Gear Up Pre-Work.md

Reflect (4-6 sentences) on the following prompts.

What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?

• Empathy has played a huge motivating role in my life and everything I do. After becoming a software developer I want to become an entrepreneur in the tech industry not only so I can create opportunities for those who may not have them but also I want to be able to give back to the community
• Empathy affects not only my life but everyone's life every day whether they realize it or not. Empathy is the reason we have labor laws and minimum wages and empathy is the reason why Turing is on a mission to build more diversity in the technological field. Empathy has been a huge contributing factor to the health of our society and I am confident that if more people and schools teach about empathy we will see a revolution of positivity in the world

How does empathy help you build better software?

• Empathy helps build better software in many different ways
• Empathy can allow a developer to keep "user-friendliness" in mind when creating. After knowing what a user goes through when utilizing software a developer can come up with solutions for problems
• When building software empathy can act as a strong motivator for a team or an individual who wants to raise money for a charity. If your goal is to raise money for a cause empathy is going to be the driving force that keeps you going every day.

Why is empathy important for working on a team?

• Empathy can allow a team to identify strengths and weaknesses of teammates and use the strengths to their advantage while building on the weaknesses
• Everyone has had different experiences in life which will allow them to empathize with different situations. When you put a diverse group of people together you get different "empathy specialties" and you're able to empathize in ways that you may not have been able to before

Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.

• In high school a new student was seated next to me who came from Vietnam and he didn't know English at all. He seemed very scared and nervous and I couldn't imagine being in that situation.
• Every day I helped him learn English and after a few months he had a great grasp of English and he was able to do his work on his own for the most part.
• It really felt good knowing that I helped him after seeing how much happier he was and how much more relaxed he became.

When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?

• As an insurance adjuster you have to talk to people every day who have recently been through some very stressful and sometimes very traumatic experiences in life. Not only are you talking to them but your mission is to help them move their insurance claim forward.
• In order to assist with a policyholder's claim, sometimes you need to weed through the emotion and extra information in order to get to the facts that affect their claim. In the beginning this is hard to do but you get used to it after a while.
• As a developer things like customer inconveniences may not be seen as irrelevant in the same way that they're viewed by insurance adjusters so I will have to turn my empathy on in that sense. This is not a problem for me as the only time I turn it off is when I'm going to work as an adjuster