Five years of IT and the choice to change direction

I spent five years at a technical school studying computing and then chose to study communication. For a long time I described that move as a break. Today I see it as a continuity I was unable to recognise at the time.

At fourteen, choosing computing was not a calling. It was a serious school with practical career prospects, and I liked the idea of understanding how the things I used every day worked. For five years I studied logic, systems, networks and programming. I learned to write code, read a diagram and search for the fault in a system that was not doing what it should. I was not the best in the class, but I was not out of place either.

The problem became apparent towards the end. I realised that the parts of the work that kept me awake were not the strictly technical ones. They were the questions that came before them: why are we building this, who is it for, and what should happen when they use it? Code was the answer to a question someone else had already framed. I was interested in framing the question.

A change of direction, not a rejection

Choosing the Communication, Media and Advertising degree at IULM was a decisive move. It was not a hybrid course or a compromise. I wanted to enter a world that, from the outside, looked like the opposite of the one I came from: words instead of syntax, people instead of systems, ambiguity instead of true-or-false conditions. I completed my bachelor's degree in 2018 and my master's degree in Strategic Communication in 2021.

At first I made the mistake many people make when changing direction: I tried to erase where I had come from. I rarely mentioned my technical-school years and treated them as a closed chapter, almost as wasted time. It took several years of work to realise that I was using those skills every day, only in a form I did not recognise.

Technical thinking as a mindset

What remains of five years of computing when you no longer program? A way of thinking. The habit of breaking a large problem into smaller ones and solving them one at a time. The idea that every system has inputs, processes and outputs, and that if the output is wrong, the cause lies somewhere along the chain rather than in bad luck. A tolerance for debugging: the patience to find the error instead of complaining that it exists.

In communication and later project management, this mindset proved more useful than much of what I learned afterwards. A production plan is a system. A campaign is a system. In a sense, a client relationship is a system with feedback loops. People with technical training tend to ask how the parts fit together before asking how to make them look good. It is not an absolute advantage — sometimes it is a limitation — but it is a perspective creative teams often lack.

A practical example is how I approach errors. Anyone who has studied computing knows that a malfunctioning system is not offended with you; it has simply received an input it did not expect. Bringing that neutrality into work with people — without becoming cold — helps separate the problem from the person who caused it and focus on what to do next. It is one of the things colleagues notice most, although they rarely connect it with my years at technical school.

The value of speaking two languages

There is a practical aspect I underestimated for a long time. In my current role at a tech company, I often act as a bridge between the people who develop a product and those who buy it. These are two worlds that use different words to describe similar things, and identical words to mean different things. I am no longer a technician and will not become one again, but I understand what technical colleagues are saying and can translate it for people who do not. In a negotiation or a project, that is often worth more than deep vertical expertise in only one of the two fields.

I am not suggesting that everyone should study computing for five years before working in communication. I am saying that the education we leave behind is rarely lost, and that the way we describe it changes the way we use it. While I treated it as a youthful mistake, it remained inert. Since recognising it as part of how I think, it has worked for me.

"I did not stop thinking like a technician. I stopped believing that thinking like one was enough."

Changing direction without discarding your baggage

If I had one piece of advice for someone considering a radical change of direction, it would be this: change, if where you are answers questions that are not yours. But do not throw away what you have learned. Ask instead what form it takes when translated into the new context. Often it becomes something scarce in that environment — and therefore worth more, not less.

Moving from computing to communication was the right decision for me. Not because communication is better than computing, but because it was where my questions had room. I only understood later that answering those questions still required the mind built during those five years. Better late than never.