I come from the world of marketing, and in the world of marketing, you can oftentimes fake it 'til you make it, which more or less means faking answers 'til you find the right one later to correct yourself. Things change so fast in the world of marketing that trends, platforms, and solutions come and go just like that, and you're expected to adopt to new things and are able to forget old ones if they become irrelevant.
In the world of learning how to code, for me at least, this is not really the case. If you have the wrong syntax, your code will break. You have the wrong logic? Your code will will break, maybe not immediately but eventually. Oftentimes when you are stuck, that's all you are going to be for a while. You can't really fake it 'til you make it, unless you stick a placeholder "pass" statement in your Python function to come back to later. It's important to have a strong foundation and knowledge from the beginning to avoid a lot of frustration. Not to say you can't be corrected or learn new things because you can totally go on Stack Overflow and find a million solutions to one problem, but I tend to absorb everything our instructors and TAs say like a sponge, and I find it sometimes quite a feat to be corrected in one thing once it's settled into my brain.
"Where are you going with this?" you may ask.
Well, on Week 8, our cohort manager Leslie announced that they will be opening up a TA position for students to apply to, as they always do for all cohorts. When I first heard about it, my instinct was immediately to think, "Nah" because as appealing as it sounded to be able to re-learn the material while getting paid to do it and also be able to interact with the awesome staff in a different level, I don't have any formal experience in teaching and didn't want to stray from my goals of finding a software engineering job as soon as possible after the program.
Two days later, my advisor came over to check up on the progress of my project and encouraged me to apply for the TA position. Moved by his vote of confidence, I agreed to give the interview a shot. However, two days went by and I started to panic. Call it imposter syndrome all you want, but I felt I would not be able to overcome the fear of imparting coding wisdom on future Hackbright students without getting real world software programming experience first. In other words, I didn't feel like I could or wanted to fake it 'til I make it as a TA, especially when there are other students' learning involved and at stake.
I struggled for a few days with my decision to opt out the interview process and focus on my own learning, but was later super relieved and happy to find out that Hackbright could not have made a better decision to choose the cohortmate that I'm sure everyone thought was the best choice to be a TA. If anyone was up for the job, it's definitely her! She's awesome, smart, funny, friendly, and has tons of teaching experience. Whoever she is advising and TA-ing in the next cohort can consider themselves a lucky bunch!
I took it as a sign that trusting my own instincts was right, and that everyone will end up where they need to be!
No comments:
Post a Comment