That super exciting first orientation semester at CODE
The first semester at every university is usually the most exciting, but also very challenging. Suad Kamardeen, our Software Engineering student originally from the UK, along with 137 other students, started her journey at CODE in September 2019. This is her story.
What the first semester, orientation semester, at CODE looks like?
It was a new and challenging experience. The journey started with an onboarding week that informs you about the most important questions like getting around Berlin and getting familiar with the CODE community. After the onboarding week, we had a workshop where we were set a semester challenge to think about a problem we would like to solve and come up with a digital solution for the problem. The most interesting part was taking an interdisciplinary approach involving each study program: Product management, Interaction Design, and Software Engineering, during the process of coming up with a solution. The main purpose of this semester is to prepare us for the core semester. In the first 7 weeks, we attended a series of workshops and check-in sessions with professors and students from the first and second generation. The workshops provided foundational knowledge of each study program, and equipped us with skills to help us work on our solution. Following this, we had a few weeks to work on our projects with regular check-in sessions to obtain feedback.
What was your favourite part?
My favourite part of the semester was getting the hang of learning how to learn. Several resources were provided to help kickstart the self-learning journey. Whilst having the freedom to control your learning path is an amazing experience, my motivation to push myself and go above and beyond stemmed from knowing that I would get useful feedback from professors and fellow students who were also invested in my growth and development. On the OS (orientation semester) EXPO day, each student had a chance to showcase what they have worked on throughout the semester.
What’s the next step for #thirdparty students?
After winter break, our orientation semester students will join the core semester students in the Pre-project Phase (PPP) where students and partners can pitch a project and get other students on board to work together.
