A Mother's Courageous Decision To Get Back To Programming After 22 Yrs
Susan Joseph shared her amazing experience with IMAD, where she came back to programming after 22 years through IMAD.
Read her account and be inspired!
“I was a good student at school. After my 12th I went on to and graduate in B.E Computer Science from College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai. I was placed while on campus. But three years down the line I was married and a mom too….. Life was never the same after that. My husband had a transferable job and we moved along… exploring various cities along the way… Along came my second daughter and life was comfortably busy…with enough time for the kids and for me to pursue my varied interests…And then the kids just grew up… My elder one is now in college and the younger one in her 11th. A year from now she will be on the verge of breaking away and joining some college probably away from home… After leading a life totally revolving around the family it is a daunting prospect…. My younger daughter took computer science as one her subjects in 11th and I started helping her out with it. It came as quite a surprise to me that after over 22 years of passing out, I was still not as blank as I feared I would be. With a bit of reading up I was recollecting quite a bit of my programming. It was around this time that the IMAD advertisement came in the Hindu. Without thinking about it too much (I am sure I may have chickened out if I had) I just enrolled for the course. And then there were many looking backs… but I hung in there. One of the problems of being a mom is that the innumerable lecture sessions you give the kids kind of all come back to you making it pretty impossible for you to back down. To add to my worries I had to make a trip to my native place during my daughter’s puja holidays and the next time I checked my email I had missed all but one of my assignments. There went my internal assessment!!! I had a whole bunch of videos to catch up and just around 10 days to give the exam. And I wasn’t even sure if I would be eligible to write the exam as I hadn’t submitted the requisite number of assignments. Once again the temptation to drop it all was so strong. But then again the thought of the various mother to kid ‘bhashans’ daunted me and I plodded on. Around that time my kid went off on an excursion from school and husband was away on work… It couldn’t have happened at a better time. I totally plunged into it to make a last ditch effort at salvaging my pride. And slowly things started falling into place. Lectures which I felt were totally going over my head started making sense with repeated viewing. And there I was on 23rd October at CIT College for my exam. I am sorry for saying so myself…But I felt so proud of myself. I am still awaiting the results and am praying hard that I can save my face by passing it. But still I made it till here and learnt surprising lot along the way. My one regret….I should have submitted my assignment…with that I feel I would have got through!!
— Susan Joseph “
This blog was originally published on Medium.
