Juliana Cristina's Story
I have always been interested in technology to a degree. During my early teen years, I started playing with Photoshop for fun, which evolved into me making fan edits for all sorts of things teenagers tend to like, such as TV shows, animes, celebrities, and posting these fan edits on the blogging social media Tumblr.
by 2013, I soon got the hang of Adobe Photoshop and started getting big on Tumblr because of my gifsets, so I started investing a lot more time on the website, making everything in my power to make a successful blog. This lead to me discovering the world of custom themes for Tumblr blogs! I started using these custom themes made by other Tumblr users onto my own blog but there was always something in these themes I wanted to change a bit. But I didn't know how to customize such thing. That's when I Googled it and first learnt what HTML is, since all the themes were written in it. I also wanted to touch up on the theme's color palette and change it to fit my blog aesthetic, which in turn is what made me first come in contact with CSS.
By 2017, I was over Tumblr and so did my very superficial knowledge in web development disappeared to the back of my head.
Fast forward to 2020, I had just come back home in Brazil all the way from China, where I stayed in for 19 months as an aupair. After such a long long time away from home, I saw myself drowning in an existential crisis. Everything back home felt the same but completely different at the same time. All my friends I left behind were now close to graduating from university and becoming true professionals while I was still in the trough of sorrow not knowing what I wanted to do for a living.
I then decided to go for Fashion Design in a private university. In Brazil we have a national exam for university, similar to SAT, called ENEM. Back in my senior year of high school in 2018, I scored an incredible grade in the exam's essay, a score of 920 out of 1000. According to the ENEM infographics, I was in the top 2% of the country with that essay grade. Because of this grade in specific, I was able to enroll in a private university with a full coverage scholarship, so I'm currently majoring in Apparel Design for free.
However, I came to find I'm not passionate about Fashion Design from a working perspective, I can't imagine working in this area. But I also refuse to drop out from university because a full scholarship is a serious privilege I cannot take for granted. Changing majors is also not an option because this would then remove my scholarship according to their policy.
Because of my sticky situation, I went on a self journey to look for something I could see myself working with 10 years from now, something I could land a job abroad more easily (I'm interested in moving abroad since I went to China) and something I am actually interested in. That's when HTML and CSS came back to me and showed me that something I played with as a hobby could surely become my profession!
