Zach Nwabudike
Point of Sales Solutions Engineer
USAePay
Milestones
My road in life took a while to figure out.
I dropped out of high school and got my GED, then worked odd jobs, like teaching snowboarding.
I decided to go back to school; I enrolled at Santa Barbara City College, then transferred to UCR.
I developed an app with my professor, Dr. Wu, to calculate phase equilibrium of chemical mixtures.
It ended up winning the 2013 Student AIChE / CACHE Mobile Device APP National Competition.
After that, computer programming became a feasible option in my career search.
I decided to apply to both programming and chemical engineering jobs; a programming job called back.
What was great about that first job was that it let me explore languages other than Java.
When ApplePay came out, I was able to mess around with EMV and familiarize myself with it.
Keep following my journey
Education
High School
Career
Point of Sales Solutions Engineer
I make sure that credit card chips work on new payment gateways between buyers and the banks.
Career Roadmap
My work combines:
My work combines:
Technology
Business
Problem Solving
Day to Day
I spend the mornings answering emails and participating in conference calls about whatever projects I'm working on currently. After that, I'll have a scrum meeting with my team to track our progress and discuss which problems we need to fix that day. The scrum meeting is a helpful way to get caught up with my team's status every day. After that, I'll dive in and get started on coding and hopefully building the solutions to those problems we'd discussed.
Advice for Getting Started
Here's the first step for college students
Although I've been successful as an Android developer with my chemical engineering degree, I would definitely recommend that students pursue a computer science or programming degree if they know that's where they want to end up. The first step is always to educate yourself on programming; whether it's taking an "Intro to Programming" class in college, or just doing your own research on the different areas and languages that you'd want to work with, just take your education into your own hands.
Recommended Education
My career is not related to what I studied. I'd recommend this path instead:
Bachelor
Hurdles
The Noise I Shed
From Teachers:
"You might as well just drop out of school."
