Hello all! A little about me:
I’m a 23 y.o. College student living off of financial aid while studying and learning to program. I have had a ton of jobs for someone my age, some of which had potential to move up and I was offered a decent amount of promotions. Mind you, even the best of them were barely over minimum wage where I live. However, I wanted more in life, and so I began to consider going back to finish my degree and found programming to be something I wanted do as a life career. This was in part due to having a friend who is a full time back-end developer in Europe who’s been a great mentor though our time zones make it hard to meetup. I’ve also been a gamer my whole life, have always loved to build and design things, have built several computers, and love learning.
I started studying C# as that’s what my friend recommended, and I loved it instantly. Starting with incredibly simple console programs like a Number guessing game, a small choose your own adventure, a miniature rpg, and other small challenges I began to learn the basics of C# and programming in general. Note, these were all text based, however, I didn’t use tutorials and aside from some guidance from my friend, I worked on these all by myself using documentation and a lot of thinking. I did that for a better part of a year, off and on while working full time.
Fast forward to Dec 18/Jan 19 I started school again and I began working on the Udemy Complete Unity 2D Course by Gamedev.tv (great guys). I worked through the entire Unity 2D course and loved it, I made a good amount of games and made them my own. Istarted the Unity RPG Course through the same guys, was really loving it, and still learning tons about C#, but I wanted to get my foot into the door of my career sooner than later. Although being a game programmer is my end all dream career, finances are limited, College is hard as it is, and the sooner I can develop skills that pay the better.
So, I discussed some of my plans with my friend and came up with the result that a good path would be to continue working on my C# skills (love the language) get familiar with the Asp.net framework, learn frontend skills such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Angular framework, and then eventually SQL. Hopefully I won’t need to be full stack before getting my foot in the door, but it’s a good goal to work towards skills wise. I started on Freecodecamp after hearing its name a million times, and I wouldn’t say I “know” HTML and CSS but I have the basics down at least, still need to do the projects for the first certificate, but I’m liking my progress and having worked with C# for over a year I get some of the concepts fairly easily. I’m most excited for JavaScript as I worked very minimally with it in the past, and now should understand it in a whole new light.
My question and the reason for this lengthy topic is this: I need, or would highly prefer, some part time, freelance, contract, whatever work just to help pay bills while I learn on the job. I understand it takes time to be job ready, so I’m talking about internship+ (where I get some small pay to get work done). What would be good sources for this, what should I be focusing on to get there, and is there any other advice you’d have for me? I’m in an associates for programming but it’s not necessarily going to make a big impact on my skills or job hunt, at least not the school I’m at. Regular part time jobs are great and all, but I barely managed to do that before and now I’m trying to learn career worthy skills at the same time, so I really need work and income that is somewhat related to my field.
TL;DR: I need part time or freelance work to hone my coding skills and bring in some income while I struggle through college with the intent to go into programming for the rest of my life, either before or after finishing my degree.