A few years ago, not long after my graduation from U.C. Santa Cruz, I was working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, an upscale hospital near Beverly Hills. At the time, I thought my future lay in hospital administration. Instead, I discovered something else: a passion for cutting-edge tech.

You see, part of my job at the hospital was editing research papers and blogs for public release. One common topic that really caught my eye was big data: the collection and analysis of huge quantities of information. In healthcare specifically, these techniques have been used to diagnose illnesses, recommend treatments, and study the effectiveness of drugs, among other applications.

With that, my imagination lit up. The possibilities seemed endless, reminding me of the excitement I felt as a kid when I dreamed of exploring outer space. I decided that I had to pursue a career in tech.

My first step was to attend a well-known coding boot camp—a private school offering intensive tech training. Their curriculum was excellent, but after I was done, I had a hard time getting a job in the industry. Like many others in my position, I wound up applying and applying and never hearing back from anywhere. The problem was a common one: every employer wanted experience, even for entry-level roles.

While still hunting for jobs, I saw an ad for Revature. It promised not only free training but the opportunity for job placement if you made it through. Plus they had just started a business analysis program, which I thought might fit my background and interests better than the traditional software development route. After messaging a few people to make sure it was legit, I signed up.

Calling the training at Revature “rigorous” would be like calling the treatment at Cedars-Sinai “decent”: a massive understatement. Here is one standout example: at any moment, someone from quality control might drop in on my cohort, point to a random person, and ask them a question about literally any aspect of the training so far.

Nor did the rigor stop with the technical content. In another part of the training, we went through round after round of practice interviews to get us ready for placement. They were some of the toughest interviews I have ever gone through, real or simulated. It was all great preparation for life in a competitive industry that never stands still.

Having survived the training, we were ready to take on the world. My placement was with a top-tier IT consulting firm in Charlotte, NC, where I worked as a systems analyst on a project involving exactly the topic that got me interested in tech in the first place: big data in a healthcare setting.

These days, I work for a leading company in the finance industry, supporting a software platform that helps financial advisers better serve their clients. I enjoy leading a team and being part of developing a useful product. It’s a management-track role, and that’s exactly where I want to be.

Revature has been key to getting me there, because the program didn’t just teach technical know-how. It developed my leadership and interpersonal skills, gave me confidence, and set me up with industry experience right out of the gate. That’s why I’m proud to call myself a Revature alum.