Hi everyone! I’m Kimberley and I’ll be your part 2 Software Engineering blogger for this year! First I’ll let you know a little more about me >:))
Some fun facts:
- I’m originally from Wellington 🏖️
- I love desserts 😋
- in my free time I enjoy knitting 👵
- I use many emojis ✨😎🎉😉👯🦭
- my favourite character is pompompurin as you can see to the right
Why did I choose software engineering? :0 ??
I had a slightly unconventional beginning to my studies, where I was initially studying first-year health science at the University of Otago in the hopes of becoming a dentist 🦷. Unfortunately things didn’t exactly go to plan and so I made a leap of faith to study engineering at the University of Auckland.
I came into engineering pretty much blindly and wasn’t sure what specialisation I wanted to study. By the end of the year I was juggling my options between engsci and software, since I really enjoyed ENGSCI111 (lowkey because of the lecturers 🤹) and ENGGEN131.
My first experience coding was in ENGGEN 131, which I ended up enjoying the most (despite making me feel like I was going insane from tediously fixing bugs) and found that it was strangely addicting and pretty satisfying when everything worked. I also found it very cool how software allows you to come up with a solution, create the product, and see your progress in real-time (i.e., unlike civil engineering, where projects can often take up to years to complete).
Software engineering also aligned most with my vision of the future. Coming from health science, I still wanted to get involved in work that is meaningful and will help others. At the same time, I also wanted more flexibility in my career to work on many different projects across different fields. Software engineering seemed to check both boxes, and I now have the opportunity to work with many different companies and get involved with projects ranging from finance to healthcare ✅✅.
That being said, engsci also gives you flexibility in what work you do in the future, as it is pretty broad specialisation. Although, I ultimately chose software since it is much more project based, where you have more creative freedom when developing apps and etc., whereas engsci was more focused on data analysis and lots of math.
What is software engineering?? 🤔
Excellent question 🤓🤓🤓🖐️
Of course coding is a major element of software engineering but it is definitely not everything. To put it simply software engineering is designing, developing and testing software applications to solve real-world problems (definitely not taken from Google 💀). It is a pretty broad specialisation where you can get your hands dirty with things like:
- Web development (making websites like these 🤯)
- Video game development🎮
- Data science / analytics📈
- Cybersecurity 👮
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning🤖
- DevOps🚗💨
- and more…!
Throughout your degree and career you’ll learn more about these paths and hopefully find which area of software you are interested in the most >:)
Will software engineers be replaced by AI??? 😭?? No jobs???
I cannot predict the future although I am pretty confident that at least for the next few years we will be alright💪! Framing it in a more positive light, rather than replacing software developers, AI is right now more of a tool to help assist developers in doing repetitive and easy tasks (like searching for 1 missing semi-colon in your code).
Plus, as I mentioned before, software engineering is pretty broad and has loads of divisions that will not be made obsolete (at least not for a long while). For instance, the demand for cybersecurity has rapidly increased over the years. It will only continue to grow with increased amounts of personal and corporate data needed to be protected online.
In general, an engineering degree is quite valuable and sought after anywhere as it proves you can learn and problem-solve 🧠, so don’t feel discouraged or worried. My advice is just choose a spec that you are most interested in / enjoy (and software is a great choice 😎😉).
I hope that this was helpful and if anyone has any further questions please feel free to reach out, I’m always happy to talk🙂! I’m looking forward to continuing this journey through part 2 with you all >:))
That’s all from me for now, see you next time~ ✧｡٩(ˊᗜˋ )✧*｡
Kimberley 😉✨