Marice Romero wasn’t sure what kind of work she wanted to do, she just knew she was stuck in a job that wasn’t going anywhere.
“I wasn’t necessarily looking to get into coding, but I had a friend who had just gotten a good tech job, and I knew she didn’t have a tech background,” Romero says. “I was like, ‘You’re working in tech now… That’s weird.’ She said, ‘Yeah, I did this Code the Dream program, and it was free, and I could take the classes while working, and they just made it easy.’”
Speaking from her office at the Center for Technology and Civic Life in New York, where she works as a software engineer, Romero remembers liking the way her friend described CTD’s classes but figuring she wouldn’t get accepted. “But I got in, and I figured, why not? I don’t have money to spend on some boot camp, and I need to keep my day job while I learn, so this is the perfect way to try something new.”
Finding a new professional path—and the confidence to pursue it
But her newfound interest wasn’t immediate. Starting in an unfamiliar field is intimidating, and Romero assumed the other students in her CTD Learns classes knew more than she did. She stayed quiet and didn’t ask questions.
Eventually, she worked up the courage to take advantage of the one-on-one mentor sessions available to CTD students.
“The mentor said, ‘Look, nobody in the class knows anything yet. You just gotta keep going and keep looking at it like it’s a puzzle.’ I think that’s what really unlocked it for me, that it can be fun, and this isn’t a surgery. If this code breaks, nothing’s going to happen. I’m just going to have to debug it.”
Her mentor’s advice to approach coding like a puzzle had made something click. Coding turned out to suit Romero’s interest in problem solving, and she found satisfaction in seeing the results of her hard work.
“I love puzzles!” Romero says. “I started really liking coding, I started spending all of my time working on projects of my own and trying to figure stuff out, and I just got kind of addicted to that feeling of spending a ton of time working on something and having it work.”
As her confidence and gratification in the work grew, Romero excelled in her CTD classes. She was offered an apprenticeship with CTD Labs, CTD’s tech-for-good arm. CTD Labs focuses on providing innovative, reliable, and effective software solutions that empower organizations to help shape a better world. Romero spent a year working alongside senior developers and building tools for CTD’s clients. During her apprenticeship, she worked on CTD’s public benefits access work.
Romero says her time at CTD gave her the technical knowledge any aspiring coder needs. Beyond that, though, she says she learned valuable lessons that translate directly into the tech workplace.
“It’s been really helpful to be able to talk about my code and be able to explain why I’ve chosen a certain framework or library or path to go down, and especially being able to explain that both to people who are very technical but also people who have no technical background,” she says. “Being able to synthesize that into a language that everyone speaks is something I definitely learned at CTD.”
Working on team projects with real deadlines, making sure code written by different team members merges properly, and building in time to rework clumsy code that was initially necessary for the sake of speed are also skills that Romero has found invaluable at her new job.
“I learned all of that at CTD,” she says. “And maybe the biggest thing is that, while I was an apprentice at CTD, there was a lot of guidance, but there were also times when I was told to try to figure it out myself. And I was given a lot of space to do that and to be comfortable failing until something worked.”
CTD’s focus on building a growth mindset—solving problems through effort and persistence while reframing failures as chances to learn—prepared Romero to excel in her current role at CTCL.
“I feel like CTD really prepped me for this job because there are only two software engineers here, and sometimes we have to throw things against the wall until something sticks,” she explained.
Finding a career in the “tech for good” space
After a year as an apprentice at CTD Labs, Romero wanted to continue working on projects that serve and strengthen communities. That’s when she heard about an opening at CTCL and felt that it “checked all the important boxes.”
CTCL is a nonpartisan nonprofit working to ensure reliable and accessible elections in the United States, a mission Romero says is “very, very relevant and something I am very interested in.”
“I design all the software that allows them to store and access all of their data and manipulate it in a way that allows them to extrapolate trends and know where more help is needed, among other things,” she says.
Romero says that she appreciated CTD’s emphasis on a supportive environment, another characteristic that drew her to CTCL.
“I learned that CTCL values employee well-being and that matters a lot to me. In the nonprofit space, sometimes you can get worked really hard with very little payoff or rest, and it was very important to me to be at an organization that really cares about their employees,” she says. “At CTD, it was clear that they understood that someone who is healthy and not completely stretched thin is much better at furthering the mission.”
The path that CTD set her on is the one she hopes to stay on, Romero says.
“In a few years, I really hope I’m still working in the tech-for-good space, and that I’m continuing to work on projects that make a real positive impact,” she says. “I also hope to be able to take on more of a mentorship role, particularly with software devs who were in my position—those later-career devs with impostor syndrome who don’t really feel like they’re cut out for software dev without realizing they actually are!”
