Kevyn Ford

What is the most useful piece of career advice you got as a student, and who gave it to you?

"Kevyn, there's nothing wrong with changing your major - you should change your major!" This was what a college counselor said to me, after I visited her to talk about yet another failing grade I had in Electrical Engineering. In hindsight, what I needed to do was simple and straightforward - I needed to change my major - but I resisted because I was afraid of looking like a failure. As we talked, I explained that I just didn't find EE courses interesting but that FORTRAN programming course - which was a requirement at the time for engineering degrees - now THAT was a course that I liked! I spent untold hours outside of coursework in that programming class and it was clear to everyone (except me) that working with computer software is where my passions were. What would my life be like had I continued to be more afraid of what "others" thought of me rather than doing the thing I knew was right for me? Hard to say...but that moment - and that meeting - was a key milestone in my life.