From Cellist to Coder and Career Coach: Meet Zicklin Alum Paden Gayle (BBA, ’19)

Paden Gayle (BBA, ’19) didn’t start out wanting to be a coder. He wanted to be a cellist, but after getting into Juilliard, he decided to leave after just one semester. 

“I guess the fear that musicians don’t make much money was instilled in me,” he admits. So he transferred to Farmingdale State College, near his Long Island hometown, to study business. Then, after his family moved to Brooklyn to take care of his ailing grandfather, he grew tired of the three-hour-a-day commute and decided to transfer to Baruch.

“I always liked communicating with people and thought I’d go into trading or investment banking, so the Zicklin School was the obvious choice,” he explains. Along the way, he discovered he had a knack for coding: “As I connected more with the tech side I found it interesting, so I shifted to the technical route.” He even founded a Baruch club, the Association for Information Systems (AIS), to help students like himself “bridge the gap between business and computer science.”

After Paden was one of only a handful of students to earn an A in his introductory statistics course, the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC) recruited him to tutor other Zicklin students in the subject. The computer and information systems major went on to spend 20 hours a week or more tutoring courses in programming, data mining, and other CIS topics. His primary motivation was money, since he was putting himself through college, but he soon found he liked “seeing that moment when they got it—when they understood what they were missing.” 

Now, Paden has combined his love for tutoring with his tenacious spirit and built a side hustle as a career coach. It started with a chance encounter with another Zicklin student at a software engineering conference in San Francisco that he attended when he was working for Bloomberg.

“Zicklin students are ambitious and tenacious—whenever I meet one, we instantly connect,” Paden says. “I told this student, ‘Know that if you graduate from Zicklin, you have the capabilities to do whatever you want.’ I didn’t think much about it until eight months later, when she contacted me with the news that she’d landed a software engineering internship and asked me to give a talk about my career for a tech nonprofit aimed at increasing diversity in the computer science field.”

Paden told them the story of how he was rejected on his first try at Bloomberg and his first two tries at Google, where he now works as a software engineer. That was the beginning of his side hustle as a career coach. He’s now given similar talks at Queens College and City College as well as for CodePath and other software engineering boot camps, and was recently the subject of a Business Insider profile.

“Zicklin taught me how the professional world works,” Paden sums up. “It taught me a lot of things you can’t put on paper—interpersonal skills, how to think, how to approach situations. Those have carried me through my career and my personal life.”

Categories: Alumni News, News