Hello everybody! My name is Anastasiya. I love to draw, daydream, read books, and solve creative challenges. If I could describe my aspirations in one sentence, it would probably be, “Jack of all trades, but master of some.” This is because as a college student, it is very challenging to decide which career path to take due to the contrasting interests that one may have.
For all four years of high school, I was immersed in the world of art and thought of becoming an artist. The type of art that I was doing included sculpture, mixed media, various forms of painting, and drawing. Yet during that time, I was also an active player in games such as League of Legends, Sims, and Assassins Creed, which drew my attention to game design. Due my love for both art and video games, in junior year, I signed up for my first coding class in hopes to learn more about this industry. This class not only taught how to do basic coding, but also educated students about the vast possibilities as well as opportunities in the tech field.
Fast forward to today, I am a sophomore in Baruch, majoring in CIS, and want to become a front end web developer. However, it is still challenging to say that this is the right path for me to take. On one hand, I look up to tech savvy programmers, attend hackathons, and visit platforms like FreeCodeCamp or GitHub. On the other, I am also like “Alice in Wonderland,” and have a whole world in my head so I end up either drawing or reading Haruki Murakami all night. So how is this personality crisis to be solved?
Over this summer there was a program called Wix Design Playground. In this program, there were many creative individuals including designers, photographers, illustrators, and animators. At first I felt anxious since we were all different ages, had different backgrounds, and levels. Yet soon the program began to feel like a small family. Together we learned how to apply both our tech, as well as other creative skills to learn how to design websites. For my final portfolio website, I immersed myself into my own ‘wonderland’ and created a place where my illustrations can live. This experience has not only taught me that the fields of art and technology can intersect, it also revealed the importance of having a passion for your career and loving what you do.
The best part about attending Baruch is getting to meet many interesting people, learning something new in every class, and have the chance to explore various career paths. As a freshman, I used to worry about getting a perfect 4.0 GPA and got super sad when I saw my first B for Calculus. Although I still worry about grades, there are a lot of more aspects that go into the definition of college success. This definition probably varies for each student but personally, I think that although grades are important, college success is , as people often say, “more about the journey, not the destination.” 🙂
