Inspirational story: From a girl who is almost uneducated to a Google engineer who receives a salary of 115,000 USD / year

The story of Sun Ling, a very poor girl born in Hunan, China, almost fell out of school when she turned 13 when she became Google's contract software engineer at a salary of $ 115,000 / year at 29 causing many people to admire.

Sun Ling's family is very poor, her mother has to sell blood to maintain life. In her hometown, it is conceived that girls only need to finish high school. At the age of 13, Sun had to take a break from school to reduce the financial burden, putting money for his brother to continue studying.

After a while, Sun was back at school. She said: 'I was begging forever to be allowed to go back to school by my father but my strong desire to go to school at that time was mainly due to the hard work of farming'. Among the friends of the same age in the village, she was the only one who graduated from high school.

After graduating from high school, Sun did not go to university but went to work as a factory worker in Shenzhen to make money like his peers.

The boring work with just repeating the battery quality check made her depressed. Sun said: ' I don't know how I want to live my life but I'm sure it's not the life I want .'

After 8 months, she quit her job at the factory and enrolled in a computer training program hoping to escape from manual labor. Sun had to work more jobs such as distributing flyers and waiters at part-time restaurants to get money to complete the training to become an amateur-level software engineer. She even had to live on three debit cards.

By September 2011, after more than a year and with a debt of 10,000 yuan, Sun Ling had earned a job as a software engineer at a company specializing in developing online payroll systems in Shenzhen. Sun is paid with a salary of 4,000 yuan / month and weekends with a small room of his own. This job meets all Sun's expectations about the life of female office workers.

But after only a short time, Sun felt small in a big city, where 'everyone around is very talented and has an advanced degree'.

So Sun enrolled in Shenzhen University's English training program and distance learning program while maintaining software engineering work.

In 2014, to practice English Sun decided to play discus, a popular game of foreigners living in Shenzhen at that time. As a result, Sun became acquainted with the new group of friends who had previously worked abroad and this girl started dreaming about a life outside of China.

60 job interviews

In early 2017, Sun Ling applied and was admitted to the Computer Science program at Maharishi Management University in Fairfield, Iowa, USA. With this program, Sun can both study and work after a few months of attending the school class, then she can complete the rest of the distance learning program.

After 9 months of study and 60 job interviews, Sun was hired by EPAM Systems, a retail provider for Google.

Regarding the work of a contract software engineer at the Manhattan headquarters of Google, Sun shared that she felt lucky because many colleagues were PhDs or studied at prestigious universities and people were only interested in ending Results of her work, not where she came from.

Without stopping there, Sun continued her journey, cultivating English, trying to integrate into American life and taking an online course on artificial intelligence. Sun Ling said that her next goal is to become Google's internal software engineer.

Sun added, her 10-year journey to make impossible as possible can be motivated by the desire to create a better life for herself. The psychology of many people is that it is very difficult to change lives, but it will become reality only if you constantly learn and try new things step by step, day by day.

1. What software developers need to do to earn $ 500,000 a year and this is an inspirational answer