I recently responded to a `r/txstate` Reddit post asking about getting a job out of the Communication Design program with just a portfolio site -- a daunting challenge. This person was swaying UI/UX, and it struck a chord with me as that had been my exact path. Going into college, I was dead-set on being a graphic designer -- a _print_ designer, specifically. I loaded up on major classes early, then burned out on the "design can save the world" ethos that you get getting a fine arts degree. My junior year, I took _Interactive Design 1_ and found myself in a class learning HTML and CSS — something I'd been doing since 2003. I quickly pivoted to playing World of Warcraft full-time in the back of the class. Next year, I found myself taking _Interactive Design II_, where I finally decided to participate. That class, taught by [Sameera Kapila](https://samkapila.com/), focused on new-at-the-time Responsive Web Design. The more challenging projects finally caught my interest and I dug in. I entered the "I want this to have this feature, I will figure out how to add this feature" loop for the the first time, as I realized I wanted interactivity would need JQuery for, and then persistence I leaned on Ruby on Rails for. I opened [my first StackOverflow issue](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13617015/running-rake-dbseed-isnt-loading-from-seeds-rb) which truly made me a developer. Then, **I did the single most important thing for getting a job out of college**: I got lucky. Not only did I land an internship; but at the end of that internship, having _not gotten picked up as a FTE,_ the only other developer broke his ankle and was home-bound. In a world before WFH, that meant they needed to quickly hire another developer without the budget for a real one -- perfect scraps for the recently-vetted intern. I realize this is a very irritating thing to write, and you're right to be annoyed.