My Spartan story: Ioana Nicolae

Back in Romania - where I’m from - the educational system has you study all subjects in high school; from music and psychology to maths and computer science.
Computer science wasn’t really my strongest point - or at least I wasn't as good at it as maths and physics! This is why after graduating from high school, my path followed Aviation Technology and Management.
In my first year of University I did 10 hours of flight training and I completely fell in love with the industry. It seemed pretty clear to me at that point that I would either try to become a pilot or air traffic controller. Then Covid happened.
The industry was hit very hard and a lot of experienced pilots and air traffic controllers were jobless, and I was left completely lost. But if there’s one thing I learned from this whole experience, it was to be resilient, and that’s when Sparta came in. They offered me an incredible opportunity to work as an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer).
It was one of the biggest challenges as I had no prior coding experience and wouldn’t have even considered myself a tech savvy person, but I'm always up for a challenge and decided to give it a try. I actually have actually really enjoyed how dynamic and mentally rewarding the role is!
What I want to show through my story is; women can not only make it in STEM, but can just as successfully switch paths into tech too.