Foundation Reflections
13 May 2022
What are three new things you have learnt about yourself and your ego due to the core learning?
1. I learnt that I am trying to adopt a growth mindset. As mentioned in growth mindset blog, I was trapped in a fixed mindset for a long time. After learning neuroplasticity and growth mindset, when I am stuck, instead of thinking I am not good at it, I cannot do it, I am telling myself that I am just not yet learnt it, I just need more time and another attempt, I will get there eventually.
2. I learnt that taking some time to reflect helps me to do better in the next time. In sprint 1 I aware time management is one of my limitations. Since I aware of it I know where I can work on to improve myself. I talked about it in the home group catchup and my facilitator Gerard suggested me to use a to do list. I followed the suggestion and I was able to finish everything within the time frame I gave myself.
3. I learnt that I need to work on how to stay focus. When my friends and families needed someone to talk they always come to me, and I always consider myself a good listener. During listening and looping section, I learnt myself not being 100% concentrated when I can not speak to join the conversation. I felt sometimes my mind went blank and because of that I missed quite a lot information than I had trouble to loop. I learnt that learning to stay focus even when only listening is something I need to work on.
What are the role of values, empathy, and self-awareness in learning and programming?
Learning and programming is not only about ourselves but also a lot of collaboration and teamwork are involved. I think values, empathy, and self-awareness decide how we learn, how we interact, how we work as a team.
What has surprised you the most about the core learning?
I was most surprised by how I was living my live and doing things in line with my values even before I realised what my values are.
What were the most challenging aspects of the core learning?
The most challenging part of core learning was what we were doing for the first sprint - sitting down to think about my values and identity. I spent an incredible amount of time to do that. Another challenging part was to share core blog on discord to all facilitators and my fellow students who I’ve never met. Believe me I was struggling every time when I need to click the share button.
Why do you think we, a programming school, are spending so much time focusing on core learning in a web development Bootcamp course?
In my opinion, the reason is simple - core learning can help me to bring a better me. For now, core learning helps me to understand myself better and to adjust my learning plan, problem solving strategies according to my strengths and limitations. For future, to be good at human skills might help me to stand out among the candidates. Human skills can be difficult to learn then tech skills sometimes. To be good at human skills can differentiated a great developer from a normal developer.
Does the time you spent studying core learning here feel like a waste of time? Should you have just used that time to practise programming instead? Justify your answer.
At this point, I would say not a waste of time at all. But in the beginning, I was confused why we need to put so much effort in core learning and reflections. It took me a few weeks to realise, to reflect on what I learnt, how I was feeling when learning, what was my problem solving strategies, really helped me to do better.