Align students often cite the critical importance of perseverance – the capacity to keep iterating and working a problem. Tell us about a time you had to persevere? How has that shaped your career trajectory?

Instructions

Essay 1 (250 words): Align students often cite the critical importance of perseverance – the capacity to keep iterating and working a problem. Tell us about a time you had to persevere? How has that shaped your career trajectory?

Background:

• Application is for Northeaster University Align program – a computer science master program for undergraduate without a CS degree

Personal Background Info

• Graduated with a hospitality & business management degree

• Worked in the hospitality industry for 5 years, most recently a reservation manager at Hilton Seattle

• Graduated tech Bootcamp at the end of 2019, right before Covid

• Was challenging to get a job since a lot of interviews are canceled and companies have a hiring freeze in 2020. This was very stressful, but instead of being disappointed I decides to a self-taught new skil. During the process, I earn a nano degree from Udacity in UX, and learn to develop with react native

• In July 2020, I started a startup project with another engineer to build a fashion social application to solve the problems of finding trends and express my fashion. It was exciting and we make a lot of progress, even hire a UI designer for the MVP. However, at the end of 2020 my co-founder has to stop for personal reasons. My co-founder is a senior engineer so having his help make the project move a lot faster, and losing him makes the project almost grind to a halt. However, instead of being dejected, I decide to learn more on the backend and pick up his part. Even though the progress is much slower, in June 2021 I’ve managed to get the project to beta state completing many missing core features.

I would love to show my perseverance overcoming unfortunate circumstances (due to covid and my co-founder leave the project). In addition, when facing challenging problems (developing an entirely new application both FE & BE as a junior engineer who only had 4 months of exposure to computer science from bootcamp), instead of giving up I take 1 step at a time to solve one small problem at a time while learning new skill to eventually ship the product.

Please let me know if you need any additional information