From student to teaching assistant
About a year ago, I began my coding journey. I started by doing a few online courses during the evening and quickly realized that it was something I could really get into. As a maths graduate, algorithms and logic came fairly easily to me, but there became a point in my learning where I started feeling that I could really benefit from some tuition and online learning was becoming a little lonely.
I discovered that a work colleague was also teaching herself coding and she told me about coding bootcamps. It sounded perfect to me. I was totally willing to give up everything for a while and go head first into coding. After some online research, I came across what I found to be the most intensive JavaScript bootcamp in Europe, Codeworks. And even better, it was in Barcelona, where I was already living. I started studying even more and preparing myself for the application process, which I had read was pretty tough in itself. I couldn’t wait to get started.
Having been a teacher before starting at Codeworks, the teaching part came naturally to me. However, I was confronted with something I had been warned about during the course, imposter syndrome. I found it daunting teaching something I had only just learned myself, and being a perfectionist, I always liked to know something inside out before feeling totally comfortable doing it myself.
Being a teaching assistant has helped me get over this and realize that in this profession, you are never going to know everything and it’s about figuring things out together, be it with students or colleagues.
Even while coding with my boss, who has been coding for more than half of his life, we still on occasion have to look up the documentation for basic JavaScript methods, splice for example, to check exactly how they work. I started enjoying the job a lot more when instead of becoming uncomfortable if I didn’t know why a student’s code wasn’t working, we worked together to debug.
Among the most valuable things I will take with me from my experience as a teaching assistant is the ability to read and understand someone else’s code more quickly. During the course, apart from a project working on some legacy code, I was mainly reading and writing my own code and to get my head into someone else’s wasn’t so easy. Spending my day as a teaching assistant with students expecting me to know, after five seconds looking at it, why their 30 line algorithm is throwing an error has required me to get up to speed at this! Another thing is being able to better debug code. If something seems like it should be working and it’s not, looking past what is in your head you think your code is doing and going through the code like a computer would to find the problem works best. Together with students I have spent many a time trying to debug something where the problem was a spelling mistake!
As well as the more technical skills that being a teaching assistant has helped me improve, communication skills have been just as important. Being able to write code is one thing, but being able to explain it to someone else is another. Like Einstein said “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
The job has really tested my knowledge over the past three months and having to explain concepts has required me to learn things more thoroughly myself. I’ve also learned that being able to drop your own ideas for a while and listen to a different approach is a great skill to have. After spending time to come to a solution, to an algorithm for example, it’s sometimes difficult to forget your implementation and get you head around someone else’s, where you may actually learn a better approach.
I’m really excited to start my career as a developer and as I move into my job search, I can take with me all the things that this invaluable experience has given me. Not only has it solidified my knowledge, it has strengthened my skills as a developer. I can’t quite believe how much I’ve learned over the past 6 months Codeworks, as both a student and as a teaching assistant and I can’t wait to start my first job!
