Day 8 of #100DaysOfHustle: Introducing Daniel!

Hey,

So as far back as I can remember I’ve been in education of some sort, and with very little diversity for the most part. I’ve never moved school aside from moving to a different building for secondary school, and even after passing some GCSEs I went to 6th form at the same campus. The school was pushing hard for all of the 6th form students to take part in the International Baccalaureate rather than traditional A-levels, so myself and about 95% of the school did so. This fitted in well for me, since it was basically an extension of traditional schooling where you stay on campus all day and have a range of different lessons (English, Maths, a choice of a Science, a language, etc.)

I chose that route because I wasn’t ready to do some proper adult-ing and because I didn’t like the idea of not being a full-time student. Following 6th form I decided to go study Psychology at LJMU — which for the first time in my life meant not walking the same route to school that I had been for 15 years of my life. By the time my course finished I was faced once again with the prospect of finally having to become a real adult… so I went back for a Masters course in Digital Marketing.

This brings me almost to the present day. A few months back while working on my dissertation and trying to plot how I could forever stay a student/decide what the heck to do with my life, I received an email from the head of my program with a forwarded message about a 10-week course around all manner of digital industries in Liverpool, called Catalyst. I still wasn’t entirely sure of what I wanted to do, but I thought this was a good start.

So now we’re 5 weeks in to the Catalyst course and I’m enjoying it so much more than I ever thought I would! Pretty much everyone is in a similar boat to myself as far as I can tell, and the atmosphere is the friendliest I’ve ever experienced. I’m not much of a talker in person, but even I feel confident to talk to anyone in the room at this stage, which is far from where I was when I walked in on day 1, not knowing a single person. I think anyone would be hard pressed to find a nicer bunch of people to spend one day a week with.

What’s the future looking like for you?

Really good at the moment! I finally got the results back for my dissertation this week - which I submitted back in week 2 of Catalyst — and it was far better than I could have hoped for. I *think* I’ve finally figured out what it is I want to do for a career, and I’m now making a conscious effort to position myself to get there. Things are looking good!

What will you be doing during #100DaysOfHustle?

I started out thinking that I would work on blog posts for the 100 days, and figured that I would try to learn a bit of coding on the way, but I’ve done a complete turnaround on that. Now I’m committed to spending at least the next (checks calendar) 92(?) days learning how to code, and working on some blog content in the background.

What have you done today?

Today I finished learning basic HTML on CodeAcademy (I started with FreeCodeCamp but felt that the difficulty spiked too much) and began the CSS course.

I also played Shadow of War and began reading Stardust by Neil Gaiman because I’m a big Tolkien/fantasy nerd.

(I liked the juxtaposition between the two images too much to not include them)