For years, I was stubborn.
In university, I met up with a friend who tried to convince me to learn how to code. I said that I’d look into it, but deep down, I knew that it wasn’t going to happen. I saw myself as an “arts kid”, and only that. In my mind, coding was too science-y, and as a history and Classics major, I didn’t think I’d ever need it in my life. I had essentially boxed myself into one field, and would only see myself as successful if I made it into that field.
Fast forward to the start of the pandemic. I was finishing up a graduate program on museums, and had my mind set on a career in exhibition design and development. Originally, in one of my classes, we had an assignment to visit a museum and write a review on one of its exhibits. With the closure of non-essential businesses, however, my classmates and I soon found ourselves having to review exhibits that were only available online.
For me, this assignment was a pivotal moment.
Acknowledging and accepting change
I decided to write a review on the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s virtual tour. At first, it felt like a visit to any other exhibit, but then it occurred to me: I’m not in an exhibit at all. In fact, I was browsing around a museum that was about 800km away from me, in my own living room, at 3 o’clock in the morning (…I was on a nocturnal student schedule at the time).
This experience sparked my interest in digital heritage. With museums and other heritage organizations becoming increasingly digital as a result of the pandemic, I realized that I wanted to be a part of this transformation. As someone who deeply values education, I wanted to help preserve and make valuable information accessible online to the public for times that it cannot be accessed in person.
But having that realization was only just the beginning.
During one of my visits to the virtual tour, I noticed that I could look down at the museum’s floor. Now, I don’t think a lot of visitors would have found this interesting, but for me, this led to a whole other realization. On the floor was the Smithsonian’s logo, and right on top of it read “Imagery & Coding by Loren Ybarrondo,” crediting the person who had brought the virtual tour to life. In that moment, I thought to myself, “coding did this.”
Since then, I started to think about the possibilities of coding in the heritage sector, and why I do need it in my life.
Taking the next step
After graduating from the museum program, I started looking at online resources to learn basic tech skills, like HTML and CSS, to pursue a career in digital heritage (one of the first things I built was an online exhibit on Ada Lovelace). The more I learned, the more interested I became in web development. Coding soon became more to me than just an extension to a career in heritage; I found myself wanting to pursue web dev alongside it.
Keeping an open mind, and letting myself find interest in more than just one field opened my eyes to the importance of interdisciplinarity (such as the collaboration between tech and humanities). I still have a lot to learn, but I am incredibly happy to say that I am where I had hoped to be when I had my realizations about a year ago. I am now able to draw parallels between exhibit and web development, and technical terms, which I had only first heard of in the past 6 months, are now concepts that I work with every day to build websites in Juno College’s Web Development Bootcamp.
I had quite a bit of uncertainty in the past few years regarding my career path, but I’m grateful that I decided to invest in myself and take this next step. My professional goals have become clearer than ever before.
