Thanks again for reaching out. First off, I'd say there are a lot of great opportunities in tech for someone with a strong mathematical background and a hunger to learn. And tech as an industry offers a lot of rewarding work and strong job security. So it's a great place to start your career.

As for my story, it's extremely meandering. I would say I've made a career of repeatedly reinventing myself and following my passions.

My undergrad back (in Australia) was in physics and maths, like yours, with focus on quantum, geometry, dynamical systems and analysis. But after my honors year I was burned out and questioning whether I really wanted to do research, which is basically what I'd been groomed for my whole life.

So -- and I wouldn't necessarily recommend this because it put my current career into "hard mode" -- I dropped the idea of having a normal job and dedicated the next three years to rock climbing and mountaineering. I worked in a climbing shop, lead the mountaineering discipline at the university outdoors club, trained like a fiend, and climbed constantly, in Australia, Europe and New Zealand. One especially heavy year I spent about 7 months camping at crags, and another two in mountain huts. This was my first real self-driven transformation, because prior to my honors year, when I discovered and fell in love with climbing, I wasn't even especially outdoorsy or sporty. Quite the opposite in fact. Like I said, I wouldn't necessary recommend this as a career move, but I did learn a ton and shape my personality in ways related to self-reliance, drive, focus, risk tolerance, stoicism and tenacity, which have probably been implicitly useful in everything since then.

Anyway, when I finally decided to get a real job, I decided that that was being a photographer. So I started an advanced diploma in commercial photography and put up my services as a freelancer. Like before, I learned like a maniac and pretty soon was doing okay financially from portraiture, weddings, sport and commercial photography and video production work. Being self-employed was a new suite of challenges, and it was an amazing way to learn a lot of new skills. But the best parts were meeting amazing people from all walks of life -- like one day when I hung out with an Olympian, a member of parliament, and a heavy metal band -- and accidentally starting out on the road to tech.

My "accidental" entre to tech was a basic web dev course offered through my photography diploma course. It was very limited in scope, but the idea was enough to get me hooked on learning JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Coding kind of took a hold of me. Before long all my freelancing was web development. Looking back, I was very green, but energetic and keen. After maybe a year of that, I received an introduction through a friend I had collaborated with, to a dev lead at a digital tech/design/strategy consultancy in Melbourne called Deloitte Digital. It happened they needed front end devs, and we hit it off. Entry level positions were normally filled through grad programs at Deloitte, so they snuck me into the Deloitte Consulting grad program and everything worked out. I moved to Melbourne on a weekend's notice and started a new chapter.