My Challenges in Andela Bootcamp and How I Have Adapted
Guess what guys?..I made it to week two of Andela bootcamp!!!. Yeah, you heard that right. I’m still shocked about it myself because it’s definitely a miracle.
Hope you are having a great week so far. For me, I have battled a series of challenges so far, starting from the first day of the bootcamp if you have been following my story since day one , then you will have understood that these struggles comes from the fact that before the bootcamp, I have not even heard about most of the tools we use here. NodeJS, Babel, ESlint. These things were very strange. But let’s not forget a popular quote that says:
Nothing worth having comes easy.
The more we have to work for something, the better it will feel when receiving the reward of achieving our goal. The longer it takes, the more precious it becomes.
Self Discovery
I discovered something about myself at this bootcamp that made me reflect and I have to be honest that I regret not doing anything about it back then in school.
So, what is it?
In a classroom setting in school, the lecturer stands in front of the class to deliver his/her lecture and you listen, I am always a kind of person that does not really understand new concepts the first time, so most times, I do not thrive in a highly tensed environment, The problem is, that’s exactly what Andela bootcamp Is, The tension is high and you have short deadlines to submit a lot. Back then, after lectures, I had to go sit down on my own and go through the course again at my own pace. Believe me, this cannot work when you are in Andela’s bootcamp. You have to quickly understand things and be able to work on them as soon as possible. This is a major challenge for me and I have a lot of work to do about that.I understand that if you want to work in a place with high expectations like Andela, you have to move far beyond your current pace, you have to understand things quickly, you have to be able to understand concepts as soon as possible and start using it immediately.
Challenges
Today Is day 7 in the bootcamp and believe me when I say I have faced a lot of challenges I had to overcome. One thing that keeps me going is the fact that most of the things I do each day are things I could not do the previous day. I go home everyday with a new piece of information, new knowledge. I keep on telling myself “You can do this”.
Speaking Out.
Nobody likes to be the stupid one in the house you know. Some concepts may seem like their answers are obvious but still be difficult to you because of one reason or the other but majorly lack of experience in that area. I had this issue when I first came into the bootcamp because I realized that many of the other candidates were more experienced. I didn’t want to look like a fool when I do not understand something I am struggling with so I always used the internet as an escape route. My learning facilitator in the first week (Benny) noticed I did not understand a lot of things and also did not ask questions so he included that as one of my feedbacks in the first week. I immediately took action based on his feedback. The next time I had problems with my code, I decided to ask in the general slack channel instead and immediately, I got several responses and believe me when I say it was much faster than searching for the problem on google. That feedback really helped and I am glad I also acted because it has really helped.
Writing
Writing is one of the major challenges I have faced since when I was in school. I was not very good at English language so I always try as much as possible to run away from anything concerning English language.
Andela got me!!. One of the major requirements in the bootcamp is writing blog posts to reflect and think about our experiences. It is not an optional requirement and I have to do everything possible within my capability to get into the fellowship so I had to make sure I learnt about how to properly write engaging blog posts.
