Makers Academy: The First Day
After 4 weeks of self-led Pre-course materials, we are ready for our first day onsite at Makers Academy — finally yay! The night before we get sent through a rough schedule of the day and what to expect in your first week but I thought I’d share with you what a first day looks like, without giving too much away of course, as I wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun.
8.30am — Doors are open and breakfast is served, a damn good spread from the wonderful Florence, Operations Manager/Superstar at Makers. After food (and only after), it’s a great chance to meet my fellow cohort face to face and put some faces to names after only interacting with most of them via Slack during the pre-course. Everyone one is friendly and eager to get started.
9.30am — Welcome to Makers 🎉 It’s time for an intro chat from Ed, one of our coaches on the course. Everyone is a bit nervous but we soon break the ice with some interactive exercises on why we are all here and what we want to get out of our time here. The best part? Realising that everyone is pretty much on the same wave length and and are here to be the best version of themselves. Although some paths of their journey might be slightly different to yours, you know that your going to be working with some awesome people. Makers have their selection process down to a mighty fine art I tell ya!
11.30am Introduced to Chief Joy Office, Dana. Before even starting the course you get a sense that Dana is going to be a supportive, positive person and that was most certainly proved true when she gave us a talk about life at Makers. We hear more about emotional intelligence, yoga and meditation and it’s highlighted that it’s not all about stressing out over a chunk of code for 5 hours. She cannot stress(or not stress if you are at Makers 😉) enough how important it is to be kind to yourself and make room for sleep, wellbeing and health as part of your web developer journey. I loved this talk and it just showed how far Makers go to support their junior devs ❤️.
12.30pm — Lunch with the gang. You will never be stuck for choice with Spitafields Market right around the corner from the office. I would highly recommend Pilpel for all your falafel dreams.
1.30pm — Our first meditation session guided by Dana. As you probably already know Makers is big on meditation and it was definitely one of the main reasons I was thrilled to get a place here. It was an amazing experience — staff and other cohorts are always welcome and there was a big turnout. They share with us some advice they’d give to themselves on day 1 and it’s so helpful. Everyone here is just so friendly and always wanting to share advice and knowledge.
2.30pm — Next up was a great talk from Head of Education Sam. He had some real, honest tips on how to succeed in achieving our goals and really solidified why we are all here; to not just become a web developer but to learn how to be a good developer and come away with the tools and mindset to do so. This is why choosing Makers for my coding journey was an easy process. They don’t just help you go from novice to expert in a particular language, they will teach you the skills needed to know how to learn anything you want.
3.00pm — after that, we are introduced to all the lovely Makers staff team, including careers and marketing. Lots of help and support offered to ‘build your brand’, essential stuff for post-graduation job hunting.
3.30pm — Pair Programming time! Our first bit of coding onsite and, let’s be honest, what we’ve all been waiting for. We are randomly put into pairs and get given some challenges to complete, it’s a nice gentle intro into what I can only imagine to be 12 weeks of pure madness but after today I cannot wait.
We take our first big steps on our journey at Makers and I can already tell, it’s going to be a good one.
