Tech took me out of the Ghetto!
I secured my first tech job as a Machine Learning Engineer after one year of learning how to code. The following year, I secured two job offers from two of the world’s top tech companies, Microsoft and Shopify at the same time. I am barely 20 years old.
Should you have my contact and you view my WhatsApp stories, I have recited these quotes all my life, and some folks might have gotten tired of seeing them. I hope you meditate on them, they burn through your heart, and they spur you to take up that next life-changing step, regardless of your background and present circumstances. The three quotes will undoubtedly serve as your key takeaways from this story.
- Sometimes, the place you are used to is not where you belong; You belong where you believe you belong.
- If you have a dream, fight for it.
- It is possible to do great things from even a small place.
Funny that some sentences and paragraphs in this article have been re-written and submitted in many of my past life story job applications and scholarship essays that I have them stuck in my head and I can recite them like I am some iCloud program.
A bit of this article might be me referencing and giving accolades to a few people that have contributed and impacted my life one way or the other throughout this journey. I hope you don’t find those boring; however, they mean so much to me, and I hope it resonates with the persons in question as well.
Sit back, grab a snack and juice. It’s going to be a long one.
Background
I was raised in a middle-class family, my father had one cow(Pun intended), and everyone adjusted with independence by leaving out the entitlement mentality. I have been able to build resilience to adapt to the constantly changing situations affected by people trying to get to the pinnacle. However, unlike many other people’s stories, I was not exposed to the internet while growing up. I went to a small local school, trying to get good grades, hoping I’d someday grow up to become a medical doctor.
At age 14, I graduated high school and had to take up several roles to further and sponsor my higher education. I worked as a salesperson and a cashier at a plastic store and a local pharmacy in my first year after graduation. For the following two years, I worked as a personal assistant for a major cement distributor in my city.
Three years after high school, in 2020, I was admitted to study Medical Rehabilitation at a Nigerian University, Obafemi Awolowo (O.A.U.), where I singlehandedly paid for my acceptance, tuition, accommodation, and many other fees from the pennies I had raised on the jobs.
I remember O.A.U gave me Zoology instead of the course I had applied for because I was about 0.6 below the Medical Rehabilitation cut-off mark. I cried bitterly when the cut-off was released because I had previously applied to two other Nigerian Universities for two years in a roll (UNILAG & UNIIBADAN). Still, I wasn’t getting an admission letter. O.A.U. was the 3rd.
In Nigeria, you know you are about to study a bad course when people tell you, “Don’t worry, you can work anywhere after graduation.” I came to O.A.U intending to reapply the following year or, better still, transfer after the first year to my desired course. But I was not at rest, I didn’t want Zoology, and I started pulling mad strings trying to get help from people. I knocked on several professors’ doors that got shut in my face, some were welcoming, but they only reinstated to me how difficult it will be to do a course transfer after barely resuming. I was devastated. However, due to my unrelenting and persevering spirit, with no formal connections whatsoever, the Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University singlehandedly signed my course transfer form from the Department of Zoology to the College of Health Sciences, Medical Rehabilitation just after three weeks of resumption. Clearing every doubt, I never bribed or paid anyone, lol.
God did it!
During this same period, I got introduced to tech by my brother, Steven Kolawole, a high-achieving Computer Science student. I did my in-depth research, and my interest in technology for healthcare got fuelled and started taking a definite shape when I read about the C.E.O. & Founder of RetinaAI, Dr. Stephen Odaibo. He is a great ophthalmologist, mathematician, computer scientist, and Full-Stack AI, Engineer. Dr. Steven Odaibo’s recognition and advancement in the combination of artificial intelligence and medicine showed me the extent to which I could make healthcare more accessible via computer science and artificial intelligence applications.
About three weeks after I resumed at my new school in 2020, fortunately for me (I think I am supposed to say “unfortunately”), Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, and all students vacated the school premises. I came home to meet my brother, and we set up my tech journey roadmap. I couldn’t be more excited to start, as I only saw myself becoming Dr. Steven Odaibo.
Life In Tech
If you are active on the Naija Tech Twitter, I bet you know She Code Africa so well. June 2020 came with an acceptance email to join the She Code Africa Mentorship program as a mentee, where I got paired with a Data Science Mentor.
This program helped me move from being a tech muggle to an intermediate in Data Science & Machine Learning in 3 months. However, this win came with its handful of dust.
I couldn’t afford any computing devices to use when I started coding, and I had to use my android phone to run my code.
Que sera sera — Whatever will be, will be
Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, I continued my job, from which I could pay my O.A.U. Tuition during the day, and I learn coding on my phone over the night and on weekends to build personal projects.
The low storage capacity of my 2GB RAM android phone caused it to wane badly, and the medium articles I used to document my progress would sometimes erase, and I’d have to rewrite them from scratch. I decided to frequent cyber cafes to use their computing devices to learn SQL, PowerBi, and Tableau since there are no mobile versions for using these tools.
After working for six months amidst Covid, I could afford a 4GB RAM Laptop with 297GB storage space, but it eventually went faulty, and in some cases, my android phone was better off.
Say No to Writing Code on the Phone
I spent my whole year 2020 learning passionately and building projects from the skills I have curated.
On a fateful day in November 2020, I was prompted to share my mini story on Twitter after I won the 2020 Ms. Algorithm Award at the Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp hosted by Data Science Nigeria and sponsored by many other AI companies like Retina AI, Terragon Group, and many more. An award in recognition of the most outstanding female starlet in the Nigerian Data Science community who strives to be the best and has also invested in helping others through knowledge sharing.
A notable tech bro on the Naija Tech Twitter, HackSultan, is known for supporting upcoming developers with resources and gadgets to excel in the tech world. This birthed how I got my first working laptop as a giveaway on Twitter. Courtesy of HackSultan, The founder of Tech Circle, OONwoye, and Angie Jones felt deeply compassionate and donated a laptop after reading my Twitter story.
If you care to see my ugly face with the beautiful laptop;
Getting this laptop helped me overcome the challenge of using my phone to code for one year and landed me my first tech role.
First Tech Job
At the end of my mentorship program with She Code Africa, I worked on several projects and published articles on my medium blog.
Above is a link to my final project where I worked on financial data using Machine Learning to predict loan default and customers’ creditworthiness. This project is required to earn a certificate for the successful completion of the mentorship program.
The CEO of a Nigerian Fintech Startup reached out to me on LinkedIn where he got connected to my profile from the Loan Default Prediction article on Medium. This happened to be a problem the company needed to solve.
I called the C.E.O. to talk about it, especially about my qualification, experience level, and Machine Learning competency. To be honest, the naive me was so conscious of how much information I shared on the call, and from time to time, I ran to meet my brother in the other room to ask questions and clarify things because I thought I was about to get scammed :)
I got my hands dirty with the company’s real-life dataset, and with the C.E.O.’s supervision, I modelled and deployed the model after reaching about 90% classification accuracy. I got paid for my work, and for a moment, I thought I had all the riches of Solomon — Tech money is sweet!
Everything didn’t end with the payment. I was offered an internship with the company to monitor, scrutinize and optimize the performance of the loan default model over the following three months.
This is how I got my first tech job as a Machine Learning Engineer without submitting a resume or a cover letter.
Walking and chewing gum at the same time
There is this saying “There are only three important activities, studying, socializing, and sleeping. As a medical student, you can only pick two”, and as it should be, I ditched socializing.
When I got my first tech job, covid-19 was maybe over, and the Federal University Nationwide ASUU strike in Nigeria was called off. Now I had to juggle between my new role, where I was mandated to work 50 hours per week, my undergraduate medical degree, and my other commitments outside the scope of school and work.
I could read through the lenses of my Medical Rehabilitation coursemates all those days. They looked at me with pity — they had this impression of, “This girl is doing too much, make she no kill herself oo .” But to some extent, they were right; I was very unfashionable and unstylish compared to most girls in my age range. All I do is carry around my old cupboard-like laptop, so if our paths crossed, I was not that difficult to notice.
New tasks were allocated weekly at the company, which I had to deliver promptly. One minute after you finish deploying a model to Amazon Web Service, you are playing with cadavers and dry laboratory bones for good grades. At the same time, attendance was a major determinant if you’d ace many of the courses. I did all this while still being a core team member and founder of many tech communities in my school. I was a Women In Tech Advocate😂.
But trust me when I tell you that I am very energetic; I truly am. I am naturally an individual who rarely takes a break from working on her tasks or solving a problem until it is done. So despite that, I spread myself so thin I didn’t end up a failure. I was meeting my daily goals.
Above everything, have a good roommate! Adebayo Temitope is a God-given one. She made every other life activity less threatening for me, especially cooking because I wouldn’t say I like to cook :)
Man’s Quest for More
They say humans are wired to keep wanting more, even if it makes them unhappy. This captures everything I want to describe here; My unquenched desires for growth created an entirely new life map for me and opened doors for more challenges.
- I had a job that paid some tokens monthly — I don’t have to name the exact amount, but with my age and level of exposure then, I was a baller.
- I was a high-performing medical student.
But the questions are; Am I in any way close to the peak? NO. Is this everything I see myself becoming? Never. Is my current career and education in line with my future aspirations? It took me a long time to answer this one because even if I say NO, where do I start drawing the lines from?
But it sure did look like I was on track, “Medical course — Machine Learning Engineering Job — A.I. & Healthcare future goal .”However, I had enough reasons to say otherwise;
- ASUU’s demand from the Nigerian Federal Government, which they were not ready to meet, led to time-to-time university strikes.
- I had fewer opportunities to learn new things while on the job. Not only was I doing machine learning engineering, but product management, customer support, and heavy-metal software engineering were also part of my day-to-day job. All these were contributing less to my primary career goal. Sounds like a typical Nigerian startup.
- At some point, I started burning out badly.
- Physiotherapy is just an aspect of medicine. I wondered if I could explore as much as I wanted with just a degree in Physiotherapy.
As you can see, I was overly self-reflecting; all these made me go nuts and unhappy, but this quote gave me affirmation.
Don’t tell me the sky is the limit when footprints are on the moon.
Out with the old, in with the new
Life doesn’t always introduce you to the people you want to meet. Sometimes, it puts you in touch with the people you need to meet, to help or to hurt you, and to gradually shape you into the person you are meant to become.
I was on a random call with Joclins, my class rep in school at the time. The talk went more profound, and he was the first person ever to mention the idea of schooling abroad. My first question was, “Those exorbitant tuition fees, where do I get them from? Is this not a plan to murder my parents somehow?”. He went further, and we discussed some scholarship opportunities as well. It was sad to realize that;
Opportunities are all around us; power is latent everywhere, waiting for the observant eye to discover it.
One precious gift life has given to me was meeting my mentor, Oluwatoyin Yetunde Sanni!
You have always felt that you had a lot of potential and there is more to what you could achieve. If you keep walking alone, there are possibilities of more and more failures. You wished that someone who has walked through that same path you are just threading would see those potentials in you and hold your hands, softly telling you that you’d be fine. This was me, and my mentor filled those gaps.
Pro Tip: This sort of relationship is rare, so when you find it, you should cherish it because it is a gift.
No, it can’t be Google!
This is the kind of message you’d receive in your D.M. You stare without responding because you don’t know what or how best to structure your response. If you wake up to tell me I’d be interviewing to join Google as an employee after being in tech for just 20 months, I’d ask you to go back to bed and sleep again.
A program manager at Google reached out to me on Twitter in a request for my CV and followed me across all social media platforms. He reviewed the CV and wanted us to schedule a call. At this point, I was already growing cold feet.
The call was much better than I predicted, and poof, I got a referral to submit a Software Engineering, Research application on the Google Career Site — from the job description, I’d majorly be solving glaring and hidden problems affecting different sectors in Africa using Machine Learning. Omo! This is hot! When I say my prayers sometimes, I ask God, “is this that thing you are preparing me for?”
About 3 or 4 days after, I received a follow-up email from a Google technical recruiter on the interview process.
I initially spoke with my recommender about my deficiency in Data Structures and Algorithms. I needed to get rid of all distractions to focus squarely on this, and since the top thing on my engagement list that took the most out of my time was my MLE role at the Fintech company, I knew it was high time I quit my job.
I was a coward — I regret this.
Never close a door in a way you won't be able to go back and knock.
Above is the response from my mentor after I explained to her how I resigned from my MLE role at the fintech company simply because I was very close to my C.E.O. and it had gone past a boss-and-employee kind of relationship. I never discussed my resignation with my C.E.O. before submitting my resignation letter, so the company was in turmoil when it was received.
I was the only MLE in the company then, and I happened to have resigned amid an ongoing ML project.
I couldn’t gather myself to have a call with my C.E.O. or the next immediate supervisor after they received the resignation letter, and when I finally had the courage to, it was too late. The call with my supervisor was of an angry tone, with both parties being upset with each other and unwilling to listen to each other’s viewpoints. I sometimes wished I didn’t have that call.
However, I reconciled with my C.E.O., and we are still very much connected now, but if there is anything you should take from this;
Learn to draw the lines between work and personal life.
A sharp knife cuts better.
One way or the other, I needed to overcome my fears for data structures and algorithms — an offer with one of the top tech companies in the world was at stake. I had to start from the basics because I needed to be taught — how do I practice without knowing what I was practicing.
Limitation: Most Data Structures courses are not taught in Python. The common ones are written in Java, C++, or JavaScript.
I picked things up with the Jovian ML Data Structures in Python course, which a friend introduced. After completing the course, I now know what Binary Search, Binary Search Trees, LinkedList, Hash Tables, Sorting Algorithms, Divide and Conquer, Recursion, and Graphs are.
I doubled down on Hackerrank and solved almost all questions under each D.S.A. concept above, after which I moved to Leetcode. I had no Leetcode subscription; however, I tried solving most questions that were not locked.
The program manager who referred me for the Google role went to great lengths to ensure I got adequately equipped for the primary interviews by setting me up for a mock interview with another Googler. However, after my first mock interview with the Googler, I lost my confidence, fumbled, and felt like a potato, and my subconscious was already concluding, “No, Precious, you’ve got no chance in there!”.
The thick-headed me wasn’t deterred. I felt I needed more hands, so I searched and looked if I’d be able to get a Googler in my corner for proper prepping. Connecting with Kanyinsola Fapohunda was a huge win, and after my first mock interview with him, he revived the fire back in me. Then he introduced me to PRAMP. Woohoo!
PRAMP is an online peer-to-peer platform for practicing technical and behavioral interviews, it pairs you with software engineers worldwide, and you take turns interviewing each other and giving feedback — Not a paid advert. I am just a happy user.
I completed about 20 different behavioral and technical interview sessions on pramp. The first few pieces of feedback I received were awful and brutal. Below is a snippet of one;
I was never bothered by the unwelcoming feedback, but I kept grinding. In a short time, my feedback started getting better, and at a point, I felt I was ready enough!
My Google interview was rescheduled from October 2021 to late January 2022. One thing I realized during this phase is that;
Recruiters are not in a hurry, and there is no problem in asking to reschedule your interview; you just have to explain your motivation — Mine was that I needed more time to prepare.
I just might have failed, but God knows I tried.
The first stage (Chat with Recruiter) of the interview was very smooth, they were behavioural interview questions, and I was spitting bars that the interviewer wanted to hear each time. I scheduled a new date for the Phone Interviews stage shortly after the call.
Hehehe. My phone interview went south. I was supposed to work on an N by N grid, but my interviewer recommended that I use the Breadth First Search Algorithm, which I had little or no knowledge of, and my brute force approach in solving the problem was not brute forcing :) either. At a point in the interview, I was speaking inwardly to myself, “God, of all the Data Structures concepts I have learned in the past three months, why Breadth-First Search? Why! The interview ended with me fully knowing that “Only the big forces, principalities, and powers of the world could get me to the next stage”!😂
I was ready for the bombshell. I failed my interview. I had spent my last three months preparing to enter Google. Now the result is here. This destabilized me for a couple of days, but I found consolation in remembering that;
Everything I learned during this phase, nothing can take them away from me.
Microsoft
I signed up for the LinkedIn Job Update Notification and it was as if LinkedIn wanted me to join Microsoft. I shot my shots for the first time in 2021 for a Data and Applied Scientist role by submitting my resume on Microsoft Careers. About five days later, I received my usual breakfast (rejection email).
After recovering from my Google trauma, I needed to comfort myself with another big thing. LinkedIn did its usual thing by sharing with me another job opportunity. This time, the Software Engineering Intern role is specifically for undergraduate students to join Microsoft Lagos (also known as Microsoft African Development Centre — West).
I previously stated how I had been raised to be independent, and having achieved so much in my life with little or no support from friends, relatives, or external people had built this sense of confidence in me. My brain sometimes is wired to think, “If I happen to be struggling with something, under no external influence, at least 70% of people of my age and caliber must be struggling with it — In short, I am not Average”. This made me see the undergraduate student software engineering role as something I could achieve without too much stress.
I remember asking my brother if getting into Microsoft was the next goal for me to chase, and the answer was NO. It was hard to admit that I am someone who only derives her sense of worth from her achievements and accomplishments. I constantly ask myself, “If I am not doing great in these things I do, what else can I be? will I matter? what do I have to offer without my hard work and intelligence?” Without those, I am nobody.
All this fuelled my decision to move forward with my second Microsoft application and indeed, I got called for my first interview round. Microsoft got back to me!
My first coding skills test was on the codility platform, and I had three questions with different difficulty levels. The third was the hardest. I completed the three coding questions before the time ran out, and overall, it was an easy peasy lemon squeezy.
My first interview round focused on behavioural questions. The conversation was very pleasing; however, just about 5 minutes before the end of the call, the interviewer shared a technical question on a document to be solved within 3 or 4 minutes (I can’t remember). This was where I got docked. I couldn’t solve the question quickly, and the interview ended. This got me scared; what if I get rejected again due to this?
No, I was wrong. I got to the final stage of the interview. This was the toughest and the most stressful for me. It was a 4-round 1:1 interview with 4 Microsoft engineers in a day which lasted from 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM WAT.
I was trepidatious on this day, but I tried to find comfort in the discomfort. My first interview question was not bad at all. It was on system design; however, my internet decided to leave me immediately after the interview started. I was dropping out of the call almost every 10 seconds. I was adamant about scaling the interview, so I suggested we continue the interview during my break. Fowl 😂. I solved the question halfway, and the interviewer recommended that I work on my internet before the other three sessions.
The other three interviews were focused on Arrays, string manipulation, sorting, and honestly, if not for my first session that was not so good, I would have said;
YES, I NAILED IT
Nah, I got rejected.
If not two, can I get at least one?
I still want to JAPA. Japa is a Yoruba slang in Nigeria that means (to run, flee or escape), most times to say somebody wants to relocate abroad. I never for once forgot my conversation with Joclins about studying abroad. The journey started with getting my High School transcript, Official WAEC result, National Identification Number (NIN), and International Passport. I had nothing 😂.
I started chasing all these documents around June 2021, and I got them all around July-August. The international passport was the hardest to get (The Nigerian readers will surely relate well).
Rejection as a Service
As a Nairalander and having seen recommendations from other Africans moving abroad, you should look more into English-speaking countries so that the language barrier doesn’t make you return to your home country with a grade zero. So the United States and the UK were my major targets, but I never stopped looking into countries like Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Poland while ensuring the courses I applied for were taught in English.
Most UK universities require that you apply from UCAS, but sadly, no UK university wanted me, and I was getting rejections upon rejections.
Below are some reasons I got rejected from the undergraduate programs I applied for.
Pro Tip: Apply to universities with higher acceptance rates for international students. Top-tier universities have lower acceptance rates, and the lower the acceptance rate, the more difficult it will be to get into that university.
I got docked here because I was very selective with my university choice and I only went for the top ones in the UK.
I narrowed my search to schools where I could get scholarships, but unfortunately, I got rejected by them all. At this point, I started ruminating on what went wrong and things I didn’t do well so that I could fill those gaps. I never wrote any English Proficiency tests, and I was not even ready to apply for them because everything comes with money. My application documents were just — Recommendation letter, which my mentor and a senior colleague helped me with; personal statements; my high school transcript; my WAEC final result, my international passport; and in some applications, my O.A.U first-year transcript, which I was able to download from my school portal and stamped by my school Part Advisor.
I resorted to writing Duolingo, the cheapest of the English Proficiency Tests. The new sets of applications I sent out scaled through, and I subsequently got admitted into three universities, 2 in the United States — Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville (SIUE), Eastern Illinois (E.I.U.), and 1 in Poland — Vistula University.
My admission into SIUE in December 2021 came with a scholarship worth $9, 488 and I needed to show proof of fund in order to get my full admission package. That was when reality got dawned on me. I ran front, back, left, and right in search of help, but there was none. The thought of opening a gofundme account and request from donations online once came to my mind, but somehow, I couldn’t get myself to do it. Sadness and loss of strength (to keep chasing) accompanied all my blows of disappointment. Reality never met my expectations, and everything I had been working toward looked like they were fading away. I chased after two things, but I got nothing. This time, my only words of consolation to myself were;
It’s alright to cry. It’s alright to wish things were different right now. You can’t always be strong even if you try. So give in this moment and then dry your eyes.
SAPA Driven Development
A Data Scientist Intern job offer from Terragon Groups — one of the biggest data analytics companies in Africa — came in during this period. I rejected the offer as I felt that it was not what I wanted at the time. I got one more from another Nigerian startup🙄 which I also turned down.
SAPA in Nigeria means a state of being extremely broke or poor. SAPA one time made me regret having rejected all my previous job offers 😂 and I thought I would have been better off getting those.
SAPA pushed me to dive into blockchain technology while building products for some mini-cryptocurrency projects with my machine-learning engineering skills.
Millionaire at 20
In this journey in blockchain technology, here I made one of the most meaningful connections of my life. I teamed up with Ernest Owojori Busayor TemitayoOladetoun and Steven Kolawole (my brother, I expect that you should know him so well by now :)). We worked together in building Nazari, a dynamic opinion mining platform/app for digital assets on the Algorand blockchain with real-time analytics and data scraping from social media platforms (Twitter, Reddit, and GitHub) aimed to enable users to understand the degree of hype/fear around a specific digital asset and Nazari was funded with about $115, 000 by the Algorand Foundation. Woohoo. I turned a baller!
First Step to Success
Take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again_Frank Sinatra.
Since my admission into the Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville didn’t work out, I started looking into sourcing funds (awards, grants, fellowships) from organizations or associations outside school. I decided to leverage my strengths, profile, and qualities to achieve this goal.
My mentor, Oluwatoyin Yetunde Sanni, has been a recipient of several awards and scholarships in the past, and I had to go through each of those (Adobe Women Scholarship, Google Generation Scholarship, Zonta Scholarship, Deep Mind Scholarship, Toptal Scholarship, Women at Microsoft Scholarship), their specifications, application requirements, and documents. Unfortunately, some happened to have closed at the time; however, I singled out one, the Google Generation Scholarship!
In my search for more so as not to put all my eggs in just one basket, I found the Orangesoft Scholarship and the Hungaricum Stipendum Scholarship.
A senior colleague once applied for a program called Dev Degree. He couldn’t get to the final stage of the application process. However, another offer came in, and he joined JPMorgan as a Software Engineer and had to let go of the application.
Dev Degree is a 3–4 year program that earns you a Computer Science Degree and also gets you to work for one of the biggest tech companies in the world- Shopify! And the company covers your entire undergraduate tuition and pays you a salary as you work.
All applications to each of these programs require a personal statement essay; however, the Dev Degree application came with computational questions to evaluate your readiness to study Computer Science, and at first glance through the questions, I found them very challenging, so I cast the application to one side 😂. I rolled up my sleeves for the rest and gave them my best.
Orangesoft
For orangesoft, the application update came really fast, and I was selected as one of the semi-finalists.
I was a semi-finalist, yeah, but this is where I got docked. I needed to submit my proof of enrollment to my US school and my student ID. I had nada 😂.
I submitted my admission letter from SIUE while explaining to the committee about me just trying to acquire my visa and stuff. I guess they had better applicants; thereafter, they served me my rejection email.
Hungaricum Stipendum Scholarship
You can read more about this program if you want. The Hungarian government gets to pay your tuition to study Computer Science at an accredited university in Hungary. I sent my application essay very late to my mentor for review. In the process of writing and polishing my essay according to her feedback, I missed the deadline by 1 minute. I submitted it at 12: 01 AM, and I got disqualified 😿.
At last, Shopify
You can’t win without being patient; it comes over time.
After getting rejected from my two other scholarship applications, I decided to pick up my Dev Degree application from where I left it off.
Taking a second look at the computational questions, they appeared to be clearer. I attempted them and alongside completed all five personal statement questions essays.
It was hard to distract myself from anxiety while waiting. I feared that I’d fail again. I was losing the strength to continue to chase.
Maybe one day, after climbing and climbing and climbing, maybe I’d reach the summit (the highest peak of a hill or mountain), with an ocean of white-capped peaks on my every side and clouds at my feet. Maybe… Steven Kolawole.
If not, I was beginning to make up my mind that Dev Degree would most likely be the final application I’d be sending out. After all, nothing seemed to be working out.
I got contacted for the next stage of the application. I was fairly relieved.
It happened really fast, and I completed three more interviews (both behavioural and technical) with the recruitment team. Lo and behold!
You know when something extraordinary out of the blue happens, and you are all excited about it, but then you get suddenly suspicious because it is too good to be true.
My mama still reminds me of how I screamed from my room during this call with the recruiter upon the announcement of my application status.
The Dev Degree program has three University partners in the United States — Dominican University and Canada — Carleton University and York University. I didn’t apply on time to the universities because I didn’t want to lose my application fees should I not get accepted (Poverty premium 😹). Upon receiving the status of my application, I quickly put in my applications, late applications rather.
My application for Applied Computer Science at Dominican University was not successful. I had issues with the World Education Service (WES) translating my Nigerian transcript. York University did claim that I didn’t meet the admission requirement to study Computer Science, then I was given admission to study Information Technology — IT. Who does IT help? 🙄. I followed up on my Carleton University admission with thunderous fasting and prayer sessions. I was so much on the neck of my admission officers through several emails, calls, and messages. Finally, it worked out.
Google Generation Scholarship
It took ages for the Google Generation Team to get back with the application update. However, a delay is not denial. I was selected as a semi-finalist for the Almighty Generation Google Scholarship!
My O.A.U official transcript was requested for the purpose of this scholarship, and I wonder how I’d have achieved all those without the help of one of my loving lecturers in the department. After the rigorous selection process, I finally got in! I chopped Google’s money and if you want to know the scholarship amount, go check their website 😉 !
Microsoft wants me back.
Okay, I realized I was rejected by Microsoft about a few months back, not because I didn’t do well enough or I didn’t meet my recruiters' expectations, but because Microsoft had no more slots to take in new interns. I was honestly annoyed and sad when a recruiter gave me a call and sent a follow-up email asking if I’d still be interested in the position as they are looking to hire an additional Software Engineering intern. “You people once made me feel like I was a potato who is too dumb to apply whatever Leetcode and Hackerrank have thought her in an interview environment.”
I hope the table above clarifies and justifies why I rejected my Software Engineering role at Microsoft to join Shopify as a Dev Degree Intern!
If you have a dream, fight for it
Going down memory lane, I was that young, self-motivated, and energetic teenage girl who found a passion and was hungry for growth, she feared, fell, and failed while nurturing the passion but found her life’s highest excitement through the hardest times.
What about we end this article with a few words from my mentor? I look at it every time; it might be of help to you too.
- As you progress, keep your heart on all your dreams and goals.
- Challenges will come but never forget overcoming them is in you already. You have the capacity; use it.
- Be aware that dreams may change as we grow older. We sometimes realize some are invalid, in self-discovery, or do not tally with who we are becoming.
- Don’t be scared when this happens, be true to yourself and stay only on the cause your heart yearns after.
- This may not make sense to you now, but keep them in your heart. They will be useful one day.
I am Precious Kolawole, a Dev Degree Intern at Shopify and a Generation Google Scholar. I launched my Youtube channel — One Stop For Tech Newbies — the day this article was published. The channel is designed to supply tech newbies with almost everything needed to succeed in their tech journeys where I will also go into detail about each of the applications and scholarships mentioned in this article. Do well to subscribe and turn on the notification button. The goal is to make sure you don't struggle as much as I did if you are just starting out in tech.
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