The Journey: I finally graduated, and I wanted to share some thoughts
6 years flew by in the blink of an eye.
I strongly believe that moments like this in life are the perfect ones to take a deep breath and look back on everything that happened. In my case, I like to think about it but also put it down in words, so that’s what I’m going to do here.
My life 6 years ago was completely different from what it is now. I was 18 at the time, just leaving high school.
I think we get into university way too young, and a lot of things are not clear. I guess that’s part of the experience. Anyway, looking back now, I’m really happy and proud of the choices I made on the journey. Once, I think a professor told me something that I took with me pretty deeply. He said that university wasn’t mostly about the courses that you took or topics that you learned in class, it was about the people that you met and connected with along the ride, basically what we call ‘Network’.
I can’t recall specifically what I did in each semester academically, but I do pretty proudly remember each one of my professional experiences along the way, and I wanted to share each one of them here. In 2019, in my 3rd semester, I went after the opportunity to become a junior researcher, receiving a very small research grant at VHLab. There I learned a lot about research, presentations, and more of the academic side of university, like publishing papers, etc. I published one too, it’s about what I mainly worked on there, pedestrian tracking through camera footage and software that would help. I made an analysis and wrote a paper called Detecting Events in Crowds Through Changes in Geometrical Dimensions of Pedestrians(I was awarded 3rd place in the SBGames Rio de Janeiro).
I believe I stayed there for around 7 months, and then I left for my first Software Development internship. The project I was working on at VHLab finished, and I was waiting to get a new one. In the meantime, I came across an opportunity to work as a .NET Software Development intern at a small company called Traut.it where I already had a friend who was working there (this is one of the many examples of how your network can help you in the industry). There were 5 people working on different projects, mine was a startup project meant to create sort of an Uber except it was meant to sell beer. I believe I stayed there for 6 months and learned a lot about software development and some design patterns.
After 6 months, my internship contract was ending, and I was invited to stay for more, but I was aiming to work for a larger company with bigger projects, so that’s what I went after. Networking is going to be important here because, as I was looking for another internship, a friend came up to me and texted about an opportunity at the company he was working for. I took the tests and the interviews and passed. The firm was called NTConsult and there I also kept improving my Software Development skills by working as a Spring Boot backend developer in a Scrum-based team. I learned a lot there, and I only left because the opportunity I was led to take would change my professional career. When I announced to my superiors that I was leaving, I was nervous at first because I had never done that before. It turns out we had a nice meeting, and they made an effort to keep me there, even making the an that I would earn a lot more than I did at the time.
Here I needed to start a new chapter because this was a new segment in my life. During all this, we were still in the pandemic, and I wasn’t motivated by the courses I was taking online at the university. While I was still working at NTConsult I started participating in the POA — Apple Developer Academy selective process. It was not a short one, but after some months, I finally received the email where I learned that I was accepted (I still have a screenshot of this email).
From then on, my whole career would shift in another direction. The Academy is a completely different internship experience; it’s focused on Apple devices and their software development, but as an intern, if you ride the whole experience, you end up learning a lot. In the first year of the Academy we were taught the basics of the Swift Programming Language which is Apple’s native language for their devices. It’s a nice language. I can’t go into specifics, but even with the first year being online, I improved a lot in my software development skills and also in my soft skills in general. I participated in a lot of different projects and also developed some of my own. Furthermore, I had so many joyful experiences that I even shared them here and on LinkedIn. For example, when I published my first app in the App Store, at the end of the program, I had 5.
Well, there were so many improvements overall, and my presenting skills improved so much too. This is something I am proud of because I used to get so nervous before presentations, and now I’ve learned to prepare and communicate the information in the best way possible.
In my second year at the Academy, I was mostly focused on one big project that I and my team developed, Caravela. I’m not going to talk deeply about it here because I’ve shared a lot about it on LinkedIn, so if you want to know more, I will leave the link here.
Finally, still talking about the Academy, I want to say that I am so thankful for everything. I have immense gratitude for the program. It has made me the better developer that I am today through so many different meaningful experiences. The job I’m in today is also only because of the Academy, and in the future, I still intend to work in the iOS development line of work because of everything I learned.
Getting back to my reflections on the university, now I want to talk about the two last semesters I had. I don’t know exactly how I feel about them or about finishing university, I’m just glad I’m done with them. Last semester, I presented my TCC. Here in Brazil, this is a big project with a paper you have to write and present in order to graduate. It’s weird to think about this part of my life being gone. For so long, I wanted it to end, and now that it has finally ended, I don’t know if I’m feeling what I thought I would feel. I guess real life just began.
The graduation itself is going to happen on January 6, 2024, but I’m writing right now because the journey has finished and now is just time to celebrate. I’m so happy with the friends and connections I’ve made and with every experience I’ve had along this journey. It is tough to summarize 6 years of my life, but I take everything good about it with me — all the companies I went to and all the people that inspired me. I hope I inspired friends and coworkers too. In the end, I guess it’s all a mutual exchange of experiences and journeys.
I’m excited about this new phase that’s coming and insightful about what the new challenges are going to be, there certainly are going to be a lot. Finally, I want to end this article by thanking my friends, girlfriend, and family for standing with me along the way, in some way, they always help you get to the finish line.
Onto the next one.
