Pursuing Passion Over Money / The Gray Area Podcast

You wanted to do computer science, did internships at some of the top tech companies.

Silicon Valley was in view.

That's where you wanted to end up, right? What changed?

Yeah, a couple of things.

There was this class, Discrete Structure, CS352.

Still remember it to this day.

Took me up out of there.

While I passed the class, I recognized that...

I was pursuing money and not necessarily pursuing the thing that my skills were most aligned with.

I still do, you know, websites and back end stuff as a hobby.

Oh,

wow.

But I only did that because my parents were like, you're smart in math and you'll make a lot of money.

So I'm like, OK. Here's the insecurity.

I enjoyed hearing my parents talk about, oh, yeah, Tiffany's at UMKC majoring in computer science and how that made them feel.

So I subjected myself to that major for three and a half years for all the wrong reasons.

And then I had a mentor that asked me, what would you do every day for free because you love it that much? And it was not computer science.

Hmm.

And so I made the hard decision to change my major 16 weeks before graduation.

And my daddy was like, girl, them people done gave you that money to go to school.

And what are you doing?