My Journey: A compilation of bumps and struggles off the beaten path.

Udacity has asked for students to provide a glimpse into their personal journey as they pursued a nanodegree with the assistance of the Grow with Google foundation. They asked us, quite simply, to share what we went through to cross the finish line. My tale is quite a whirlwind, so strap in for the wild ride.

To say that my journey through the last 12 months was easy and carefree would be an incredible misrepresentation. I’d like to say that I breezed through everything I experienced with poise and excellence, but that would be an incredibly fallacy. I was tipped off to the scholarship from family friends, who told me I should go for it. What was the worst that happens, I get rejected? It was a completely free attempt to a completely free preemptive course that could potentially lead to an online alternative degree that would, if anything, expand the skillsets I already had.

I had graduated 3 years before with a B.S. in Computer Science, but my focus there was Java. My personal feelings aside (okay, let’s be real, Java is incredibly verbose and I was completely done with it. If you’ve ever written anything in it, you know exactly what I mean), as I looked further into the Mobile Web Specialist track, I found that it might be my chance to kickstart my Javascript skills and transition away from a language that I had fallen out of tune with. I also saw the potential to network through Udacity, especially with a nanodegree under my belt, and find a new entryway into software engineering. There was no losing from simply going for it, so on December 4th, I sent my application off through the communicatoobs (Yes, the communicatoobs, that’s all the internet is, a series of communicating tubes, everyone knows this) and quickly let it fall to the back of my mind.

What also happened was my anxiety was kicked into high gear, reminding me of all the things that could happen. Even though I had nothing to lose, my mind still wanted to somehow make this chance into a negative thing

The first reminder that I had even applied to this scholarship was an email telling me they were extending the application deadline, which put it back on my radar that this was a thing that I had signed up for. What also happened was my anxiety was kicked into high gear, reminding me of all the things that could happen. Even though I had nothing to lose, my mind still wanted to somehow make this chance into a negative thing, reminding me of all the failures that would result from a simple, harmless application. I had a month to wait until they sent out emails, and this was just for Phase 1. On January 10th, however, I received my acceptance for a Grow with Google scholarship toward to Mobile Web Specialist track. This would grant me 3 months to complete their challenge course, to show I was good enough to complete the content and capable of interacting with other developers seeking the same goals as me. The challenge was simple enough, the sample application we worked with was easy to understand and I still have plans to go back and look through it, to see just how it all ticks, but what really struck a chord with me was that the challenge course also wanted to see how we socialized. It wanted us to not only be able to show we were capable of coding and thinking like software engineers, but to be able to project this, and maybe offer insights for someone struggling along the way with a concept or a paradigm being used. This was also a reminder that not everyone came from the same technical background as I did, some people were using this course to transition into a new field. It didn’t come as easy to them as it did to me. I had to adjust the way that I commented on things, lower my expectation that they were working with a similar foundation, and that sometimes, the simplest concept to me was the most daunting for someone else.

Fast forward 3 months, a couple hundred thousand slack messages, a couple hundred forum posts, and we had reached the end of the challenge course. We had all accomplished what we had set out to, for the most part, and began the agonizing wait of seeing just who would make it through to the nanodegree. If you were in that Slack server, you know how nail-biting it was. I remember them being incredibly delayed the day they told us to expect responses. We were all on the edge of our seats, wondering if silence meant we were in and the email was just late, or if we didn’t make the cut. Personally, I didn’t think I was going to make it beyond that point. Sure, I knew the content well enough, it was pretty easy to skate through, but I didn’t think I’d spent enough time on the forums, enough time in the help channels. I didn’t know if I had quite made myself noticeable, which I put way too much weight on.

However, on April 17th, at 9pm, I received my email, 1 of a 1,000 just like it, congratulating me on my scholarship. I was ecstatic, to say the least. I had genuinely convinced myself that for some unknown reason, I wouldn’t be chosen. There was a 2 week break between that email and the course’s start date, but I was ready to jump right in. My energy level had never been higher, I was in need of an outlet for it. I took off like lightning when the course access was granted, I was present in Slack ready to help people who stumbled along the way. With my experience from the challenge course in Phase 1, I knew there were people without a technical background that would definitely need assistance understanding some of the deeper topics, and while I was geared up to dive headfirst into the project application, I was also ready to help people who weren’t quite so sure they were capable of it. Keep this in mind, because the story actually sidetracks a little bit later. At the beginning, I was an abundance of energy and determination. I got through the first chunk of videos, I completed every quiz with ease, and I had hit the first wall, Project 1.

Project 1 wasn’t necessarily difficult, it was actually fairly easy if I’m being honest. My main issue was with the application scaffold we were given. Logically, I understood that the course wasn’t expecting us to jump in with a knowledge of certain frameworks. We didn’t need to know React or Angular, we weren’t expected to understand Express routes, and the application didn’t use any of that, however it also didn’t use anything. It was as pure javascript as you could get, right down to document methods to generate the page layouts. The HTML was a barebone skeleton that was manipulated through the application. I guess I had oversold what exactly I would be working with in my head, but this floored me. In my mind, I wanted to re-write the entire base application. Arguably speaking, there was actually nothing stopping me from doing just that, beyond not implementing any frameworks for the UI, or any form of middleware backend like Express, and this was my first mental hurdle which would catalyze into most of my frustration across this course. I was able to get through Project 1 with almost no issues, my code was documented (although, I probably could have done a better job of this, but cut me a little bit of a break, at least I had any documentation at all!), my commits were…a little lacking. I have a habit, which I still haven’t broken, where I just charge through my list of requirements one by one until I hit a mental wall and have to stop for the time being, and then I commit my changes. Clearly, this isn’t the intention with version control, but I digress. The simple fact was that I made it through the first project and I was on my way into the meat of the course, where we transition from front-end work to API calls and the back-end of the application.

At the same time, Student Leader applications went up. Our incredible Community Managers were looking for a little extra help from students who were willing to put in the time to assist other students. I applied, knowing that even if I couldn’t help with specific problems, I could still be an extra set of eyes when looking at code. Every engineer knows that sometimes, when you stare at an application long enough, lines just start blurring together. Having a fresh set of eyes to look at something, to see a misspelled variable, a missing semicolon, or a comma out of place that was enough to throw off the logic, but not completely break an application, was an invaluable resource. I was accepted, I helped host a few Study Jams, I helped people understand what code was doing, or wasn’t and should have. I was happy to put in the time to provide the insight that some people just didn’t have yet, while still pushing my way through the second set of videos. I was still moving along with the same energy that I had entered this course with.

However, my procrastination got interrupted by a serious bout of depression.

This is where I hit my wall. I’m not going to lie, I’m known to procrastinate. I put things off until the last minute because “I can easily just push it out, it’ll be fine, I can do it later”. It’s not an uncommon thought pattern, and it’s easy to just wake up one day and decide that that’s the day you push through and finish what you were putting off. However, my procrastination got interrupted by a serious bout of depression. Not the “Oh, maybe I just won’t do anything today” depression, but the “Hmm, I don’t think I’ll get out of bed today”. Sometimes, it wasn’t just today, it was 3 or 4 days where I would just wake up, roll over, and decide that going back to sleep was a better choice. Spans of days where I just felt so incredibly useless, that I couldn’t even contemplate getting out of bed to sit at my desk and stare at my monitors. What was worse is that while physically, I didn’t want to move, mentally, I was wired. My mind was geared and ready to go, it wanted to get the projects done. I was more than prepared to complete it, I just physically didn’t have the energy to do it. Am I saying this to excuse myself from putting work off? No. It’s not an excuse to say “Oh I was just having a bad day”. It’s an explanation. While other people were occupied with their families, and their other jobs, and they were fitting free time in to work on this course on the side, I had all the time in the world to dedicate to it. I could watch the courses, I could poke away at the project requirements with nothing stopping me, except not physically being able to bring myself to work on anything, or focus on something for more than 5 minutes without wanting to crawl back into bed. I’m saying this to acknowledge that this is okay. It’s not a weakness to be human. It’s not a weakness to feel insignificant or unable to accomplish something. It’s certainly not okay, and it shouldn’t become the norm, but it happens, to a lot of people, and for most, it happens unspoken. You hear about the accomplishments, not the struggle to get there. You don’t hear about the thoughts in their head telling them they can’t do something, or the nagging feeling in the back of their mind that just sucks the energy they had just gotten from sleep right out of them.

It was like this for 4 months, I put off at least 60% of the course from July to most of October. The looming deadline of October 24th, the end of the 6 month period, burst my bubble one day, when I realized that the long period we were given for the nanodegree was coming to an end. This was a date that I read back in April and said “oh that’ll be easy, I’ll be finished way before then.” I was certain that I would finish this course in 2 months, and spend the other 4 just helping students along and answering questions they had. With 2 weeks left in the course, I pushed myself to watch more of the videos, to get back into the application and start implementing. I was going to finish this course, even if it was at the last possible second. However, I still couldn’t bring myself to open my editor, to work on the project. I had everything I needed, except the energy to do it. I had almost resigned myself to just giving up, and not trying to fight to accomplish something. I will admit that I was ready to quit, and then we got the email, and the announcement in Slack. Our lovely CMs had secured us 3 weeks to continue working.

When I say Kelsey and Brenda were miracle workers, I’m not exaggerating. Even if I wasn’t actively working on the course, I always had Slack open. I was always watching their office hours, I was there during the student leader meetings, I saw how much they wanted everyone in the scholarship to succeed. I don’t know if this is what gave me the spark I needed to finish, but I was motivated. I still had my ups and downs, days where I didn’t wanna get up, but I had 3 weeks. November 14th. I knew that somewhere in that timetable, I was going to finish Project 2 and 3, and I was going to complete the degree.

And I did. I’m not going to say I did it alone, I was grateful enough to utilize resources from early graduates with project walkthroughs. I was able to see where others had stumbled and slide through without those mistakes. Not to say it was easy, not to say I didn’t run into issues that I tried to brute force many times. One in particular, the one I will never forget, the first time that Javascript not having strict variable typing actually caused a logical error that I had to step through in the debugger to find. However, I did find it, and I got irrationally angry at it, but I reminded myself that I had a goal. I was going to finish this course. I was going to get my nanodegree, like so many others who had been lucky to receive this scholarship had, and I did…on November 13th. I told you, I procrastinate, but I work well under pressure and deadlines.

On Tuesday, November 13th, I submitted my final project 3 revision, it was reviewed and declared complete, and I was ready to proceed to graduation. I had managed, through a deadline extension and a major hit of depression and procrastination, to drag myself over the finish line a day before the course access was set to end. I had completed what I applied for a year earlier, which looking back is super weird to think about. It had been a year since I applied for the chance at a scholarship, and here I was finishing it. I wasn’t second guessing myself, I had almost certainly earned it after everything I had struggled with to get there, but time sure flies when you’re internally berating yourself and your potential accomplishments.

So here we are, at the end of our path most certainly less traveled. I can’t say many people have a tale as unique as mine was. Going from “Gung-ho, Spunky Applicant, ready to set the world on fire” to “I don’t have the energy to move” to “Nanodegree Recipient” in the span of 9 months is certainly a roller coaster I never imagined I would be on, but it’s the story that I’m happy to tell. Looking back, there’s only 2 things I would do differently. First, I would have rewritten the application we were given on Day 1 of working with it. Technically speaking, we weren’t required to leave the application the way it was, we were free to rewrite and restructure it as we saw fit as long as it still retained its functionality. Part of my issues in Project 2 and Project 3 was making the logic work with pre-existing functions. These issues came simply because of the way my mind logically wanted to write functions versus how the application was written. In hindsight, this was great practice for any job I’ll have in the future working on legacy applications that were written in a time before Promises and async/await were a thing, but it was frustrating nonetheless. I had even told myself, looking over the repo in Stage 1, to rewrite. To make it work the way my mind wanted it to work instead of trying to fit myself into its mold, and I ignored that voice.

Never ignore the voice when it’s being reasonable.

Second, I would have asked for help, and I would have asked early. I would have looked into 1:1 coaching, I would have attended more Study Jams beyond the ones I helped run. We were given all the resources in the world, and I let my pride get in the way of asking for help. They made it abundantly clear on multiple occasions that project coaches and graduates were ready and waiting to help, I had spoken to a number of them while helping other students, but I was just too caught up in my selfish desire to do everything on my own to ask for the assistance I needed, even if it was just to be told “I wasn’t crazy, someone else had also run into the same problems I was.” I don’t have the ability to go back in time and tell myself to stop being stupid now, and to be quite honest, I probably wouldn’t. Despite everything that happened, I still obtained my goal and I did it on my terms, but I would never tell someone else that how I did it was okay. Going lone wolf as a software engineer is just asking for problems, don’t be afraid to ask for help. There’s always someone out there with more experience than you, someone who has been there, done that, and is willing to offer guidance to make your journey a little less bumpy.

Moving forward, I want to take what I’ve learned, and modernize it. The application, despite my personal critique (I mean, it uses callback functions…callbacks. I don’t know about any of you, but I’ve heard the horror stories of callback hell, I don’t actually want to experience it) was good enough to use as a foundation. I want to learn React, and I want to learn ExpressJS, beyond the basics. I want to have a repo in my Github that shows I’m capable of implementing these frameworks into living, breathing applications. Anyone can read a library’s “Getting Started” page and say they know something, but I want physical proof I can give a recruiter. I want a project I can say “I did that!” with, so a hiring manager has a reason to talk to me. I want to be more than just words on a paper and meaningless boasting. I want to never stop learning, I don’t want this nanodegree to be a “one and done”, I want it to be a catalyst to my future.

If you’re reading this, and identify with anything I’ve written, here’s my advice to you: You’re not alone. If you think that you can’t do something, or maybe you think that you can actually do it, but you can’t seem to find the energy or the motivation to push yourself there, if you’re missing the drive, know that someone else has been there before. They’ve felt something like what you’re feeling, and they still pushed through it eventually to accomplish their goal. I’m not saying it’s easy, because quite honestly, I hit the “I’m done, I’m out” breaking point multiple times, but I’m saying the potential is there. Eventually, you’ll find the match to light up that spark and push through, and when you do, you’ll be happier from the accomplishment. I may not have accomplished my goal by conventional methods, but I still accomplished it, and I’m proud of that, if anything. In the words of Robert Frost:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”