Making the switch
September 3, 2024
Ryan Voccio MS’24 used Brandeis Online to accelerate his transition from mechanical engineering to software engineering.
When Ryan Voccio MS’24 was in undergrad, he thought for sure that mechanical engineering was the field for him.
However, sometimes interest in coursework doesn’t always translate into interest in real life. Near the end of his undergraduate experience, Ryan interned at a few startups, and he found that the work wasn’t “clicking” the way he thought it would. When he took on a full-time position after graduation, it became clear that a career in mechanical engineering was not the right fit for him.
“Once I got there, I was like, ‘Oh, maybe this isn't for me,’” Ryan told Brandeis GPS. After having a conversation with his wife, Ryan started seeking out alternative opportunities — and software engineering quickly stood out.
Ryan had taken an undergrad course in Java, which he found to be “fun” and “interesting.” After doing some research, he discovered that software engineering had all of the problem-solving elements he enjoyed — minus the parts of mechanical engineering that he hadn’t.
“With mechanical engineering, you design something, send it out to manufacturing, and only find out if there’s a problem months later,” Ryan explained to GPS. “But with software engineering, you have the whole life cycle of your product at your fingertips. You can make a change and immediately see if it worked or not.”
Excited by the idea of becoming a software engineer, Ryan started learning on Codeacademy — but he soon found that the program’s options were limited, as they did not allow him to apply what he was learning to real projects. “It was nice to get some of the prerequisite knowledge that I needed,” Ryan said, “but by the end, I barely even knew how to run code outside of my web browser, without the Codeacademy site.”
So, in search for more in-depth knowledge, Ryan began seeking out master’s programs. He narrowed down his search to a few schools, but Brandeis Online soon took the lead. “I liked that Brandeis had an online software engineering program before other schools started creating them during COVID,” Ryan said.
Aside from Brandeis Online’s experience in providing fully virtual education, Ryan also was drawn to the program’s curriculum. “Other programs had a lot of prerequisites, but the GPS program allowed you to get right into the software,” Ryan explained. “So I really appreciated that I could just kind of get into what I needed to do, because I had the confidence that I could do it.”
The hands-on nature of the Brandeis Online program also appealed to Ryan, who wanted to find a job in software engineering as soon as possible. “As someone making a career switch, I needed to gain the actual skills, and I needed to do that immediately,” he told GPS. “I didn’t want to just gain theoretical knowledge and still need on-the-job experience. So the fact that the GPS program was focused specifically on software engineering, rather than computer science, was important to me.”
When Ryan began his Brandeis Online coursework, his hopes were fulfilled. In his first two courses — RSEG 120: Software Development Methodologies and RSEG 103: Software Development in C++ — he not only gained an understanding of the entire software development process, but he also was able to “get past the basics” and “actually do development and make projects on [his] own.”
Paired with his previous coding knowledge, these two courses alone gave Ryan the confidence he needed to seek out and land a job as a software engineer at Boeing.
“I definitely did some learning on the job just because I feel like that's going to be the case with any job, at least from my experience,” Ryan said. “But the base I had [from Brandeis Online] helped because the team ended up using C++ specifically. So it was nice to see what I was learning reflected in my job, and to actually be able to use it.”
Ryan continued to take GPS courses while working full-time. He found that taking one course per semester was manageable. “I liked the spread of the courses,” Ryan told GPS. “A lot of times, you have a 3 week project, so you can divide the work out. So it wasn’t like I was having to do stuff every night and suffering all the time — I actually kind of took my own break when the week started, and then worked throughout the rest of it.”
One of the most impactful courses during Ryan’s time with Brandeis Online was RSEG 127: Software Engineering Studio, where he worked with a user-centered design student and a fellow software engineering student to create a retail inventory management system. Together, they built the system from the ground up, starting with back-end development and ending with a functional website that users could access.
“There's a lot that went into it, especially hooking up the back end and front end, because everyone was kind of specializing in their own thing,” Ryan said. “I had never really worked with front end [development] before in my life, so I was trying to learn that while also making sure that everything was connected and worked.”
Although they were working together virtually, Ryan said that his group made a great team. Each of them utilized their strengths, with one student tackling product management and another tackling design while Ryan created the software and made sure that all of the pieces fit together. “We met up once a week, kind of like a scrum team, and worked out everything and kind of updated each other on what we were doing,” he said. “So that was great, and I really learned a lot.”
Now that Ryan has completed his Brandeis Online degree, he has no regrets. “For a lot of people, the options are either a degree or bootcamp,” Ryan explained, “but I just feel like you gain much deeper knowledge with a degree. And it’s not like you have to wait until the end of all of your classes to use what you have learned in a work setting.” This is especially true for Ryan, who started his software engineering job near the beginning of his degree.
While his master’s degree hasn’t earned him an immediate promotion, Ryan says that his time at Brandeis Online has had a positive impact on his career transition. “I definitely appreciate all that I've learned, and I feel like it has made me a better software engineer,” Ryan told GPS. “It’s given me tools that I wouldn’t have otherwise learned, like Java or Springboot. I don’t use those directly at my job, but that knowledge has helped me to understand patterns and it’s opened the door to new possibilities.”
Ryan also says that the connections he made at Brandeis Online were invaluable. “Having access to other people who are learning at the same time, and to professors who are actually working as developers, was huge,” Ryan said. “I can try to do projects on my own time, bang my head against the wall, or search for answers to my questions online, but having access to skilled engineers who are actually able to walk me through things accelerated my learning quite a lot.”
For future software engineers who are trying to decide between online “bootcamp” or an online master’s degree, Ryan recommends the master’s — all the way. “As long as you manage your time well and are doing stuff you actually enjoy, then it's very worth it,” he told GPS. “The [Brandeis Online] program has given me a lot more knowledge than I would have been able to gain on my own.”
To learn more about the Master of Software Engineering or any other program at Brandeis Online, please visit our website.