Shamayel Daoud was a science tutor for kids in San Francisco a few years ago when she had a realization: This city is way too expensive for me. She enjoyed the work but was living paycheck-to-paycheck and knew she had to look for a higher-paying profession to comfortably afford the rent. So she decided to return to her early love of computers and applied to coding bootcamps in the area. Within a few months, she had multiple offers.

When she had to make a decision, she ended up picking App Academy, the one bootcamp with the best reviews and toughest curriculum. More than a year later, Shamayel ended up as one of the heads of the curriculum itself.

So how did she do it? Shamayel says she wasn’t particularly different or special but that she worked really hard and cared about what she was doing. That serves as a lesson for other people who might be interested in a coding career and the bootcamp itself.

As Shamayel moves on to a new job at a cool Silicon Valley drone startup, we spoke with her about getting started as a student, the most important challenges she faced, and the importance of LGBTQ diversity in the tech industry.

How did you go from being a pre-med undergrad to getting into computers?

So I grew up in San Diego, born in New York but moved over when I was really young. And I ended up going to school at UCSD because my parents wanted me to be close to home. They wanted me to be a doctor and so that’s what I thought I wanted to do. So my entire high school life was focused on, like, biology and the sciences, though I actually took a few AP computer science classes because it was something that always interested me personally. So when I went to college, I started as an electrical engineering major. And then I swapped over to physiology and neuroscience because I was still thinking of going the pre-med route. After I graduated I realized I didn’t want to do that. So that’s when I started looking for other options. And thinking, where do I want my career to go from here?

So what did you do after leaving college?

Pretty soon after leaving college, I moved to San Francisco. That was about 5 years ago. I was tutoring because I had a good foundation based on all the things I’d been doing. And I decided I didn’t want to be a pre-med or do research, [or] do any kind of lab work. So I tutored for about three-to-four years and then I heard about App Academy and bootcamps in general. I took CS [Computer Science] classes in high school, was an electrical engineering major for a little bit in college. Maybe this is something that I can keep pursuing