If you asked me as a kid what I wanted to become when I grew up, I wouldn’t be able to tell you an answer. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and business owners so they told me why not pursue a law or accounting degree? Math was my favorite subject and they told me accounting would be a good fit then since it’s heavy on Math. They continued to tell me that it was also a practical choice since I’d be studying the language of business and I could take over their businesses after. With my parent’s insistence, I felt the need to follow their advice and elected to pursue a degree in accounting.
My first day in college, I vividly remember an icebreaker activity I had with my classmates from my course - “Why did you choose to pursue an accounting degree”? A lot of them said that it was their lifelong dream to become an accountant - that they wanted to have the prestigious three letter Certified Public Accountant title C.P.A. at the end of their names. I remember feeling that I couldn’t relate to that at all. I would answer that I pursued accounting because it was practical and that it would be easier to find work since businesses would need one - an answer echoing my parents sentiments.
The next few years I buried myself in schoolwork, passed my subjects, graduated with a degree in accounting, and then right after took and passed the CPA licensure board examinations. The most common path for aspiring CPAs was to work in an audit firm and render countless hours, regular overtime, and weekend work to gain experience. So following this conventional wisdom, I chose to work for one of the top auditing firms in the country.
I specialized in tax compliance and my work revolved around checking a company’s financial documents and processes against tax regulations and coming up with an amount that they would have to pay in case they were audited by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR). Naturally, my work involved a lot of research into tax legalese and a lot of Excel computations.
I found myself trying to automate parts of our workflow with Excel functions like =INDEX(MATCH()) and =CONCATENATE() and even dabbled in a bit of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the programming language integrated into Excel. This made our review process so much faster that I became the go-to “Excel wiz” in our team. I loved the problem solving and formula creation process so much that I reflected and thought “Hey, what I’m doing is programming. What if I learn an actual programming language?”. I didn’t see a lot of opportunities mastering Excel and I just couldn’t see myself working in tax for the remainder of my career.
So, I took a leap of faith and decided to carve out my own path. I had a new dream of becoming a software engineer, a dream that I can call my own. All my life, it felt like I was living life to fulfill expectations set on me by my parents. As cheesy as it is, I realized that I only had one life to live and I’d rather try pursuing things that would make me happy than chase after a dream that’s not my own.
And so at the height of the 2020 pandemic, I resigned from my job to pursue studying programming full time. It was great to know that I had the support of my teammates and managers and that they saw the potential in me. I started with learning Python and created short programs with turtle graphics. Though after months of persevering with my self-directed study, I decided I needed more structure and guidance to accelerate my progress. I enrolled in a local web development bootcamp and also did The Odin Project, a self-paced online curriculum on web development, to supplement my learnings. Eventually, I finished the bootcamp and landed my first role as a full-stack web developer.
Now, I can confidently say I’m thriving and much happier with the work that I do. Looking back, I don’t want to say I regret pursuing an accounting/business degree since it still gave me valuable skills I can transfer over anywhere. I also get to leverage the skills I’ve learned working in tax. For example, the heavy documentation and review process for tax accounting lends itself considerably to the way I code. It starts with heavy research on options to implement a feature and as I code, I like to cross-reference resources and documentations. Also if I have time, I enjoy writing the thought process behind certain implementations and as a bonus, it doubles as documentation for the team to review.
Overall, my experiences have shaped me to have a unique point of view and I wouldn’t change it for the world.