If anyone had told me at the start of this year that, come October, I would be trying to perfect an online portfolio displaying various coding projects I’d made over the previous weeks, I would have sworn they’d mistaken me for someone else. I had never touched code before in my life — let alone heard of concepts like JavaScript, React, HTML, and CSS (just to name a few).

Yet here I am, halfway through an intensive 14-week software development course at Northcoders**, **a multi-award-winning coding bootcamp based in Manchester and Leeds.

So how did I get here?

After graduating from The University of Sheffield last July with a degree in English Literature and Theatre Studies, I was excited to see what the world of theatre had to offer a fresh graduate like me. The answer? To put it bluntly, not very much. I had decided to dedicate a year to trying to build a connection of contacts and gain as much work experience as possible in an industry famous for being about “who you know.”

I was pretty successful considering I was based in Sheffield at the time — a city that doesn’t have the largest theatre scene — and managed to get a job in the Box Office at Sheffield Theatres: a complex comprised of the Crucible, the Lyceum, and the Crucible Studio. Here, I was able to network more successfully, arranging various meetups with theatre makers and attending work experience within different sectors of the industry, including stage management and light/sound design.

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