Week 10. Post 3.

 

How have your interactions with colleagues from varying backgrounds holding differing perspectives developed your perspectives?

My interactions with my colleagues and the conversations I have had with them has really broadened my perspective about what I can do with my computer science degree. Working in a software engineering team in a non-software engineering tech company really helps you grasp all different intersections of CS with some other field. At my internship place, most of the people come form natural science backgrounds such as physics, chemistry, biology etc. 

I originally thought that to work in the tech industry one would need to come from a computer science background. However, as I talked to my colleagues I realized that people who work in the tech industry come from a lot more diverse and sometimes unexpected backgrounds than I thought previously. I learned that because tech industry is constantly growing there is always need for new perspectives and skills and any of the previously mentioned concentrations can somehow translate to an area of need in the industry. In addition, it is not hard to learn software engineering skills later in one’s career and convert to being a software engineer.

In contrast, I have other colleagues who first majored in computer science, worked as a software engineer, but then realized that might not be the job for them and decided to change their career. Yet, they did not completely went off from the CS field - they just shifted to some other jobs such as product marketing/management etc. 

At later stages of my life I will try to explore as many different fields of the CS as I can, not trying to limit myself just to software engineering.