I graduated from the University of Illinois in 2015 with a degree in Physics, worked as a lab technician in the Chemistry department for four years, and am now pursuing my dream of becoming a software engineer. While working as a lab technician, my focus was mostly on preparing labs for students, leading teams of student workers, maintaining lab instruments, and making sure everyone was safe. When COVID hit and we all had to work from home, I got the opportunity to solo-develop my own web application using Python and Flask to help lecturers request chemical demonstrations for their lectures. I had such a good time building it that I decided to turn programming into more than just a hobby and pursue a career in the field. I've been working at Smoothstack Inc. for the past few months where I've been taught software testing techniques and methodologies, how to use tools like Micro Focus UFT and ALM to facilitate automated testing of web applications, and how to work in an Agile Scrum team environment. My team and I are currently putting everthing we've learned to the test in creating our capstone project, a complete automated test suite for a banking application.