Hello Devon,
My Name is Asha Glenn. I am a college professor running an ultrasound program currently. I fell in love with computers right before leaving for college in 1999 😳when my family purchased our first computer. I had always said that I would go into the health field since the age of like 6 (mainly due to fact that I was a sick kid, and wanted to give back). But once I hit my college campus, I immediately switch from my declared biology major to computer science…then I walked into my first CS course, and there weren’t any other black women in there…and I got very intimidated…and I immediately switched back to biology (but my love of computers never died). So fast forward many years later, and I am now teaching an associate’s degree program, and I decide that I need a master’s degree in education. I major in education specializing in instructional design. So now I am incorporating tech into my curriculum and I’m being introduced to design and all kinds of software; and I am sure that I am meant to be a programmer. So I enroll in Skillcrush’s Developer Course, and I love it. I am now skilled in HTML, CSS, JS, and a little jQUERY. I want to start freelancing to take on some projects, but I am scared and kinda clueless. I am also married with two little kids so I have a lot of distractions. I heard your podcast with CodeNewbie and felt that I could benefit from your help.
Thank you.
Ah-sha. She asked how to start selling her services as a newbie. Told her to think of herself as a problem solver rather than a web developer and to find problems she can solve with her current skillset. She asked what she needed on a resume. I told her you usually don’t need one for freelance work and that you need to build trust. Told her that, in the beginning, she can do that by building small prototypes of the parts she’s unsure of. This will also help her alleviate her own worries that she can’t do the work.She asked if she could think of the job description as a mini coding problem. I said that was a great idea. The only problem is you may end up chasing every technology out there. I told her to find what she likes and go deep on that rather than chasing the new shiny. Told her that, if she thinks of herself as a problem solver and talks to people about their problems, with an eye toward software she could build that might solve them, she can basically invent gigs by finding solutions people didn’t know were out there. She said she’s already been doing this at work after getting her degree in ID.
Next steps:
- Start building her network
- Look for work she can do
- Build a project of her own from start to deploy