Greetings, penguins! I'm Mara, a newly minted Computer Programming grad with the research and oral communication skills that come from 10+ years working in Higher Education and local government. I prefer in-person jobs over hybrid/remote. If you are local to the Eugene/Springfield area, I would love to connect with you.Until I worked as a Program Coordinator for the City of Eugene, I hadn't considered any careers in tech. In that role, I needed numbers to document the program's impact, but the numbers didn't exist in the way I needed them. Budgets being what they are, getting a license for PowerBI or another data analytics tool wasn't going to happen. So, I learned how to make pivot tables, which led me to how to import data and clean it up in PowerQuery, which led to me learning how to relate data sets to each other so I could make more pivot tables.. In short, I learned how to use the default already-paid for tools to make custom macros and automated flows that would let me get the data I needed. It was so satisfying to break down a problem, make a tool, and use the tool I made to solve that problem.After that job ended, I went back to school for degrees in computer programming and web design. I recently graduated with an AAS in Software Development and a 1-year Web Design Certificate from Lane Community College. This summer I hope to find an internship or junior web developer role with a great software engineering team to get more experience working in a production environment.