Balancing Study and Work

A Recent Challenging Learning Experience

Studying and working concurrently is a very familiar and yet challenging experience. It gets more ‘interesting’ if the work you are doing is parallel to what you are studying. Recently I found myself having to apprehend the material in the Andela home study guide while remaining fully active at work as a telecoms solutions and sales technical support engineer with one of the key operators in Uganda which on it’s own is already very demanding. It presented me with a challenging learning experience that I feel I should blog about.

I mentioned this dilemma to a couple of colleagues who did not see it as a challenge for me as I have been attending a number of 1–2 week training’s for new platforms at work while comfortably achieving my daily tasks. Neither did I at the beginning as I thought the study would be similar to online challenges at codewars and codility requiring you to build simple applications to solve tasks like reversing sentences and finding factorials of numbers with a programming language of your choice, a mini master of which I have become :-).

Reality hit me when i found out that i only had about a week out of which to make time to internalize the home study guide with it’s key content being python, a programming language I had never interfaced with but had only heard my peers regularly chat about. The big O notation was another uncharted territory for me.

I had to get out of my comfort zone, adjust my working schedule to always be done by 17:00 hours to make time to consult and research further on these topics. I occasionally searched wiki pages, forums and YouTube videos for deeper explanations and examples on various topics. Consulting peers and mentors in the development domain improved my learning speed as they demonstrated concepts in ways easier to understand. Within the week, I had learnt basic python, understood the big O notation among other key topics enabling me to pass various interview levels to this stage. In the end, the fatigue was there but incomparable to the lessons learnt. There is always opportunity to be better in discomfort, and learning is continuous. It was worth it and I have resolved not to stop, but keep balancing study and work.