MY JOURNEY THROUGH TECH

My journey through tech has been a rather bumpy one. I developed an interest in ICT about 2 years ago and it has been something of a roller coaster — sometimes challenging, and at other times, wonderful and time-consuming. I wasn’t really consistent as I had some other things on my plate.

It all started at ROAR hub in my school (University of Nigeria) where I attended a workshop on growing your ideas into businesses, knowing when an idea has a chance to thrive or fail, considering our community and the challenges that come with it, or if our ideas solves a problem in your community, and also, I learnt how to pitch. By the end of the workshop we were grouped into teams with magnificent ideas and we were told to see it as a company and make it grow into that. So my team and I kept working on our idea which was called Trillzapp (a geo-location enabled event discovery system for professionals and everyone else new in an environment or looking for where to chill off). I was a digital marketer for my team and since I had no knowledge on digital marketing, I took courses online and developed myself in that area.

We competed at the Techfest event in Lagos where we came second. That period was a really great exposure for me. I moved into web designing on freecodecamp which was recommended by a friend. And I loved it and started developing myself.

I got cut between school and programming, and it wasn’t easy for me as the peculiar nature of our environment makes it extremely difficult to combine these two interests. But programming was what I enjoyed doing.

I pitched to investors with my team but fun and school came to a crossroad and I wasn’t putting in enough effort into any so I had to choose one and it had to be school.

I went for my SIWES experience a few months later and learnt a little bit of: Java, android studio, JavaScript, data analysis, a brief brush up on HTML AND CSS. Then I focused on web design using HTML AND CSS and JavaScript, and using WordPress.

After my IT ( industrial training) I resumed for the next session but because of the pandemic everything was put on stand still even programming.

At some point, I had even come to the conclusion that I should probably put the whole programming thing on hold and just focus on school but my heart wasn’t agreeing. So when I got the letter in the mail informing me that I had being accepted into the internship programme at GENESYS I was shocked and excited because I couldn’t believe I got in. I had applied 3 months ago and even forgotten about it till the interview in May, after which all hope was lost because I had issues with my network and wasn’t able to finish the test or the zoom interview.

I got to know about the internship from a friend who works at GENESYS. He told me about the internship and sent me the link. The funny thing is that the opportunity for the application into internship programme had closed but a second chance was given and there was a countdown to when it was going to close, I almost missed that too. But thank goodness I latched on the opportunity just at the nick of time.

I’m hoping this opportunity really provides me with real concrete growth so that I can expand my horizon. Sitting at home doing nothing this period isn’t good. Like the saying goes “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. I certainly do not want to be the horned beast’s workshop-NEVER!