> if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. As

> if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. As a biology major who later had to turn to tech (sadly quite common as it turns out), I can sincerely empathize with this. Unfortunately, in the health sciences you cannot do this, even taking a low level lab position requires some level of college/university credit because of the samples you are dealing with (blood, tissue) and the requirements imposed by Law to ensure they gate-keep even though errors occur regardless of degree level in labs, which is why you take such large samples to begin with. In my foray with tech I've made a career in fintech (co-founder then went to a Megacorp), after spending time in Supply Chain roles the auto Industry. In both of those fields you are encouraged to not follow the predecessor if you want to be successful and move up; it rewards you if can pull it off and bring something novel and add value to the Team/Operation. And that, more than anything I learned in University, stuck with me for reasons that I think you could understand. After COVID derailed my Life, as it did others, I asked myself what I wanted to do and I decided to enroll into a BSc program in AI and Machine Learning, with the aspiration of doing what you just mentioned--getting a role before graduating by leveraging my existing skills and the new skills I'd learn with the brand of a University to back it up. My entrepreneurial habits kicked in during the on-boarding process and I saw a need to create a payment processing system to pay for tuition as so many students (mainly international) at the University in question were forced to pay via a system which resulted in delays, missing deadlines and large fees to process if it were possible. Some students even had to resort to using Western Union to make the deadline! This was at the time that Twitter had launched its Bitcoin tipping feature via iOS on it's platform, so a proof of concept/MVP could have been spun in short order. Eventually the faculty sent out a memo condemning using any alternatives (they became aware of the conversations happeing in Slack chat) saying it would result in further delays (or inability to register at all) if they did, thus making it entirely moot to try and flesh anything out. It wouldn't be anything but a MVP, as being a middleman/clearing house doesn't serve any of my long term goals. But what it could have done is disrupt the model and force progress to be made where it would otherwise remain stagnant. With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears? I mean, I'm guessing YOU would be open to this given what you've said but how would your project managers react to this? I've held developer and consultant status at the aforementioned Megacorp and I had way more friction for more insipid things.