My first week at ALC 3.0 (Google Africa Challenge 2018)
When I applied for the (Google Africa Challenge Scholarship 2018), I never really put my mind to it. I mean, I gave the application my best shot, but I was a bit skeptical. After my fair share of — “Thank you for your interest” — letters, I had become quite skeptical about applications. Within a few days, I had totally forgotten about the application. Little did I know that this one was to be different.
On the 2nd of May as promised, I received a congratulatory mail offering me a scholarship to partake in the (Google Africa Challenge Scholarship 2018) together with other tech enthusiasts from around Africa. It was one of the must uplifting days of the year so far. It felt good to be finally accepted and it was coming at a great time too.
You see, I just started learning ASP.NET MVC, and with the rich knowledge of front end web-dev that this scholarship was going to provide, I could really accelerate my learning process, and position myself to build some interesting things. I was determined to make the most of this.
With great expectation and excitement, May 8th finally came. There is no better way to describe the first day than super chaos. The primary forum, slack, was getting a huge chunk of messages per second. We were to make introductions, so you can imagine what will happen when 3000+ people (as of the first day) are all trying to make an introduction at once. It was impossible to really meet anyone. I managed to get in my intro, but it was immediately drowned in the pool of posts.
Then came the process of learning and helping other people learn. At first, it was looking like a game of fastest fingers first. Everyone wanted to get to be the one that solved that fellow’s problem and gain some traction in other to win the nanodegree scholarship, myself included. I mean they said it was not a competition, but let’s face it, this is a fight to the death!
But enough about the forum. I have immensely gained from this first week. If not anything, I have come to understand and cherish the power of the MDN documentations and communal learning. Seriously, it is second to none! There is always someone with a solution to your problem. All you need to do is ask.
In all, it has been amazing fun! Being able to help people understand stuff, going through the lessons and quizzes and interacting with other members of the forum from around Africa. I can’t wait to go through the next seven weeks with this amazing group!
It’s been AWESOME!
