Combat Medic → Software Engineer — An unconventional path
Context: Former U.S. Army combat medic (82nd Airborne) now studying web development (Full Sail B.S., graduation Oct 2025) and interning in AWS Cloud Support. No paid SWE role yet.
AI assist: ChatGPT helped me organise interview stories into this outline; every anecdote comes from my journals and mentor feedback.
Status: Reflection, not a victory lap. I’m documenting the throughline so hiring managers know what’s real.
Reality snapshot
- Military experience = 3.5 years triaging casualties, coordinating medevacs, and running aid stations.
- Civilian roles (case management, security, construction, animal rescue) reinforced empathy, logistics, and practical problem solving.
- Today’s work = student projects (Car-Match, Triangle Shader Lab, CheeseMath), AWS internship labs, and an honesty-first portfolio.
Transferable muscles
| Past role | What I actually did | How it shows up now |
|---|---|---|
| Combat medic | Stabilized multiple patients, prioritized severity, called in specialists, documented everything | Incident triage mindset: reproduce bugs fast, label severity, route owners, capture postmortem notes (Car-Match runbooks, AWS lab retros) |
| Case manager | Tracked complex cases, aligned families/providers, maintained daily status reports | Stakeholder comms: weekly updates to professors, internship mentors, and project collaborators |
| Construction | Worked from blueprints, adapted when materials/weather shifted, led small crews | Product agility: roadmap Car-Match features, adjust scope when Render cold starts or Atlas limits pop up |
| Animal rescue | Stayed calm with limited gear, made humane but tough calls, logged each event | Pragmatic delivery: cut scope when exhaustion rises, focus on user impact (accessibility, reliability) over “shiny” features |
How it translates to engineering work
Triage before heroics
When Car-Match’s backend sleeps on Render, I stabilize first (wake instance, log downtime on the site) before exploring cron jobs or paid tiers. Same with AWS labs: collect signals → narrow blast radius → document the fix.
Story-first communication
Patient charts demanded “Situation → Background → Assessment → Recommendation.” I use the same format in pull requests, runbooks, and status updates so teammates can act quickly.
Planning with contingencies
Military logistics = backups for everything. In software that means fallback content, cached API responses, or documented manual overrides. My READMEs call out cold starts, feature flags, and “if this breaks, do that” steps.
Empathy under pressure
Calm tone during outages, demos, or tough feedback sessions matters. I learned that rescuing animals and sustaining morale on long missions. Now I use it to facilitate study groups, run peer reviews, and keep honesty logs even when the results aren’t flattering.
Proof points
- Runbooks & retros:
/docs/runbooksin most repos + AWS internship notes show the triage/comms habit in action. - Honesty updates:
honesty.md+honestplan.mddocument every copy change and limitation on my portfolio—transparency born from medic-level accountability. - Community work: Tech Talk Club coordination + CIRIS documentation contributions rely on the same skills as managing aid-station crews.
Where I still need mentorship
- Deep CS topics (algorithms, distributed systems).
- Running real on-call rotations with customers on the line.
- Leading cross-functional engineering projects (beyond student teams).
- Translating empathy into scalable processes (incident response, accessibility reviews, documentation ops).
Takeaways for other career-changers
- Catalog your previous playbooks. You probably already know how to triage, document, and communicate—just reframe it.
- Stay honest about gaps. I say “student-level” every chance I get so expectations match reality.
- Keep serving. Whether it’s open-source docs, study groups, or honest portfolios, the service mindset still applies.