Advice to Future and Present gSchoolers
I’m a gSchool graduate ten days out of the full stack development program. It was an amazing six months that I will never forget. I’m very excited to continue interviewing for developer, QA, and DevOps positions and find my first job in tech with the skills I gained through gSchool. (#devforhire)
In a short six months I had an amazing transformative experience in my approach to problem solving, learning to code, and allowing myself to have fun writing code with my own custom workflow.
If I had to do it all over again, this is the advice I would give myself.
- Take Care of Yourself
The days where I was well rested (or amply caffeinated) were the days that I was able to retain the most information and have the most fun learning.
This includes eating healthy and finding time to exercise. A healthy lifestyle in and outside of gSchool will drastically change your experience for the better. I was working out three times a week prior to gSchool and felt the need to stop that routine in order to learn as much information and knowledge about Ruby on Rails as I could. What I failed to realize is that lifting is a meditative happy place and a great stress reliever. After I started to actively lift again about midway through gSchool I felt a higher level of mental clarity in class and a greater ability to disconnect from my work.
2. Take Good Breaks
One of the hardest things for me to do was to disconnect myself from the stories I had remaining for my big projects. I’d close my laptop but my brain would still be rattling around with ideas of how to fix a complicated bug in my application or I would be telling myself, “You should know this!”.
The best solution that I found is to close my laptop and go for a walk. It took me a while to figure this one out but the sooner you find your disconnect the better. For some it might be reading a book or calling a friend on the phone. Do anything that engages you mentally so that it is impossible for you to think about the work you have remaining. You will come back to your code refreshed and it will make a world of difference.
3. Have Fun
Is learning to code always fun? Not all the time. Can you do something about it? I did and I know you can too.
There were too many days when I walked into class and forgot to have fun. I was too frustrated with myself, the code, or feeling behind that I let it hurt my mindset and make my day more difficult. The days where I made a conscious effort to enjoy the small victories and told myself to have fun were the days where I left class feeling more accomplished than defeated and eager to learn more.
The code and frameworks you are learning are complex, awesome, and learning them is something you love to do. You wouldn’t have made the sacrifices to join gSchool and participate in a very fast paced learning environment if you felt differently.
Treat the errors and bugs you will continually receive through class like quests or monsters in a video game to overcome and not as a roadblock preventing you from learning. Running into problems and overcoming them calmly and with a smile on your face is what will make you a great developer that everyone will enjoy working with.
Thanks for reading and happy coding everyone!
