Journey through GA
The General Assembly - Software Engineering Immersive Program is a 12 week bootcamp designed to teach both front and back end languages, libraries, databases, and relevant soft skills to prepare aspiring programmers for a new career in tech. For our cohort, SEIR 826, we started our course at the end of August; now that we’re on week 10, many of us have begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we are eager to hit the ground running.
Preceding the course, I was initially drawn to software engineering to start working on, building, and improving existing web applications that make such an impact on my own life, specifically for music and tech services. For the course, preparation consisted of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript practice. During the bootcamp, we’ve covered variety of concepts and projects, with the schedule divided into lectures, labs, exercises, challenges, and reviews. Nearly every 3 weeks is project week, where aside from brief daily check-ins and help if we ask for it, we are working alone on our own ideas. It was with the completion of Project 1 that I felt affirmed that the switch to software engineering was exactly the move I sought.
My first project, Coop’s Questions, randomized and displayed questions from a category of the user’s choice. This was a project I had been theorizing for months prior, and upon completion, I felt empowered and even more excited and motivated to pursue software engineering. Looking back, it was just a few simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files deployed to GitHub pages, but it was that moment of publishing my first fully functional project that I built entirely on my own that greatly inspired me. I would continue to have the same fulfilling feeling turning my next projects, Coop’s Cheerups and DevQ, which integrated HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Express, Handlebars, Mongoose, Heroku, Node, and React.
While there have been many high moments, it’s equally important to recognize the lows - bootcamps are HARD. As the name implies, a web development bootcamp is an intensive experience designed to impart both the hard and soft skills necessary to be a software engineer in a short time. One must be prepared to feel confused, overwhelmed, uncertain, and overworked. It was in these moments that I had the most important revelations, that despite those feelings it was the persistence to keep working, keep growing, and not giving up that would make me a successful engineer. Importantly, don’t be afraid to take a step back and take a deep breath if you need it, be patient with yourself, take the time you need to build a strong foundation of knowledge.
Moving forward, I’m absolutely optimistic. Not only have I gained the ability to working with different languages, frameworks, databases, modules, and platforms, I now have the confidence to conquer any new language, the mindset to break down and solve problems analytically, and the work ethic to overcome any barrier to building a successful project. Although the bootcamp will be done soon, I know the best has yet to come, and I can’t wait to continue pushing programs that I’m passionate about.