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Hey friends! I’m Tabitha- Tabi for short. I’m a Systems Engineer by day who has an obsession for over-the-top fashion. Being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field has been a (sometimes-bumpy) journey, and I want to share my story and career advice for anyone and everyone who is pursuing a technical career with a creative personality.

Do you enjoy your job?

This is a question I get a lot! The short answer is: yes, overall I do enjoy my job. The long answer? Well, that requires a little more background, so let’s start at the beginning…

As someone who always found school easy growing up and rarely struggled, I came into college being pretty successful the first semester. The second semester wasn’t so easy. I had a Chemistry class, which was a subject I always liked, but it was taught by a pretty disorganized and somewhat bitter adjunct professor who had one of the freshman students teach the class while they just sort of kicked back. I went to office hours to get some extra help when I started getting lower grades, and this professor told me point blank that even though they “never discouraged a woman from pursuing a career in science”, I would never achieve my dreams of becoming a physicist or engineer if I couldn’t succeed in this class. I remember leaving the office hours session incredibly disappointed, confused, and shattered. I had never had someone tell me I couldn’t do something, especially in the context of a teacher discouraging their student instead of helping them. Suffice it to say the rest of the semester was full of floundering and not knowing what I was going to do next…

At the same time, I began dating someone who seemed so sure of himself and his career choice of being an engineer. Because I was so overcome with this relationship and so in love, I started to think that maybe I could be an engineer too. When my freshman year ended, I became increasingly worried about having to declare my major in my upcoming sophomore year, so when the fall came around, I started attending career events, missing a lot of sorority parties, and growing further away from my boyfriend, who had changed from the sure-of-himself, “golden guy” to someone who partied and drank a lot, leaving himself in sometimes-questionable situations with his friends and a girl he worked with. On that front, we began arguing a lot, something we had never really done, and he didn’t seem to respect or support my drive to be successful and take college seriously. He didn’t struggle in school as much, and he insisted his parents and their connections would probably get him an internship for the summer. Since I was the first person in my family to go to college and have a white-collar career, I didn’t have that luxury. While I was working towards my future as an engineer so that I could have a future with him, he was working towards his own life without me. Still, we struggled on and I loved him so much that I didn’t want to give up on our relationship or what we had had together.

But, fate knew when to step in. In the fall of my sophomore year, after what I thought was our relationship going through a good patch for a while, he dropped by my apartment on a Saturday morning and shattered any hope I had had of a future with him. He basically told me that he couldn’t give me what I wanted and didn’t love me the way I loved him. When asked about our relationship being better lately and the blissful date we had had less than a week earlier, he said he felt like he had lied to me about his feelings. That was the thing that hurt the most: that he could ever lie to me about loving me and take advantage of my love for him this way. Suffice it to say, I took this breakup more than hard. I contemplated taking my own life (which I haven’t really admitted to a lot of people until now; but it’s an integral part of my career story and who I am today, so here it is…) and went back home to live with my parents for a few days. The rest of that semester I barely slept, ate only about one meal a day, and did anything I could to get him off my mind, especially since we saw each other all the time being that it was a small school and we shared friends.

I reached a point that semester where I was determined to live down the person I had been, and prove him and everyone else who had discouraged me wrong. So, on my 19th birthday, I declared my major to be Mechanical Engineering and so began what ended up being a tumultuous 5-year college career with over 170 credits, numerous math classes (with coinciding bad grades), a professional society presidency, two internships, two part-time jobs, and overcoming a ton of adversity to earn my degree. By the end of my college career, I had done everything I had set out to do, and I had even lined up a post-grad job at the same company my now-husband had started working for when he graduated a year prior. He had move back to his home state of Colorado to start his career, and when I graduated, it was our plan for me to join him so we could get married, and a job out there was the focus of my final year, so I was elated.

Everything was coming up roses. But soon, the stress of being without my family in a new-to-me state and a career in the intense aerospace industry began to take their toll. My husband and I made the best of things for two full years in Colorado, and I genuinely tried to enjoy it, but while I was successful at work, deep down I knew it wasn’t right for me. People at my job weren’t happy or personable, and the office environment just didn’t suit me like I thought it would. During this time, I started my second career of fashion blogging and sharing my quirky outfits as an escape and outlet for the creativity I had long suppressed. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I knew I needed a change. In the midst of lockdowns and even having Covid, I applied for and secured a job out in Southern California and my husband transferred his job so that we could move back to my home state. Because of the pandemic, we both began working from home, and after we both changed jobs a few more times to secure working-from-home roles permanently, we realized this was the best situation possible. We both landed on jobs that we thoroughly enjoyed, and felt so thankful that God had given us what we had needed.

So to sum it up, yes, I do enjoy my job now. Both my blogging career and my career as an engineer. I’m always asked if I would give up engineering for blogging and, if things hadn’t changed for the better with this career, maybe I would’ve said yes once, but now, I really do enjoy both and feel like I can finally express both sides of my personality through my careers.

And, because I promised you some career advice and you made it through my long-winded tangents above, here it is: you have to live for you and no one else, and this includes your career. When people have said told me that a job is a job and you don’t have to enjoy it, I just couldn’t accept it. I mean, this is what you’re spending countless hours of your precious life doing, why is enjoying what you put so much into such a lofty expectation? Sure, be realistic about your expectations, but also don’t be afraid to change and adjust until you find the thing that suits you. The first part of my career and college was full of letting my desire to “stick it” to other people and prove myself determine my path, and I later regretted not paying attention to my own true wants and needs more. YOU are important, and what you want out of life should drive you. That’s not to say that you can’t let others or external things motivate you, but at the end of the day, you’re the only one living your story and the result of your choices, so make them ones you can be proud of. Don’t hesitate to take the unconventional path or to explore secondary careers; in today’s day and age, I’m so thankful that we’ve expanded our definitions of what a career and “office” looks like to be more accepting of those who don’t fit the traditional mold. Careers aren’t always linear, and the old adage of “when life closes a door, it opens a window” really is true. You’ll end up where you’re meant to be, just trust the process, keep your faith, and be authentically yourself.

What has your career been like and what career advice would you give? Do you enjoy your career? Let me know below and be sure to subscribe to my blog for more engineering and fashion content!

Xx Tabi