Starting Makers Academy
So I’ve been quiet for quite some time. Apologies. Partially this is because I’ve not felt that I have much of interest to say as I’ve simply been studying quite hard recently along with juggling actual work. Though even as I say it, I realise I’m going against what I set out to do, namely continue to write about my experiences regardless of what I expect the outcome to be, because at the end of the day, it is perhaps presumptuous of me to judge what others will find interesting and even were one to find my outpourings boring, no masked intruders are standing with a gun to my dear audience’s heads to make them read this (I hope).
And, partly, I have just been busy which is a rubbish excuse I know, so again — I am sorry. ‘But what have you been busy with, which is so important that it has kept you from your blogging duties?’ I hear you cry.
Well, after a good 6 months of learning to code on my own, taking time at weekends and in the evenings, I felt like I still wasn’t really getting anywhere very quickly and just had lots of questions. And if I’m really honest, I was finding it hard to discipline myself to keep studying, especially when I didn’t really seem to be doing a whole lot with it (sadly the project I started working on, which I detailed in my last post got pulled :/). I made the decision to further my education by doing a bootcamp to turn me into a software developer (I realise this sounds similar to waving a magic wand and turning me into a frog but I promise you, that I’m fully aware that the only ‘magic’ being used in my transformation will be hard work). Living in London, UK, I’m pretty lucky that there are a number of different organisations which run such courses here but I eventually settled on Makers Academy. What attracted me to them specifically? I think mainly their pastoral care — it’s a selective bootcamp and they’re extremely invested in making sure that all of their graduates succeed the course and then find work at the finish which is the end goal for me. Secondly, they take the welfare of their students very seriously, providing daily meditations and yoga. This might sound silly — after all, if that’s what I’m interested in, it’s not hard to find a yoga group or a meditation app — but what it showed me was that they had thought long and hard about the health implications of working so intensively on their students and that they were aiming to provide an environment conducive to learning. And finally, I just thought the course looked awesome — so much to learn and training us all in Agile methodolgy.
Anyway, fast forward a few months, after a fairly rigorous application process plus 4 weeks of pre-course study (which was a *terrible* idea to try to take on while continuing to work full time) to today, which was my first day. How am I feeling? Mainly just exhausted — lots of new names and faces and lots of details to take in about course structure etc., etc. But also pondering some new food for thought.
We were all told that we were going to be ‘knowledge workers’ — which apparently means, broadly speaking, that we will be spending a large part of our working life as developers simply looking up how to do stuff. They then dropped what was for me a rather startling statistic, which is that junior developers will spend 60% of their time doing this and senior developers 30%. They then asked how we all felt about this.
Globally speaking, I think the majority of us felt pretty positive about it. After all, there aren’t so many industries that you can go into where you are learning all the time and get paid to do it, especially when that learning allows you to be creative and build exciting things. If I’m honest, my main worry about this would be that not all employers are aware of the ‘knowledge worker’ thing and want results quicker than it would be possible to deliver them. Though on the other hand, making the point that it was ever thus in any industry is probably valid.
Their next question for us was: ‘How nervous are you about starting Makers?’ As this question wase by anonymous poll, I didn’t actually see how many people admitted to this but I heard the movement of many arms being shifted upwards — including mine. Frankly, it’s pretty terrifying. Despite the coding I have done, so much feels unknown and there is the terror that after having made the decision to change career, hand in my notice and pay the considerable course fees, I will quite simply be bad at it. And I’m not terribly reassured right now after having done the pre-course studying that I’m any good because it did feel, quite frequently, like I didn’t know what I was doing.
However, what was reassuring, in a very weird way, was being told that we will be feeling like this very intensely for 12 weeks. Because that showed me that actually, it’s ok if I feel like I’m in out of my depth. And it’s ok if it feels like there is so much to learn and how will I ever manage it? And it’s even ok if I fail some of our weekly challenges. Because the point of being here isn’t to be perfect — it’s to learn. And more importantly, to learn how to learn, how to figure things out for myself in an industry so technical and jargon-filled it is literally not one, but many other languages.
So I’ve committed to not beating myself up when I inevitably fail, and more specifically, not allowing such failure to dictate my sense of self-worth. Because, to sound utterly cheesy, failure is just a step on the way to success — and as long as I’m prepared to study the whys and the hows and incorporate failure into my learning process — then I really won’t be failing at all. Because each failure will have taught me something valuable — whether that be a new concept or to double check that my parentheses match up. And the gaining of such knowledge will constitute success within itself.
