Superheros, coding and launching a career in tech

Kat Kolomycew joined our September 2019 intake and in just under 6 weeks she will graduate the course as a Junior Developer. Having spent time studying at Univeristy and then going on to do a masters she was unsure of her next move. That’s when she came across _nology and decided to reignite her passion for tech.

Written by Nology Team - 14.09.19

During the first half of my life, I lived in a neighbourhood in Poland known primarily to the rest of our town as a place to ask for directions while en route to somewhere else.

The second half picked up the pace from first gear straight into fifth, starting from changing my home base to Edinburgh to mastering two new languages and adventuring in not just the familiar corners of Europe but also those at the other end of the world in Australia. As of June this year, I’m also a proud Masters graduate in Translation and Interpreting.

I grew up surrounded by computers – and I mean this literally

My dad, a superhero without the awkward Spandex suit but with some knowledge of just about everything, worked in a company whose entire IT infrastructure depended on him. When he wasn’t bringing computers to our flat, he was bringing me to the computers at his job. I strolled through corridors of machines as tall as skyscrapers, played with motherboards the same way other kids played with Legos, and watched my dad write coding novels in the Windows XP command line all the while he juggled his bottomless coffee mugs and the equally bottomless “How does this work?” and “But why doesn’t that thing work?” and “When will I understand everything?” questions of a curious little girl on his shoulders.

It was hard to keep up my coding hobby whilst at uni

Although I stayed largely loyal to social subjects in high school and settled on language studies at university, I approached art with the mind of a scientist who loved getting her hands dirty with projects in the tinkering spirit of Tony Stark. But I won’t lie to you – all in all, those years in education were a blur, and my coding hobby disappeared among the other 56 tabs constantly opened in my mind. For a decade I had been go-go-going for so long – getting good grades, getting once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, getting out into the world – that suddenly stopping to a halt after my graduation meant losing sense of what I really wanted to do.

So I blindly started searching through graduate schemes, and when my frustration finally hit hopelessness, I asked myself what interested me with the curiosity of a little girl. A week later, I shared my story with Pete who had been looking for students for the next _nology intake; a month later, I was informed that my curiosity would have a place to land; and now, seven weeks into the course, I’m learning and understanding and building things which were just an unreachable dream made of “How?” and “Why?” and “When?” questions a few years ago.

It’s just as challenging as I imagined, and some days I get more questions than answers, but I’m grateful for every moment. There have only been a few times in my journey where I could say that I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and this is one of them. The people are awesome, the atmosphere is fun, and I believe that with my new knowledge of both JavaScript and soft skills I will end up feeling like quite the superhero (but no, I won’t wear an awkward Spandex suit).

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