Violex Ming
Engineering
I wanted to help people
I always knew that when I grew up, I wanted to help people. When you're young, you only see the strongest connections and the only connection I saw was between helping people and being a doctor, so that was that: I was going to be a doctor.I did well enough in high school and found myself at the world's best public university: UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, In my first year of classes, I failed and I failed hard. I wanted to major in biochemistry then go to med school then residency etc etc, but I wasn't passionate about biology or chemistry and the classes were so... boring. I knew I had to pivot but I just didn't know where to. I had so much tunnel vision about being a doctor that I had failed to open my eyes and see other opportunities.
Thankfully, Berkeley had my back. They came out with the data science major and after hearing a friend who happened to be in the first data science class talk about the program, I decided to take some classes on whim and that's when I met the love of my life: programming. It sounds cheesy but after the first day of classes, I knew that I had found what I wanted to do. Even though it was too late to switch into the official computer science major, I carved out my own path within the data science major and consistently worked to prove myself to be on par with, if not better than, my peers who had been coding for years. It took six semesters of late nights, some tears, and lots of coffee but in the end, I found myself at DevRev on the AI/ML and backend teams.
The best part about it all is that I never had to give up on my ultimate goal of helping people; at DevRev, I get to create a product that will help millions of users, a number of people that I can't even begin to fathom. Life doesn't always go the way you want it to go and sometimes the path that you want to take isn't the path that's right for you. I'm thankful I was able to find my way to a path that I enjoy and I'm excited that we're building will help others find and focus on their own paths.