Pick out 3 behaviors that resonate with you in the list and describe why they resonate with you in a reflection.
Quite a few of these resonate with me for a variety of reasons. I liked suggestion # 3 about micro-decisions and naming things... Something I've done since middle school is play Dungeons and Dragons. In my adult life, I have taught several friends to play this, taking on the role of Dungeon Master. As the DM, you have to accomidate what the players want to do and where they want to go, which often involves making up many names of people they chose to encounter that maybe you didn't expect or weren't prepared for. To deal with this effectively, I had to teach myself to not get to hung up on micro decisions surrounding fast personality creation, particularly what the new characters name is. I'd often find myself naming a bunch of people every session and while their names weren't that important, it was important to track the names since you never knew which of these people may be important to the players in the future and which would just be encountered the one time. I also relate with # 11, Taking responsibility for your mistakes. I would get so frustrated with the accounting dept at my job when they would spend so much time trying to place blame for for a mistake on someone...Meanwhile, I'd be thinking 'look I don't care why this employee doesn't have the money they are owed, or who screwed up... but they need their money, so can someone fix it?' The process of placing blame would sometimes delay when an employee would receive funds they are owed by days, and it would fall to me to explain why. It really frustrated me that our employees had to wait until blame was assigned so that person could fess up and fix it. Sometimes, it is actually helpful to assign a responsible party, so being quick to admit faults can ease this process for the whole team. Even if something wasn't entirely my fault, I would start expressing what I felt I could have done better in my emails to accounting in the hopes that would free their conscience and they would just fix the issue quickly. #29 resonates with me, Learn to move fast and break things. This is what I need to challenge myself to do. I think in my upbringing, I got criticized a lot for not doing things perfectly and received a lot of positivie feedback for things like nailing a solo in the last choir concert. I need to get over an expectation of perfection as I am embarking on a journey where I will never know the most or be the best at anything- I'll need to become life-long learner and adaptable, unafraid of learning through failure. I've done a lot of work to conceptualize this, but I have to actually do it now, which is scary, but less so knowing others are on the same path and will be supportive.
After reading, consider the idea of checklists. Write a reflection on the benefits of a checklist and how an organizational system such as a checklist might help you first as a student and later as a full-time developer.
Reading this article makes me think about how each individual only has a certain amount of bandwidth. I'd say checklists help by making it possible to stow away tasks and allow yourself to not think of them, at least for a time. This opens up more bandwidth for learning or working or connecting with people. Compartmentalizing tasks in this way can help free up mental energy and also ensure that these tasks are not forgotten. It would be silly to dwell on a routine trivial task, at the same time, depending on what it is, someone may depend on its eventual completion. As a student, I think checklists will be helpful particularly for to-do items in my personal life. I'll be wanting to free up as much of my mind-space as I can for learning, however I will need to still acomplish mundane things like paying my bills, doing laundry etc. Checklist will also help put my school workload in perspective. In a career envirnoment, I think checklists will be very helpful with routine job assignments... perhaps a checklist could be created to help streamline something like the construction of the framework for the project to be done, or to take care of some of the regular, routine officey parts of the job so that you can check those off as needed, then devote your full energy to deep thinking. As for the work of a developer, I think checklists could help in troubleshooting errors, or perhaps in breaking apart projects or the seperate tasks of a program that need coding.
What is your greatest strength and how do you know? How do you work best? What is your greatest area of improvement? How do you hope to maximize your strengths for your new career in software development?
I took this survey a couple of days ago, as it was linked to the team slack and I didn't realize it was part of the formal prework, and now as I am trying to go back and further examine my results, I am pretty sure a part of the page is appearing blank that should have info on it...I feel like it is glitching, but will try to check back occasionally. It doesn't seem to want me to retake the survey. They did email me a pdf of some of the findings, but I am unsure it is the full scope. Anyway, This pdf tells me my strongest category is Civic. I'm not sure I wholly agree, but I can see it- one thing I am reasonably able at is hearing differnet perspectives, and gathering different pieces of information, and synthesizing it. I find I can be pretty diplomatic and I usually try to be a peacemaker. I'd personally think critical thinking is one of my strengths. Looking at the qualities listed in the document provided, I am also identifying with the EQ competency self control- I can stay quite calm in stressful situations. Looking at some of the other listed attributes, I think some areas relating to leadership, assertivness and self-esteem will be areas I will want to grow. Sometimes, in larger groups of people, I allow myself to fall into the background and perhaps don't find my voice within the group if I've decided that it will take a lot of effort to speak over those in control of the conversations. Sometimes that keeps me from adding valuable input or keeps me from feeling fully invested. I think I work best with smaller teams that place a lot of trust in one another and who can meet/communicate effectively, then rely on each other to do what they say. I hope to maximize my stregths by helping a team understand one another and with my logistical thinking about how to divide projects among a team according to where people's strengths lie. Update: I submitted a support request, and Allison from PAIRIN actually got in touch and the issue was found and fixed! Excellent support team. My leading general style is Ocean of Calm; my strongest driver is microscope; my top EQ competency is glass window; my highest virtue class is lover of transcendence. Looking at this, I think I can maximize those strengths by recognizing I have a tendency towards introversion/introspection, but I can take on a lot of responsibility and build strong working relationships. I think I can also keep cool in stressful situations. Hopefully this can keep me calm through encountering complex challenges in coding.