Hi. I’m Lindsey. After a career of 10 years as a lab technician in a phytopathology laboratory, I made a career change to become a .NET consultant at eMenKa NV.
Career path
After graduating as a Clinical Lab Technician in 2008, I got my first job as a lab technician at the University of Leuven where I did research on Microbial Genetics.
After a year, I switched jobs and became a lab technician in a phytopathology laboratory where I worked for 9 years. I found this a really interesting job, I learned a lot and gradually got more and more responsibilities. But when I now look back on that period, I realise that a wasn’t happy there for many reasons. One of those reasons was that I didn’t have any challenge anymore in my job. I looked for other jobs but the problem was at that time there weren’t many openings for lab technicians. So I just stayed there….
One of my passions is photography. When my husband and two friends started in 2014 with a new tech conference in Belgium and didn’t have much budget, I decided to do the photography so they could save some money on this. As I look back on this, it was one of my best decisions. As the photographer, I jumped into every session and I started to follow a few parts of sessions. To my surprise, I found it very interesting. After the conference, I wanted to learn how to program. I started doing some tutorials and tried to learn C#. After some time, I realised that I couldn’t do it on my own and decided to go back to school.
In September 2016, I started a 3-year program in the evening. Those 3 years were hard due to the combination of my full-time job, going to school in the evening, the tasks I got at school and a household. But I succeeded and graduated summa cum laude in June 2019. I don’t know if I could have done this without the support and encouragement of my husband.
After 2 years, I was ready to make the switch and exchange my white lab coat for a laptop. That is now almost 1,5 years ago and I haven’t regretted it for a single day.
Community
I had the privilege to be involved with the organization of Techorama Belgium and the Netherlands from the very start. Techorama is a yearly international technology conference where we welcome 1800 attendees in Belgium and 1200 in the Netherlands. Our commitment is to create a unique conference experience with quality content and the best speaker line-up.
Since the summer of 2019, I’m also a board member of VISUG, the Belgian Visual Studio User Group. We try to organize one evening event per month and one larger event, Visug XL, per year.