Values are like my compass to help me decide how I will act and where I should go in order to find what is right for me and what impact I want to make in the world with the work i do.
The more i know myself, my interests, strengths, weakness & limitations, The more i can place my attention on the areas i need to improve and the better i can decide where i will be most valuable and happy.
I will always be working with others so it's important that I take the time to put myself in their shoes and understand their perspective and emotions. Even simply caring about whether the next person who's going to work on my code will be able to read it or not, can count as empathy and this is especially important on big collaborative projects. We aren't robots and for us to work well as a team we need to be able to get along.
The thing that surprised me most about the core learning was the listening and looping. I had never heard of this before but doing it helped me learn just how bad my attention can be at times and knowing that I can work on it using this exercise is awesome.
I was not good at reading comprehension in school and a few of the questions I just didn't understand or know where to start writing. I think I over-thought about it and ended up stressing myself out. Putting my thoughts into words was pretty difficult for me and sometimes ended up all over the place but it got easier over time. Another aspect was overcoming myself, i had to get over the fear of going blank and stuttering before i started the listening and looping. I had to get over my fear of feeling inadequate before I asked questions on slack. And i had to shut out the thoughts that told me i wasn’t going to finish in time, i wasn’t going to find an answer, or this is too hard for me.
Well anyone can learn the tech side but not many take the time to learn the human side. Just like in any job, attitude is more preferred than experience (in my opinion) Just like how my mother got a gardening job with zero experience while going up against two qualified horticulturalists. Her attitude and heart was in the right place and she would get along with her team very well because of it. The others interviewees had all the knowledge but were not pleasant people to be around and not very hard workers.
We could've been given all the answers and still learnt programming but it would be up to chance whether we’d be good collaborators, emotionally intelligent, and good resilient problem solvers. I like that with this program, you know you are training to become the full package and knowing that industries will recognize that is pretty neat.
No definitely not. I do think some of the questions feel forced and should be modified just to make it easier for us to answer and more natural, But overall I think it was my favourite part. At first it did feel weird and like a waste of time but I started to grow into it and enjoy it. I think the blogs we created will also be nice to show possible employers too once we’ve tidied them up. It was interesting to learn new things about my brain, and felt good to take time to just be with me and think about where i'm at.