I knew early on that whatever I’d eventually be focused on working with, it’d be language. My resolve pretty much solidified during my education in Strategic Communications, Digital Media, and HR Management at Rutgers University. I embraced my fascination by the inner workings and nuances of language: the psychology of intent and purpose which drive a speaker to communicate in order to achieve a desired outcome… dissecting how to strategically communicate by way of meaningfully piecing together what becomes a message that attempts to follow the expectations laid by semantics and syntax… and the impact on audience in terms of how effectively a message was able to evoke an intended thought or emotion, which may or may not inspire intended behaviors.
As I initially imagined my career path would lead me to work in communications with and between the people side of the business, I sought after professional opportunities in business- and company-oriented communications. I followed my passions for mastering effective communications and leaned toward practicing within the context of corporate, which manifested into roles in Corporate Communications and Marketing. Eventually breaking ground at a tech startup, I assumed a role in which I built the company’s internal communications function.
Such a job required me to quickly self-learn and further develop the tech tools and applications needed to establish the arm of internal communications — namely those for strategic email communications and migrating to a new intranet. As acting manager and novice developer for these tools, I strived to understand how these tools “spoke” to each other and finessed things to work from the backend— sparking my interest in the language(s) of technology.
As such, I knew from then on that the next phase of my professional development in mastering all things communication translated to skillfully fortifying my competencies in tech — through learning how to fluently “speak” code.