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A Crystal Stair: Lessons From a Summer of Searching

  • Writer: Allison Higgins
    Allison Higgins
  • 4 days ago
  • 6 min read

I started this summer with a goal to have a full time role by June/July. Since spring, I have been applying, sharpening my skills, and keeping a detailed record of every role I have applied to. Based on the amount of applications I have submitted and rejections I have received, I have an approximate 30% rejection rate. While this doesn’t sound as bad as it could be, living through this uncertainty while trying to balance my financial obligations has certainly been no ‘crystal stair’. On the other hand, keeping track of my search this way has helped my mental health tremendously. Instead of seeing each new each new opportunity and rejection as a personal failure, I’m instead viewing the job market from a more numeric and logical sense. A few things I know for certain are: 


  • My resume and experience are both solid and I can explain my career journey very well. 

  • Many companies have just begun their new fiscal year which typically signals an increase in headcount for hiring 

  • Conference season and networking season are everyday occurrences in Atlanta. You just need a plan. 


Last week, I got the opportunity to turn my plans into action and  catch up with many members of my network during Atlanta Tech week and Render ATL. Between “hellos” and “congratulations”, we shared tips on where to look for jobs, which companies were hiring, which networking events were necessary to attend. I also had the chance to meet with hiring managers from several companies I’m targeting.Presently, I am still applying, and still hopeful for landing a full time role. 


The job application tracking template I’m using can be found here on Notion. It’s fully customizable, and I hope will help you find peace of mind if you are too still searching for an opportunity. 


Another new way I’m approaching this job search is by not solely relying on LinkedIn and Indeed for job postings. While I do like to check these sites at least once a week for roles posted in the last 24 hours, I began to notice that a lot of the companies would post the same role on both and that the postings were not updating as frequently. This can be extremely frustrating in the job search, so I compiled a list of free job sites I’m actively using to find roles:












Contingent Workforce Roles








When not job hunting, I’ve also been investing in building my skills with a particular focus on AWS, and AI/ML libraries. In many of the full stack and front end roles I have been applying to, AWS, specifically experience with DynamoDB, CloudWatch, and EC2 have been mentioned in the job description and nice to haves. My goal is AWS Certified Developer Associate credential before the end of year. I have been using Codecademy to study, but I am also looking for free or discounted exam study materials as well. On the AI/ML side, I have been studying Hugging Face through its library of free tutorials. Among other skills like LangChain, and TensorFlow, Hugging Face stood out to me in many job descriptions as well. It’s no longer enough to understand large language models, a developer must be able to show that they can create their own if necessary, and that’s the level of mastery I’m working towards. 


This summer, I also had to get creative about making ends meet. In June and July, I taught at the Black Girls Code Atlanta summer camp, held in Decatur, GA. While the rest of the world focused on the big games at Mercedes Benz stadium and around North America, I and the other instructors and counselors, were focused on transforming our students from game players to game developers. We utilized the French game engine Godot to teach the students about gameplay mechanics, the importance of physics, and how to create and add their own characters to a game. Watching things click for my students was magical, and reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in a while: I am pretty good at teaching.  But like all good things in life, camp had to end.




Fortunately, before camp began, I had landed a contract to build out an app for FIFA fans to meet up, find watch parties, and build community during their visit to Atlanta. For this app, I had to quickly gain mastery of Lovable. With the explosion of new AI development tools on the market, I had not had time to try all of them. When starting, I was skeptical of the idea of prompting my way through building an application. Quickly I realized that Lovable itself was based on typescript, an ecosystem I am already very familiar with. This eased my anxiety, about not being able to debug in the deepest layers of the app, should something go wrong with my prompts. I was able to get the core features and app functionality quickly built, but Lovable’s token usage rules can be a bit of a headache for a beginner. There were several days of buying extra tokens, while still waiting on the token counter to reset. Once the limit for the day was reached, all I could do as a developer was wait for it to reset and explain to my client what was going on. Although the games have concluded, you can still see the live app here: https://fanposse.lovable.app/ 




As I find myself on the precipice of a new season, I’m realizing that this summer has given me something more valuable than a job offer: perspective.


I started this summer hoping to land a full-time role by June or July. That hasn’t happened yet. I’ve experienced rejection, uncertainty, financial pressure, and more than a few moments when I questioned whether I was doing enough or whether my experience was enough. But I’ve also built, taught, learned, networked, created, and continued moving forward. I’ve learned to look at my job search not as a referendum on my worth, but as a process: one that can be measured, adjusted, and approached with intention. Maybe that is what resilience actually looks like. Not pretending that the road is easy, but continuing to walk it even when it isn’t a “crystal stair.” This summer reminded me that I am more than the outcome of my job applications. I am still a software engineer. I am still a teacher. I am still a builder. I am still a problem solver. I can learn a new technology when a client needs it, stand in front of a classroom and help a student discover something they didn’t know they could do, and sit down at the end of the day to figure out what comes next. And perhaps most importantly, I’ve realized that I can continue to help others while I’m waiting for my own help to arrive. That has been one of the hardest lessons to remember when life doesn’t unfold according to the timeline I imagined. Sometimes we become so focused on what we haven’t received that we forget to recognize what we are still capable of giving. This season has reminded me that there is still purpose in the waiting, growth in the uncertainty, and value in continuing to show up.


I’m still applying. I’m still learning. I’m still building. And I’m still hopeful.


I don’t know exactly what the next season will bring, but I’m walking into it with a little more confidence in my ability to navigate whatever comes next. I pray that my life realigns itself in exactly the way it needs to and that when it does, I’ll be able to look back and recognize that this season wasn’t a detour. It was preparation.


If you’re in a season of waiting, uncertainty, rejection, or reinvention yourself, I hope you remember the same thing I’m learning: your current circumstances are not a complete measure of your potential. Keep building. Keep learning. Keep showing up. Your story is still being written.

 
 
 

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