PineHeroes: Munkhbat.E "You need to focus on what you can learn today and what you can do right now."

I was a boxer for 10 years, and for a time, I thought I would continue my career as an athlete. But when it came time to choose a path for university, I decided to pursue a degree in software engineering. However, during my second year, my mom got seriously ill and needed treatment abroad, which led to some financial challenges for our family. Because of that, I had no choice but to take a year off from school and start working. At the time, I thought about working in tech, but things didn’t go as planned. While job hunting, one place offered me a position in design. They asked, “Can you do design?” With no other real options, I ended up taking the job as a designer, and I worked in that role for four years.

Even though I was working as a designer, the thought of getting into IT never left me. I’d often try to write code on my own and watch coding tutorials on YouTube. But when I thought about going back to university to study software engineering, I realized the courses weren’t really focused on what I wanted to learn. They’d require me to take all sorts of unrelated classes, and I found the idea of spending my time like that pretty overwhelming. That’s when I discovered Pinecone Academy. I thought it might be a good fit if I could save up enough money, so I spent about a year doing that, then enrolled in the fall of 2022. I graduated in the summer of 2023 and immediately landed a job at Cody, the company behind Shoppy. As a software engineer, I feel like the better your skills, the more your salary can grow, and that opens up tons of opportunities.

If you're aiming to become a software engineer, my advice would be to focus on short-term goals instead of long-term ones. Focus on what you can learn and do right now. And always stay curious. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Why?” For me, the biggest factor in getting where I am today has been the environment and community at Pinecone. I highly recommend asking questions until the instructors' brains are fried!

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