42 Piscine Day 19 — (Exam03)
Edit: This is part of a series that culminated here, Next post. Previous post.
Edit2: I consolidated all the posts of the piscine daily posts here
Edit3: You can read up about what it’s like as a cadet at 42 here
Well I no longer fear failure as it has been my constant companion. “hello little fella, good to see you again, oh is that how today will go, fantastic, I’ll try to learn from it”. In short, I failed the exam. Not because I don’t know how to code, no not that but because my brain decided that remembering which library to use was no longer information worth remembering. Code was otherwise flawless and functional, but with a compile error, still compiled, still worked, but I failed the exam. One of my friends failed as well because he forgot to put them in proper folders, again code was fine but instructions weren’t followed.
Such is the nature of the beast that is the piscine. It doesn’t even phase me anymore, no anger, no depression, just a hard lesson learned. My chances of getting in this time are ever slimmer as rather than show progress mine has been a downward slope, despite my ability to code being better than it was at the start, these dumb mistakes have really cost me.
Most people did fairly well on the exam though, we are all improving, and most people don’t spaz out like me and make dumb mistakes. So for most a fairly good day.
More people continue to leave everyday, but strangely I saw more than ten people at the exam that I’ve never seen before, and I’m here from about 8 am to 10 pm everyday, so I’m not sure how that happened unless they are purely nocturnal, even then I would have though, a couple of nights I’ve not slept well and come in at 3 am, several times I’ve come in at 6 instead of 8. I have no idea who they are or where they came from, they are clearly registered but they haven’t been here. My headcount is still around 85 every-night, but we had about 130 sign up for the exam, again it doesn’t really add up for me.
It’s been cool to get to know some of the other students as well. One is a chemist that used to do research for the EPA, another a pharmacy tech, another a former nurse. We have people from all over Europe, all over the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, the Caribbean, Ukraine. I hear at least five different languages daily. I’m exposed to ideas I’ve never thought of, I just played one of the most enjoyable games of chess of my life.
In the slack channel they have asked for volunteers to study really cool things, to mentor kids in programming and to do hackathons. I want to volunteer every time they ask, but I’m not actually part of the school yet, and if things continue as they are I may not get in, at least not the first time. But I still want to be here. I need to learn to be better about figuring things out on my own, but this is the place to learn that. It says a lot about a place when people willingly come back to potentially fail again and don’t feel cheated by the experience.
Barely matters though, I’m growing my skills, I’m growing as a person, and as frustrating as this has been I have no regrets about having done it. Tomorrow is a new day.
