A Week of Firsts

I've been two weeks out of Hackbright so far, and I can say with confidence that though this has been an uphill battle just like how everyone warned me it would be, it's an uphill battle peppered with firsts that are not too shabby.

First First
This weekend I attended my first hackathon, organized by Girls in Tech and sponsored by Hackbright, DocuSign, and many more. Aside from the awesome swag (hello Memebox and Jins!) and constant stream of brain food and fuel, what I enjoyed most was being surrounded by awesome women with awesome ideas coding awesome things.

I got to see my cohortmates, say hello to fellow Hackbright alum I've met and haven't met before (they're everywhere!), and most importantly, build a project from start to (almost) finish in less than a day. Some teams stayed overnight, but my cohortmates and I opted to head back to our respective homes after 9pm, work remotely in bed, and get some much needed rest.

My mentors have been telling me I really need more projects on my resume since I don't have a prior career in tech I can talk about, and that's what I got from this hackathon. In a few days my teammates and I will meet up in person to make some additional features to our app and deploy it. Even though we didn't win any prizes, I'm super excited I'll be able to deploy my first app ever. This will make deploying future projects I'm planning on creating seem much less intimidating. Let the project floodgates begin!

Second First
Today I received my first application rejection. And it was not from an ATS bot, so it does count towards a [long overdue] first rejection in my books.

It sucks, but I know it's gonna suck even more if I let it get to me. At least someone, some person,  took those few seconds in their day to scan my resume and decide "Nope!" as opposed to a machine scanning my resume and placing it in the bucket of send-auto-rejection-email.

Last week I read a post by someone on LinkedIn saying that her favorite word is "Next(!)". I think I might adopt this into my own vocabulary of favorite words. Because the next thing can always have potential to be more exciting than the previous.

5pm Update: Make that 3 rejections in 1 day. Let the application rejection floodgates also begin!