Oh boy. I’m done being “fun-employed” as of today.

On March 20th I flew back to Toronto from Japan. I had accepted the offer at the end of February while I was still in Japan from Amazon to work as a Solutions Architect but wasn’t set to start until the end of June. This meant that I was going to spend the next few months figuring out what to do with all my free time. 

I entered highly productive days where I learned SQL, did some HIIT workouts or worked on my Japan Photo Memory Book and also entered slump days where I just lay in bed, extremely unmotivated to do anything at all. 

From April to May, I spent a lot of time reading books, baking and trying to find some meaningful things to do. In the middle of April, Sarah and I made it a challenge to stretch every day and work on getting our front splits down. 

In May I started to build a website from scratch and never really finished it, but I do really want to finish it. From scratch I mean that I built a database on MySQL, created an API and tried to put that all together using React.js. 

When the weather started getting a bit nicer, I hopped back on the bike I had bought in fourth year but never really had a chance to ride. I started building on the mileage and realized that I could remedy my sore ass with bike shorts! Sarah and I started going on hikes and enjoying the various Ontario Parks. 

So I guess when someone asks what I’ve been up to the past few fun-employed months… that’s my answer.

When we got the e-mail with a few details regarding the call we would have in preparation for the first day, it included e-mails of everyone in the cohort. I was already very anxious to start in this role feeling highly unqualified and to make it even worse, I searched all of my fellow cohort members on LinkedIn because I was super curious to see who else would be embarking on this journey with me. I’m probably 1 of 4 girls out of 23 of us total in the cohort. I’m the only Mechanical Engineer. There are about 2 or 3 other people that have Commerce/Business backgrounds but other than that they’re all Computer Engineers or Computer Science Students. Scary. I have this strong feeling of Imposter Syndrome that I’d like to address and combat. I’ll probably talk more about it in the next few posts.

I’ve made one friend so far but I wish I could meet everyone more organically in the office. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be working from home and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I definitely will need to be careful of not putting in too many hours right away because I’m afraid of not being good enough. I’ll also make sure to not be too intimidated to ask for help or ask questions, because this is exactly the opportunity to do so. 

I feel like blogging is probably a really good way to journal about my adventures of becoming a Solutions Architect and reflecting on my experiences in general. I might throw in some fitness goals and challenges along the way and document my experiences with that too!

Until next time,

Carole