From the fashion industry to a 6 figure tech job

Amanda Tjan is an alum of the Front End program and software engineer at Molecule.

When I finished my undergrad in management, I moved to Spain to teach English for a year and work on becoming bilingual before I started working a "real job." What was supposed to be one year quickly turned into more as I fell in love with Madrid and started to see that the city had opportunities for me to pursue my lifelong dream of working in fashion. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be part of an industry that influences billions of people all over the world. I ended up spending four years in Madrid and I had a jewelry collection that I sold in multiple stores, a Masters in accessories design, and an offer to work at Inditex's (Zara's parent company) headquarters as a stylist for their website to show for it.

At 27 years old, I was exactly where I always wanted to be professionally, but I realized that fashion wasn't all it's cracked up to be. I dreaded waking up in the morning and going to work in a toxic environment, so after one year, I quit and started studying JavaScript on my own. By chance around this time, I reconnected with old friends who had been part of the early cohorts of Turing, and they pushed me to apply because Turing is different from other "coding boot camps."

After going through Turing's website extensively, I Googled all that I could about the interview process to better my chance of getting in. When I got to the second round Skype interview, the types of questions they asked me about my background and why I wanted to make the career change only cemented that this was the school for me. So when the interview finished and they told me that I was in, I felt ready to leave my home in northern Spain and move out to Denver. I had no idea at the time that going to Turing would be one of the best decisions of my life.

Everyone who knows me is shocked that I pivoted from a successful fashion career to writing code, but my fashion background makes me a better developer. I have an eye for design and I've learned to leverage that in my two jobs since graduating Turing. In addition, I went into Turing bilingual and now I'm multilingual with the new languages I've learned.

I designed my resume from scratch to make sure that it would stand out aesthetically, and sent it out to any LinkedIn job post in Madrid that looked like it could be interesting. These kind of details helped me stand out in the Madrid job market, since there aren't many schools like Turing in Spain and most programmers still come from a traditional computer science background. My strategy worked and two weeks into my last mod, I had a job offer. Thanks to those seven grueling months spent learning to code,  I now work in an industry that truly influences billions of people, earn a six-figure salary, work remote and continue to live my dream in Madrid - that same city that has always felt like home.