Career chats: How professionals found the right education path for them
About this video
Three professionals explain how they found the right education path. One moved from community college accounting classes to a business degree in accounting and finance and became a financial advisor; one did a six-month coding bootcamp during COVID; and one returned to university after a long career in state service to earn a master's in TESOL and teach ESL.
You'll be able to
- describe different education paths, including community college, degrees, bootcamps and master's programmes.
- explain how interests and feedback from others can change a person's education plans.
- recognise that education choices can happen at any stage of life.
Key words
- major
- The main subject a student specialises in at college or university.
- concentration
- A focus area within a major, such as accounting or finance within business.
- bootcamp
- A short, intensive training programme that teaches a specific job skill, like coding.
- TESOL
- Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, a qualification for teaching English.
- ESL
- English as a Second Language: English taught to people whose first language is different.
Transcript
(bright music) - So at Questa they offered a business class and then after that I took accounting. There weren't many business classes offered at Questa, but I took accounting one and two, came really easy to me. And then I transferred over to Cal Poly thinking I was gonna finish out in accounting.
I did finish out in accounting, however, while I was getting close to finishing my degree, I did not see myself being an accountant. It reminded me, being in that field kind of reminded me of being in engineering class a little bit. And so I started taking, you know, more finance classes, had a few really good instructors that were really challenging and really sparked an interest in me.
So I ended up majoring in business, but I concentrated in both accounting and finance. One of my professors said, okay, you're really analytical, but I can tell you love people, you'd make a great financial advisor, I think that's what you should do. And I thought to myself, great.
- During my marketing time, I had the chance to work with a lot of software developers. And so when COVID happened, I had a lot more free time, especially like in the evenings to do anything I wanted, cuz you know, there's nothing really else to do. And so I chose to start studying software development.
I entered into a bootcamp specifically focused on teaching people how to code. And so I did that for six months. It was a six month long program. And when I graduated I was luckily enough to find a job at a mid-size technology company.
- So I went to state service and I worked in a few state agencies over the course of almost 25 years, starting as an office assistant and going through every step through analyst and up to management. And when I retired last year, I was at second level management, but during that time in management, mentoring and coaching and some teaching, I got the teaching bug, I guess you could say again.
And so I went back to school to Sac State and got my master's in English TESOL so that I could officially teach ESL to second language learners. (bright music)
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