After reading the articles above, create a gist on Github and reflect (4-6 sentences) on the following prompts.
- What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy has helped me many times in life, majority of which I saw when going through a difficult major in college. Surronding myself with people who had 'been there done that' made me so much more capable of completing my courses. It also made me a lot more confident in my work and my ability to preform well. Empathy also made me a great team player, I was able to empathize with people during group projects and help them overcome roadblocks I myself had gone through. This also worked vise-versa with people empathizing with me.
- How does empathy help you build better software?
Empathy can aid me in my building of software by making me a team member that is easy and understanding to work with. If I can learn to be empathetic towards all the people I work with I would be a much more valuable programmer. I think empathy to help others solve problems would in turn give me more resources to go to if I need problem solving help. In turn I would be much more capable of building better software, as would my team members.
- Why is empathy important for working on a team?
Empathy is important on a team because, simply put, stuff happens. Life happens, things change on a dime and sometimes people cannot follow through, they need extra help or extra time. By having empathy on a team you can have a safe work enviornment that doesn't push or pressure team members when stuff happens. By having empathy you can support one and other and lean on each other when things happen, but you can also move forward with your project and continue progress.
- Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
In college I was an SI leader for a physics 1 class. I held sessions and made packets for the students to help them study or to prepare for an exam. I did this really off the basis of wanting to give help where I myself needed it the previous year. That's why I did the job because I knew I could relate and emphasis with these students. After grades were entered I had a student find me and tell me how much help I had been and me being able to relate so well gave her the motivation to work hard through my course as well as her other hard engineering courses. That really felt good and I realized the power of empasizing with someone.
- When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
Being empathetic in a professional setting was hard when there was a time crunch. I really realted to the Tedtalk when he discussed time had the greatest factor on if the kids would stop or not. I've definitly been guilty of not being aware of anything other than myself when I am on the clock. I think my first step in overcoming this will be to become aware of it, and maybe not be late.