The Reach Out Assignment

Full disclosure- I cheated a little bit on this assignment. Not only had I already met the person I chose to reach out to, I actually lived three doors down from him my freshman year. But in spite of that, I felt like Cody met the requirements in a “spirit of the law, if not the letter” kind of way.  Cody was a diver, so even though I lived literally fifty feet away from him, I practically never saw him. I’m pretty sure I hung out with him one night, in a group setting. I definitely had never had a one on one conversation with him. And after freshman year, I honestly don’t think I had seen him once. Not even walking across campus from a distance. So I think it counts.

But the main reason that I was willing to bend the rules a bit was because there was no one that he was literally the most relevant person in the world for me to talk to. As a recent graduate who is about to leave a situation with free food and lodging, my number one goal is to get a job. And finally, after several years of deliberation, I have decided that the right job for me, at least for now, is as an iOS dev at a startup.

Cody graduated from the same university, in the same class as me. Although he was a comp sci major, he had only taken one class where he learned and used Objective C. Cody wanted to work as a mobile dev at a startup, and just like me, Cody went to beach week (the week before graduation) without having accomplished that. But Cody had one thing (other than a comp sci education) that I didn’t- an app that was, for a time, the #1 free app in the App Store. He wrote I’d Cap That while bored during Spring break, and then immediately following beach week, he flew out to Palo Alto to meet with a company that offered to buy his app, and hire him as an iOS engineer.

I’m not really sure what I expected to get from the conversation. I knew that his blueprint wasn’t really one I could follow, or at least not one I could reasonably plan to follow. Based on his example, all I have to do is release an app that hits #1 on the App Store and I can get a job. Easy. But while the conversation wasn’t particularly enlightening, in the way that meeting some eminent visionary in the startup world might have been, it was surprisingly relieving. He was able convince me of a few important facts that helped put my mind at ease. There is definitely a market for iOS developers, I can become hire-able as a full-time iOS dev with out a ton of experience, and the best way to improve my chances of becoming a dev is to put apps in the app store. So even if the path ahead of me isn’t exactly clear, I know the right direction to head.