On a grey winter morning of February 2023, in Ingolstadt, Germany, Keerthana Prabhakar awakened to a metaphorical kick in the teeth. She reached out for the mobile phone on the nightstand, and started her day by opening her emails. The response to her latest job application had come in, and the handful of words in the preview told her everything she needed to know: Unfortunately on this occasion…
‘In total, I spent something like a year applying for jobs in programming,’ she says today. ‘I think I must have sent over two-thousand applications, and only got three, maybe four interviews. I know you should never give up, but that morning, I also knew that something had to change.’
Keerthana was already familiar not only with tech work, but with the struggle that women experience breaking into it. Born and raised in Bangalore, India, she had discovered a passion for electronics when she started handling smartphones in school, and went on to study Electronics and Communications Engineering at the APS College of Engineering in her city.
‘My family supported me getting an education, but actually working in this field was not very traditional for girls,’ says Keerthana. ‘When I first went for interviews, I didn’t tell them about it. And they weren’t especially happy when I started working.’
Nonetheless, Keerthana found a position as Telecommunications Engineer, building and testing Java applications. She already knew how to code in Java, Python, and to a lesser extent also C and C++. Her career was off to a bright start.
‘Then came marriage, and I moved to Germany to live with my husband,’ she says. ‘And I basically had to reboot my career from scratch.’
The new environment didn’t make things easy. ‘The culture shock was enormous. I remember that I was so baffled that nobody in Ingolstadt spoke even a rudimentary English. I went to a language school and asked how to go about learning German… and I could not communicate with the receptionist. Even the person working for a language school didn’t speak English!’
Then came the job hunt, and with it, a cataract of rejection letters. The experience was demoralising. Looking for other avenues, Keerthana started attending webinars on careers in tech – and one in particular caught her eye.
‘I heard the speaker explaining what Web Development was and how it worked,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t exactly my field, but some of my skills were transferrable. The career options were excellent, with outlets as a full-stack developer, but also more discrete roles in frontend and backend.
‘And the idea of creating websites had something magical about it. It was creative, it was work that was always changing and evolving, and it would teach me the inner workings of something I used every day. I was hooked.’
As the summer turned into autumn, then cycled into a winter colder than Keerthana was used to, these meditations only grew in her. When she woke up that fateful morning and started her day with a rejection letter, she decided enough was enough.
‘I needed an educational certificate that would be recognized here, and I had two options to get one,’ she says. ‘I could take a Masters at a local university, but I didn’t want to put two years of my life into it, and besides, the language was still a problem. The other option was a coding bootcamp, and that was a paltry four months. I made my decision very quickly.’
And so, in May of 2023, Keerthana started on a WBS CODING SCHOOL Full-Stack Web & App Development Bootcamp.
The experience was challenging, as these bootcamps notoriously are. ‘At the beginning it was so overwhelming, I thought I wasn’t learning anything. It wasn’t until I was working on my final project, building it with my own hands, that I realized how much I had actually learned.’
As for the job hunt, Keerthana didn’t wait until the bootcamp was over to get started. ‘Mentioning WBS CODING SCHOOL in my CV made the search so much easier, and even more so after the school’s Career Services helped me optimise my LinkedIn profile. I even got an interview from Google! But they wanted me to move to Poland, and that wasn’t really an option for me.’
In the end, the offer she accepted – which she also received while in the bootcamp – was for a position as Backend Developer Intern for Rebuy. ‘When they called me to offer me the job, I felt so relieved. I had been waiting nervously all week, but looking at it more broadly, you can say that I had been waiting for that moment for a full year.’
The road has been neither smooth nor straight for Keerthana. Life put obstacles in front of her when she tried to start her career, and then tried to take that career away from her. But now she has taken it back.
‘I lived through a phase that was really depressing, but I did not give up, and I found my light at the end of the tunnel,’ she says with a smile. ‘As they say, it’s about the journey and not the destination. You never know exactly where you will end up – but focus on what you’re doing and on doing what you love, and don’t let the obstacles hold you back. The rest will fall into place.’
