Passing the finish line
A cohort just had their final presentations and as always they were exhausted after 12 weeks of an intense coding experience. Watching a cohort graduate, after following along with their struggles during this time, we always draw some conclusions.
With this post I will try to summarize what the graduates and coaches learned during this intense journey. And what they would like to have known, especially about keeping the energy level up, before starting the bootcamp.
Get a hobby
The Bootcamp journey is an experience that requires full immersion into coding. But just like snorkeling, you need to get to the surface every now and then to get some oxygen. This means that you need to find or keep up a hobby that has nothing to do with coding whatsoever. This hobby should also preferably be a non-computer hobby so that your eyes can relax after staring at a computer screen all day long.
Some hobbies that you can either take up or keep up are:
- A daily walk in nature
- Playing a musical instrument
- Cooking
- Knitting
- Photography
- Gardening
- Crossword puzzles
Make sure you get rest, sleep and proper food
This is kind of a no-brainer but, remarkably these are the things that students fail to do over and over again. They simply do not sleep enough or eat proper food. Getting to sleep early or at least not staying up late is essential for being productive the next day. Late night hacks could be fun sometimes, but this comes with a cost of not being able to take in information and coding in a high pace the next day. Make sure that you get your sleep!
Getting proper food is also extremely important. It is so easy just to go out for lunch and buy some fast food. Eating out on special occasions is fun, but doing it on a regular basis has two basic disadvantages. First it’s expensive, secondly the food that you get is often full of fat and high in calories. This will result in you getting drowsy right after lunch and missing out on important information, just because you were in a “food-coma” state.
The best thing you can do is to prepare your food at home and bring it with you to class. I prefer light salads as lunch and fruits as snacks because they require little preparation and you can also eat it cold in addition to not making you feel like a zombie.
Don’t stress!
Sometimes stress is good, other times …not so much. Stressing out over a project or trying to understand some concept will not help. We learn best when we are relaxed and and focused on one the task ahead. A great way to feel in control is to write things down, so that the unfinished tasks don’t occupy your mind.
When working with a task, as soon as you realize that you need to read or do something else, write that thing down. And say to yourself that “you will look into that when you have completed the task”. This will help you to finish the task quickly but also make you feel more in control, therefore eliminating the stress.
Do not compete with other students,
instead compete with yourself
When coming to a coding bootcamp you will meet people from all walks of life. They will differ in age, gender, experience and motivation. It is really hard not to start comparing yourself with others in the cohort. This is a very slippery slope.
Before we continue we need to talk about how a hormone called “serotonin” works.
Serotonin is a hormone that basically indicates if we are in an good or bad environment. Defining the environment basically means two things, our access to food and the competition for that food. The keyword here is competition.
When we compare ourselves with others our body reads this as an conflict. And depending on the outcome of that conflict our serotonin levels will either rise or lower.
This is a way for our bodies trying to adjust to the group and the status we have within that group.
When we compare with others and feel that we know something better than them it increases our serotonin levels making us feel good and motivated. However when we compare ourselves to others and don’t know as much as them it lowers our serotonin levels making us feel bad.
Higher serotonin levels is linked with dominant behaviour, lower serotonin levels is linked to submissive behavior. Submissive behaviour makes our bodies react in a depressed way meaning: lower motivation levels, lower energy, bad sleep, lower hunger and appetite.
In a stone age society the losing part of a conflict would lower his/her serotonin levels which would indicate to the other members that he/she had lost the conflict and that we are no longer a threat to the winner, ensuring us continued access to food and keeping us safe from further violence.
Now to the point.
Comparing yourself to others could be a good thing, but in the context of the bootcamp it’s not. There will always be people that are better or worse than you and comparing ourselves to them is a risky move. Instead YOU should compete with.. Yourself. This would mean that you only look to your own progress and your improvement from day to day. Or even better, from week to week. This will increase your motivation and keep you mentally sane until you cross the finish line.
Mental toughness
Mental toughness is more or less the ability to stay focused when under pressure. In a true bootcamp fashion we can use a method that Navy Seals use to keep themselves mentally tough. Let’s introduce the “The Big 4 of mental toughness”
This technique has four main parts:
- Goal setting
- Mental rehearsal
- Self Talk
- Arousal control
Goal setting:
The first thing you need to do is to set very small achievable goals. In our case that would mean, for example, the goal to make a unit or feature test go green. The goal should be clear and well defined so that there is no confusion on when the goal is completed.
Mental rehearsal
The second step is to mentally visualize yourself completing the goal. In our case this means visualizing ourselves coding and the test going green in our terminal.
Try to lay out a plan on how you are going to complete the goal from start to finish. This can seem a little bit tedious but the idea here is to prepare yourself so much that you are basically repeating a task rather than trying to do it for the first time.
Self Talk
Self talk is the activity when you speak to yourself. You are continuously giving yourself instructions like, I should do this, I should to that, I feel like this or that. It is very important that we control this process and only give ourselves instructions that help us finish the task. This means that we should banish thoughts like:
“I can’t do this”
“I don’t understand”
“I will never get this”.
You know what I am talking about. We all do this. But during the bootcamp we should banish thoughts like this and instead give ourselves instructions like:
“This is easy”
“I’ll get this”
“I am really enjoying this process”
“I love to solve tricky problems”
It really doesn’t matter if you feel like this or not. We are creating an habit that will help us finish the task and stop our minds from sabotaging our progress.
Arousal Control
Arousal control means that we need to control our physical movements and breathing.
If our body is behaving in a way that indicates that we are under pressure, then our minds will follow this and act accordingly. If you notice that your body is slumped, your breathing shallow, your shoulders and face tensed, then you need to take control. This means that you control your breathing to be slow and controlled and that our postures reflect that. We should also relax our bodies so that the signal goes to our mind that we are in control and not under stress.
Have Fun!
The last thing for us to cross the finish line is to have as much fun as possible. The cohorts that enjoy their time when coding make much better progress than those that are stressed and worried.
Meet your team members outside of the camp, try to socialize as much as possible and try to include everyone in the group. You will have good and bad days, the others in your group too. Make sure that you make it together. To drive this point home, here is a quote from one of my favorite shows:
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”
- Game of Thrones
Craft Academy is a Tech Education Provider that aims to bring new talent to the market and help to solve the shortage of tech workers. We are founded on the belief that modern development standards, agile methodologies and business skills are fundamental for ITC professionals.
Our primary service is a 12-week coding bootcamp designed to provide individuals with a foundation of skills that allows them to enter the industry as junior developers.
With that foundation, our learners find employment in various industries or start their own businesses that bring new innovations to the market.
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