Please respond to the following questions in a reflection (4-6 sentences):
- What is your greatest strength and how do you know? My greatest strength is relationship management and people. As a die hard hufflepuff, I am a loyal human being and I am a team player through and through. I will choose people and relationships over most things 100% of the time. I recently was an Operations Director for Teach for America and the biggest praise I receieved was creating such a great and positive culture within my team.
- How do you work best? It depends on the exact situation. If it is something that I need to indidivually crank out and do some reflection and my own work, then I find a nice quiet place with some headphones and do that. If it is something more creative that would need collaboration and brainstorming, then I work best by talking things through. Overall, it depeneds on the nature of the project, but I would say in terms of efficiency I work best on my own in order to complete a task.
- What is your greatest area of improvement? I would say that my biggest area of improvement is the nitty gritty details. I am a vision person and a relationship person, so I foresee small details being an area that I could work on. Besides the details, I would say that overall I enjoy new things and starting new projects, which causes a downfall or follow through when new projects arise. This weakness would be finishing projects/things before moving onto the next thing.
- How do you hope to maximize your strengths for your new career in software development? I see myself as a continuous learner that has a passion for technology and development. I would love to use this passion and drive to continuously learn in order to find nuances of languages and nuances of development in order to find more efficient solutions. In additions, after the gear up pre-work, I foresee my empathy and 'caregiving' strength helping my new career by really walking in other peoples' shoes to understand how the software will best serve the customer.
- How might knowing about your strengths and working preferences benefit you as a software developer? Self-awareness is one of the most important things to understand when becoming a developer. At the end of the day, humans will be using the programs that we build so it's vital that we understand ourselves and our customers. As a caregiver that is calm, cool, and collected, it will be important to be aware of that and understand a different perspective from my own. As one of my strengths is to keep calm, it will be important to understand the stress of customers and how best to soothe/provide solutions when problems arise.
