Hi 👋🏼 I’m Serge.

Yes, I did in fact do my bachelor's degree in Finance, this is true. Still I got to build a deep understanding of financial analysis, statistical modeling, and data science here, not bad. I also did a lot of soul searching in college, tried a lot of new things and built many long-lasting friendships that I keep tabs on to this day.

How do you make the most out of the world shutting down? I spent a great deal of time thinking about my background, the direction the world was headed in, and how my skill set factored into that equation. I really believed in my ideas and that I could innovate and create things, so I figured I should learn how to build those ideas, because some day they might be worth something. That summer I started programming.

I started working tirelessly, building websites, projects, reading textbooks, doing leetcode, and watching free online courses, I studied everything I could get my hands on; soon it started paying off. I started getting interviews and just a year after I made the decision to learn to program, I landed a junior software engineering role at a Chicago-based consultancy. There I spent the next 2 years learning TypeScript, HTML, React, AWS, and Tailwind - I even taught myself Vim.

I really learned a lot from 2 years of late nights, early mornings, and tight deadlines; by the end of it I'd gone well beyond the basics of OOP, building exposure to type-systems, error handling, logging, and even DevOps practices. I really liked what I was doing and felt it was time to formalize my experiences, so I applied to attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and they admitted me into their graduate computer science program.

I recently graduated UIUC with a Master of Computer Science and a formal understanding of operating system design, databases, algorithms, functional programming, and embedded systems. I've learned a lot and I've come a long way. Yes it's tough out here, but I have what it takes and I'm determined to push myself to a senior-level.