My 3 Emotions Leaving Digital Marketing for Recurse Center During Covid
Excitement, anxiety, and fear!
On the second day out of my well paying marketing job (I made ~60k annually as a Junior analyst which is above NYC’s general median salary of 57k) the 3 emotions really sunk in. I had a decent runway of 10 months saved up having worked 2 years after graduating and being smart with my spending decisions.
However, the feeling of tapping into runway money to join a bootcamp always feels dangerous, especially since I had recently downloaded the mint app to track my overall finances and now would have no income coming in and rent coming out every month. What kept me hopefully though was the connections recurse center was fostering for me even before I started the program. This boosted my feelings of excitement!
Excitement
The excitement came from my hopes of getting back into coding. I had previous experience coding in highschool working with HTML, CSS, and Javascript and tossing code together in college, so the world of front end felt welcoming. Add on top of that was the idea of a salary bump, knowing junior front end devs made $90 — $100k, and the hopes that if I played my Fall1’20 batch and my 12 weeks of self guided learning well I could end up in such a role. But what I knew would keep me focused above all that were the projects I had in mind.
My big project would be a list of locations shot in nyc that people could search through and that would be placed on a map for people to go take photos of when we could all travel and walk around the city again. But like all big projects that are dear to ones heart the anxiety of failing and even worse making a low quality version always kept creeping into my mind.
Anxiety
On top of the anxiety of being jobless in a pandemic was also the worry that I would make little progress on the project I had at hand. In my mind the phrase: “I know the path, I just have to get to the end” was in constant conflict with, “but what if you’re wrong or don’t make it to the end.” This battle of thought is what I know will be the toughest barrier for me because I know that without belief, one is likely to stray and if you stray you leave room for fear to become reality.
Fear
The fear that I don’t want to become reality is 12 weeks that show little to no progress, leave me jobless, and have me wondering why I made the decision to leave what I had to fail in what I wanted.
But I don’t plan on focusing on that fear! I plan on using blog posts, my networks at recurse center, and the array of knowledge that is out on the web to get the skills I need to succeed. I hope that after 12 weeks I can come here and write my 3 new emotions of stepping into the career path of entering Front End Development as a career.