Meet Erin!
“It’s rough going from being one of the smartest cocktail waitresses to feeling like the dumbest engineer,” Erin begins.
My college lab partner, Erin Keller, is remarkable for many reasons. She has shown tremendous courage and determination in switching career tracks from a non-tech field to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Erin’s story is inspiring because it proves to me that while it is not easy to walk away from old dreams to find new pursuits, it is okay to do so.
Erin originally studied Fashion Design after high school (“I liked to sew,” she explains, “I made some of my own clothes and wanted to have my own label”). After a stint in Long Beach, California, Erin was saving up to become a landlord when she was introduced to KOOP Austin, a non-profit radio station.
After an unfortunate incident burned down the station, Erin joined the team as a volunteer to help build a new station. “We got new equipment, so we learned to set it up and use it together. I learned about the air chain that all the data goes through before it is sound on the air. I spent time crawling through insulation across rafters running cables through the building. It was very satisfying.” This project and her interactions with the project leader, an engineer, convinced Erin that she wanted to give engineering a shot.
It was not easy. “I graduated high school seven years before I went back to college. My design degree didn’t use any real math, so I was very rusty,” she says. “I bought a High School Algebra book at Goodwill and worked every problem just to get back in the groove.”
After many classes at a community college, she was admitted into the prestigious Electrical and Computer Engineering program at the University of Texas. “School makes me feel old a lot of the time,” Erin says. “Programming was especially hard because so many of the youngest students learned it in high school. That just wasn’t offered when I was a teenager. I also don’t have the stamina that I did when I was younger. At eighteen, I could get by on three hours of sleep when I had to, but I can’t think straight without at least six now.”
We all know that engineering isn’t easy. Having to restart in it is probably even harder. Erin says she persisted through the program because she thought of how many people don’t get the opportunity to start again. “Although it is difficult, at first, to give up on former dreams,” Erin says, “they never really go away.” She joined the university’s women’s chorus and made amazing Halloween costumes every fall. “You will always be you,” she adds, “but your priorities and needs are probably going to change throughout your life. It’s not a betrayal of self to admit that you want to try something new.”
Erin has interned at Emerson and AMD, two of the world’s largest semiconductor companies and will be working full-time after she graduates this fall.
I am so proud to work at Udacity because I feel online education has the potential to make career changes and the pursuit for new skills much easier and more readily accessible. If you want to start something new and don’t know how, browse our courses or check out our upcoming nanodegrees.
Comment below and let us know if you need any advice on how to get started. We’re here to help.
