "We would love to place you in Eastern Europe like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, or Africa, but you can't go to a Spanish-speaking country unless you can prove that you speak Spanish." So basically I said, "Alright, well then I'm not doing the Peace Corps."
 
So I found this other program through the Ministry of Education in Chile called English Opens Doors, Inglés Abre Puertas. I got certified to teach English as a second language and then I went and lived in Pichilemu, Chile. I taught there for six months, and then came home and got my first job in the travel industry.
 
I still wanted to go international, so I got a job as an account manager for very, very wealthy people that were part of this vacation club. My region was the Northeast, so New York, New Jersey, Boston; for the first few months, I remember thinking that people were calling and just yelling at me, but that's just how they talk. And then the economy skydived, and the industry I was in was built on real estate, so they laid off half the company.
 
I really didn't know what I was going to do, but something logical in my brain said, "This recession's going to be for a couple years and a safe harbor might be getting another degree." So I applied to grad school to get my master's in English. The plan was to go to whatever school was the cheapest, which I assumed would be CU Boulder, but Boston University came through with a really generous scholarship and stipend package, and I went and got my master's at Boston University.
 
I loved it. We had this amazing cohort of like-minded English nerds that were really cool and it changed my life. I guess for me, it provided me with a lot of confidence. I learned that I'm really good at reading texts and seeing patterns and pulling them out and then putting together a compelling argument from those things. It gave me this sense of accomplishment and purpose. And it made me realize how important and valuable it is for me to have this really strong, vibrant, stimulating, social community. It was very empowering.
 
I had worked at Outward Bound right before I went to BU, and then I went and worked for them for a while again. It was very low stress and I got to go for really long runs every lunch break. And then I did a half marathon burro race with a donkey, which had always been a life dream.
 
And then I went and taught community college. I worked at three different schools, which was really rewarding but also very challenging. I think the adjunct professor arrangement is inherently flawed in that they have a huge load and they’re not well compensated and they're not well supported, so it makes it difficult to succeed.
 
I had always told Outward Bound that I wanted to write for them, and I'd done blog posts for them. They approached me and said, "Hey, would you be interested in helping us with our main collateral?" And I said, "Yeah, I'd love that." I got to work directly with the executive director. He was really smart and creative, and they gave me a lot of creative license to put together their beautiful main collateral piece. I realized writing was lucrative and fun and I thought, "If I can get enough work as a freelance writer, I could make that my career." And then I got more freelance clients, and one of my clients, Inspirato, ultimately hired me full-time as their marketing manager.
 
I also had a business reselling vintage clothing. I'd always loved vintage stuff and my mom is an old hippie. I loved going to thrift stores even in high school; I felt this sense of achievement when I could get something really cool that nobody else had. And then I saw people out in the marketplace really succeeding, and I saw this explosion of small shops and little artisan companies in Denver. And Etsy was already pretty well developed, so that made it so easy to sell things online.
 
I started taking pictures of vintage cowboy boots and dresses from the 50’s in my backyard and putting them on Etsy. I got a ton of sales and then I got a logo and branded everything and had a social media presence and started going to these markets. It was really fun and I learned so much about what it takes to run a business. I couldn't keep doing it once I was working at Inspirato because I didn't have time, but it was a great learning experience.
 
I worked at Inspirato until this past June. I have an 18-month-old little boy, and my husband and I realized that we were on this hamster wheel that we couldn't get off of: dropping my son off at school, going to work, leaving work, rushing to pick him up, getting home at 6:30, feeding him, putting him to bed, and then doing the same thing five days a week. I definitely could have kept doing it, but it wasn't the life that I really wanted for myself. And then I got pregnant with our second, and I knew something was going to have to change.
 
I've always been really interested in real estate, especially in the Denver area. There are a lot of interesting neighborhoods, and I'm a hunter-gatherer; I love to research things, I love to find things, I love to share things with other people. So I got my real estate license and signed on with a broker and I've been dipping my toe in the water of trying to be a realtor. We moved out to the mountains from a small, historic neighborhood just outside of Denver. We have deer and mountain lions and bears and beautiful trees; it was a big change for us and I would love to specialize in helping other people make that change, especially with a growing family.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I have to say that one of the most positive things in my life has been working. When I was 14 or 15, I got a job at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. I didn't have my license, so I rode my bike. I worked there all through high school and I had to show up and be somewhere and be responsible and I loved helping the customers. I got to be a manager and I had keys and I got to order stuff and I got to help with choosing who they hired and I loved it. It gave me so much self-worth and confidence. The time I spent working, making money, developing my people skills was excellent.
 
I feel like it's easy to get really worried about the impact that your decisions are going to have in the long term. But the truth is, you have a really long life and you can make decisions, you can change your mind, and you can change your mind again.
 
I've been lucky to have someone who supports me both financially and emotionally so that I can take risks like changing my career and pivoting. But even when I was in college and my parents weren't paying for any of my stuff after I graduated, it still wasn’t that big of a deal. I've changed my mind about 10 times. I've done a lot of different things in terms of my career, and it has all been okay. You don't have to make the perfect, exact right decision all the time. As long as you are taking good care of yourself and the people that you love, it's all going to be fine.

​Lexis Hanson is a software engineer at Salesforce, a job I had always assumed required at least a specialized college degree. So you can imagine my surprise when Lexis casually mentioned that she spent a year and a half teaching herself how to code while working full-time, so she could make the transition from consulting and customer success to software engineering. And that’s only one example of Lexis’s initiative and dynamism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
At that time, I felt pretty certain that I was going to do something like financial advising. The reason I was interested in that, I think, stems from when my dad passed away, and my mom had a lot to handle at that time in terms of our household finances. So she started working with a financial advisor, and she would bring home these documents. It always caught my eye when I'd see these charts saying, "If you'd invested $10,000 in 1990, this is what it would look like now," and it was always this exponential amount. I thought that was so fascinating that you could just put your money somewhere and do nothing with it and it would become more money. So I had this idea in my head of wanting to help people do that.
 
At that time, I was also in a marketing competition organization called DECA. I was very competitive in DECA and was kind of evangelizing it at my school. I was one of seven or eight people leading DECA for the state of Arizona my senior year, planning and speaking at all the competitions. It was a blast. I traveled so much during my senior year within Arizona, and also to Atlanta, Washington, DC, LA, as well as Lake Tahoe. I was exposed to a whole bunch of experiences I never would have been able to do.
 
How did you decide to attend Arizona State University?
 
I actually only applied to one school, which is kind of silly in retrospect. I had the plan to stay local, because I have three younger sisters and I wanted to stay close to them while they were growing up. Looking back, I wonder what kind of schools I could have gotten into, even if I wasn’t going to go. But I got into Arizona State, and they offered me a full scholarship, so it was a no-brainer for me to go there.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I applied to the finance program and I got into the W.P. Carey School of Business outright. I stuck with finance for all four years, but I ended up adding a second major of marketing, particularly because I had been exposed to a lot of marketing stuff through DECA. So I ended up with a BS in finance and a BS in marketing.
 
I actually worked at Bank of America all through university. I started off as a teller inside of a grocery store banking center. It was the perfect job actually, because I could get a lot of hours in, and depending on the semester, I could do classes in the morning and work in the afternoon, or vice versa. Then I went into a role working the chat bot. But it wasn't a bot - it was me. It was a fun job. I didn't have to really do much selling, and I could have my homework on the screen too when it wasn't busy.
 
But I was realizing in college that the world of finance wasn't exactly what I thought it was. When you study finance, there are two major paths you can take, which is to go to New York and slave away working 80 hours a week. But I'm all about living a balanced lifestyle and feeling like I'm worth something. Or, of course, you can go into financial advising. But I was realizing that it's much more sales than anything else. I graduated early, so I was 21, and I was thinking, "What person on the edge of retirement is going to want to give 21 year-old me everything they have saved in their life?" Not that that's an impossible stretch, but I felt as if that was going to be a lot of work, to build up a book of clients.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I had always been interested in tech stuff, but I didn't have the skills to go and be an engineer yet. So one thing I looked into was analyst tech positions. Since I had the finance background and I could do Excel things and sales ops, I applied at SAP when I was getting ready to graduate. I happened to know somebody that was a sales manager. Her husband used to lead DECA for the state of Arizona, so that connection very much came full-circle, which was awesome. She was my referral and gave me glowing recommendations.
 
I applied for what’s called the Inside Sales Academy, but I had zero interest in being a salesperson. This woman that I knew there, Alison, insisted, "Don't worry about it. It's a very flexible role. We're just trying to bring in younger talent, and we'll adapt the position to whatever you need." I was a little skeptical, but I went in for the interview anyway, and I more or less came out and said, "Hi, I'm right out of college and I don't want to do sales, but you should still hire me." Of course, I framed it much better than that. But I found out that they had a role that was helping with the operational side of this inside sales team.
 
It was a smaller team at SAP at the time, and they didn't have somebody to help their salespeople keep everything in order. And what would happen is that, as they got close to the end of the quarter, there would be something wrong with the contract, or the right products wouldn’t be on it. So I basically pitched to them that I could fill that role and it worked. That was my first job out of college.
 
I did that role for about a year and a half. Then I was in Pennsylvania at our corporate headquarters. I dived deep and ended up learning a lot, so I was giving a presentation on these really small bits of minutiae that don't seem to matter but they were really important for what we were doing. There was this VP, Robert, in the room doing internal consulting, and apparently he was really impressed. He took me aside and said, "Hey, we're looking for somebody on our team. I know you're young and you're new to a lot of this, but I'm really impressed with how you think." It was mostly centered on, it sounds like such jargon now, but business process engineering. What they basically do is talk to different executives within the company across different functions and help them analyze problems, come up with solutions, and implement them.
 
I was really excited about this conversation. The team seemed great. He said there were certifications they wanted people to have before they joined the team. I immediately started looking at it when I got home that week. Luckily, all of the content I needed to know was available online or through internal channels, so I went ham and crammed for five days, signed up, and ended up passing the test.
 
I sent Robert a screenshot and said, "Hey, here are the test results." And he replied, "Lexis, this test is supposed to take two months of studying before you take it." I’m not saying that to brag. But if I look back at my experiences, that was the biggest moment I’ve had when I realized, if you don't have preconceived notions that something is hard or something is supposed to take X amount of time, you might just blow your mind.
 
It took about six more months because of internal politics and such, but I eventually got onto that team. I was on this team, and they asked me, "Do you want to go to Philly or Palo Alto?" And I chose Palo Alto because there's sunshine, and I think I've scraped ice off my car all of once in my life, and I never need to do it again. Arizona kind of breeds that into you.
 
It was a blast. The project that I consider my baby that I worked on the most was with our sales team in Mexico. It was such a weird experience because I was 23 at the time and there were directors and managers that were very seasoned, they had been working at SAP or in the industry for a long time, and I was up there presenting my PowerPoint slides like, "Here is everything that is wrong with what you're doing."
 
It wasn't just me, which was good. The other guy I had co-leading with me was one of our colleagues in Germany, and he was an amazing human being, very nice, very patient, and he had a German accent that was really lovely to listen to. It was super international, which was also a really good learning experience.
 
Around the time I was closing out that project, I was starting to look at other things in the Bay Area, not because I was running away from SAP - I actually had a really good experience there - but it was my first job out of school, and I was looking for some income growth and just to experience something different.
 
So I was looking at startups, and I ended up going to a company called Chameleon.
I was the first hire, so it was a super small startup. I worked there for about six months. Basically, it wasn't what I had signed up for. I had this expectation that I was going to be doing product management and customer success and some marketing as well. I ended up doing a lot of social media blog posts and stuff. It was not my jam.
 
So I thought, "I'm not happy. I'm learning a lot, but I don't feel excited to go to work every day. This isn't for me." And I wasn't doing much of the things that I really wanted to be doing. I was in a position where I didn't need to be anxious about going to work, so I made the decision to quit without having a backup. In January, I started applying, and I applied online cold to Salesforce IQ, and they responded to me. I interviewed for a customer success manager role, which is a fancy way of saying account manager, and I got it.
 
When I joined, it was a company called Relayed IQ that had been acquired by Salesforce. The company was still operating independently, so there were 200 or so employees. And we still had our own CEO. That was the part that excited me, because it was still a small-ish team environment, which I still feel like I hadn't had the experience of at the time. And the product was changing really fast, which was exciting.
 
They had already been acquired, so I knew that I was going to be integrated eventually, and I was evaluating, "Would I still be happy working at Salesforce?" And the answer was absolutely yes. The culture is amazing here, the work-life balance is really nice. And the customers that I was working with were really special too.
 
When I joined Salesforce IQ, because it was this small-ish environment, we had lunch together every day. We would sit at these really long communal tables, and I befriended a lot of engineers really quickly. Again, I had always been interested in technology, but switching to engineering never felt attainable. One of my friends pointed me to some resources online, and there was a really good website, TeamTreeHouse.com, that was the catalyst for everything. After going on the website every night for two months, I decided, "All right, I'm going to do everything I can to make the switch and make this happen with engineering."
 
I didn't have much of a plan, but I committed to spending 15-20 hours on it every week outside of work. I thought about doing a coding bootcamp, but I would have had to quit my job, and I didn't want that uncertainty of not working for six months. And I took some pride in trying to figure it out myself.
 
I split my time between reading, watching videos, coding my own projects, and then eventually working on an open-source project. That project I worked on was instrumental in my success. It allowed hiring managers to see the code I’d written, and it helped me prove that I was capable of making this transition.

Networking was also a key part of me making this transition. I put myself out there in uncomfortable ways, and set up informational interviews to better understand what hiring managers were looking for when they brought on new engineers. These connections came full circle by the time I began my job search for software engineering roles. Roughly 80% of my conversations were with managers and recruiters that I already had a previous connection with. And in May of this year, I switched to software engineering at Salesforce.

In spring of 2016, I attended Google I/O tech conference, and they gave all the attendees a Google Home that year. When I set it up at my apartment, I tried to ask it for the price of Ethereum (a cryptocurrency), but it replied with, “Sorry, I’m not sure how to help with that.” Given that I was making progress in my coding at the time, I thought, “I’m going to build an app for that!”

It took longer than I expected and involved many nights trying to solve for bugs I could barely wrap my head around, but in August of 2016 I launched CryptoPrices, an app for Google Assistant that lets users ask for the prices of various cryptocurrencies. It turned out to be a hit! It was published in the Google Assistant store and I was eventually given an award from Google for the traction it gained.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?

It partially frustrates me that I made a career transition in my late 20’s and I don’t feel like I have as many “technical chops” as others my age that studied computer science. At the same time, I have a lot of experience that’s unique on my team, and I get to bring my other skill sets to the table.

Some people are lucky enough to know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives. I envy them. I’ve felt for the last 10 years that I’ve been trying to “figure out my major.”  But I think it’s important to know that there are way more jobs out there than you’d ever realize. Jobs with titles like “Customer Success Manager,” “Chief Equality Officer,” or “Supply Chain Analyst” are careers I never thought existed when I was 17.

Unless you know that you passionately want to be a lawyer, nurse, teacher, etc., my advice would be to pick a major, courses, or internships that give you a variety of options and learning experiences. The more color you have in your story, the easier it will be to sell yourself in those jobs you’re eventually really excited about.

It also never hurts to pick up some technical skills, whether you navigate toward courses in mathematics, coding, finance, or something else involving formulas and logic. These might not always be the easiest skills to add to your resume, but they’re really helpful to have when you’re looking for a job. Employers love when candidates have skills that can be objectively measured.