What is your long term goal and/or career pathway?
My goal continues to be to get a job in the tech industry but I’m not sure on specifics. If we think even longer term than that, then possibly developing my own websites and apps for myself or customers for extra income? Who knows. In any case I want to make sure I have a robust skillset and am hireable. I ideally want to get hired into a role as a junior web developer in a workplace that has other developers around so I can learn from them too.
What do you think your biggest strengths and limitations will be in Bootcamp?
After looking once more at what I had put as my strengths and limitations during sprint 2 I realised not much has changed. I would still regard persistence as a strength and limitation being that I don’t understand things straight away. I think that this weakness of not getting something in my head straight away may hinder me in the bootcamp because I spend hours and hours figuring things out. I don’t want to get left behind at the bootcamp due to not understanding something. Also, another weakness that I touched on was focus. I can lose focus quickly. I don’t think I have ADHD but I feel at times I do..
What do you think your biggest non-technical challenge at Bootcamp will be?
Speaking in front of groups, or anyone really. If I don’t understand the material correctly or can’t remember, I struggle to explain things in a coherent manner. In fact, I’m just plain bad at explaining anything. I get lost in my own explanations at times. This is something I’ve mentioned in the learning plan and this is still definitely the case. Also a limitation I may have is working in a team. I have done it in the past but not in the way that coding works. It will be a challenge. I may also struggle with keeping to the times at the bootcamp, I think I’ll end up skipping breaks and whatnot if I’m behind. But we will see.
What non-technical skills - human skills - would you like to see developed in yourself while at Dev Academy?
I think this ties into my previous answer above, I need to improve on explaining things to others – this probably comes under needing to improve communication? I believe this will have great benefits in the future. My limitations are what cause this to be lacking – the fact that I don’t maybe understand material fully. That’s one possibility.
What are your expectations from the Bootcamp team?
Support to me would probably be encouragement and pointing in the right direction if needed. When not understanding something, trying to help people understand it in a way that makes sense to them.
What are your expectations of yourself on Bootcamp
Fortunately I’ll be going to the campus to do the bootcamp so I should be within arms reach to pull one of the facilitators in to get them to help me understand something or point me in the right direction.
Write down a commitment to how you will manage your workload in this programme. This should include - an explanation of how you will manage yourself to work productively and safely with other learners, facilitators and industry/community representatives.
I am committed to doing my best to improve my skills through the bootcamp. To manage this workload I will be spending as much time as I can towards the studies. I have set aside most of my life right now so the only thing I should be doing is studying. I plan to work productively by using the time spent wisely. If I encounter a problem for too long I will ask a facilitator for some assistance. The unfortunate thing is about the bootcamp is that the campus is in the city, getting to and from there will take a chunk of time out of the day that could have been used towards learning. If I decide to study after coming home and into the night this will cut into my sleeping time so I aim to avoid sleeping late. I will try to sleep around 11pm to get up and get ready for the long day ahead. I will also go out and socialise with friends and family occasionally to clear my head and to not get burnt out. These habits should allow me to come to the campus to learn with a good mental state.
1. What is your long term goal or career pathway?
My long term goal/career pathway is to literally get my foot in the door in the IT sector. Once I’ve landed at least one job using the skills I have learned during the course I will be able to continue to improve my skills and become even more employable. To me I would think that landing the first job doing web development is going to be the toughest hurdle but I have high hopes that I can do this. I’m not chasing for money, I am chasing for knowledge and building a skillset to become employable.
2. A description of your strengths and limitations when it comes to learning
Doing this course has opened my eyes a bit. There are times that I struggle to get something to work. E.g I was working on getting a dropdown menu on my blog to work for too many hours. Sometimes things don’t click in my head straight away. They can take time. I will eventually understand how to get it to work. But I also might forget it over time if I haven’t made use of it. My strengths in this sense would be persistence. I knew I wanted to get the dropdown menu to work so I continued to chug along to get it going. My limitations would be not always understanding something from the get-go. I might lose my focus for a bit here and there and then have to read over/watch the same material a few times.
3. What skills (non-technical core/human skills) would you like to see developed in yourself while at Dev Academy?
I’m not very good at explaining things. This is definitely something I want to work on. Some people seem to be naturally good at explaining issues or telling stories but I don’t think I’m there yet. I want to improve my explaining abilities so I can be on par with everyone else.
4. A commitment to how you will manage your workload in this programme. This should include: o An explanation of how you will manage yourself to work productively and safely with other learners, Facilitators and industry/community representatives o What you will do when things are building up and starting to get to you
I’m currently keeping up with the course contents because I have done some self-studying but from here on out I plan to ramp up the number of hours I spend studying. It’s very unlucky because as soon as the course started, my family has had some bad events unfold, this cut majorly into my study time. I’ve had to become a night owl and do my studies with around 4-5 hours of sleep a night. I want to give 100% of my time and focus to the course because I want the most out of it. Fortunately, there might be a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel and I should be able to ramp up my hours to study. I am also quite flexible and will make it work no matter what I have to do. It’s been tough but I’ve managed to work around the issues that have arisen so far so let that be a testament to my commitment to this course. If the course contents are stressing me out it will be best to take a short break and then come back to it. I sometimes find that when I’ve come back from a break I have a bit of a clearer mind. Because of the nature of the course and interacting with other students and facilitators it is necessary to be in a good mood and be approachable. This will require good amounts of sleep and breaks to keep the mind happy.
If things get more tough, that’s ok. As long as I can keep my chin up and understand that the struggle may only be temporary and there will be a light at the end of the tunnel I can keep going.
5. A commitment as to how and where you will seek help in a timely way
When necessary, I will talk to/message appropriate members of the team for assistance. As I’ve found in the past, struggling on a problem for a long period of time is not exactly efficient. For the most part everything is available through google, I just need to seek it out and understand the content and apply it.
6. A description of what you expect from the Facilitation team
I expect the facilitation team to keep us on our toes. Strive to get the best from us and understand not everyone will be comprehending the content at the same pace (not that you guys don’t).
7. Any scheduling information such as block-out times when you are committed to other things. For example, you might have whānau commitments like school drop-offs. It's important to plan these in.
Besides for my current family affairs there’s nothing else that will be taking out time from my day. The family issues are at a point now where I have to visit lawyers, prepare documents etc. But those events shouldn’t be lasting for too much longer (hopefully).