Culture question and application advice request - interested applicant

I hope this is the place for this! I'm a current graduate student looking to apply to Red Hat for a software engineering role or any engineering role relevant to machine learning/AI. Machine learning is my primary interest in school.

I have had to change my career trajectory from hospitality to engineering due to intrinsic motivation and interest, and a lot of hardship. I benefitted a lot from open source resources to make this career transition and want to express my appreciation towards that effect without sounding like a sob story. I've had to learn a lot rather quickly so my portfolio is a tad sparse but I'm putting the finishing touches on a transformer based project that I will publish to github.

Are there a lot of stories like this? Is it better to focus on my professional qualifications and just briefly mention I have had a career change?

Any advice welcome! Thank you