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Advice for LS students entering Capstone

Advice for Capstone students

Here is a list of pieces of advice that I've given students entering the Capstone program of Launch School. The focus of this list is for the learning and project portions of the program, nothing job related (could be added later). It's based on my own experience going through Capstone and having observed other students go through the program. Not every piece of advice may apply to you, but I hope that at least some of it will be helpful.

Congrats on completing the Core Curriculum and getting accepted into Capstone and best of luck on your next journey!

  • Be prepared for a big shift in how you learn. While Core was mastery-based learning, Capstone and your future jobs will be just-in-time (JIT) learning. You will feel like you're drinking from a firehose of information and feel the urge to study some topics repeatedly, but I urge you to "timebox" your learning (dedicate some time to a topic and then move on). You will have the chance to circle back to any topics in Capstone during your job hunt, so don't stress too much on it.

  • Be aware of your energy levels during Capstone and take the time to recharge when needed. Capstone may seem feel like a sprint in the beginning, but it's really the start of another marathon as you'll be learning new topics, researching and building an advanced project, working closely with others on a team, creating a case study and presentation, and job hunting. My recommendation is that you take at least 1 full day of the week off each week to recharge. And if you feel like you didn't have a chance to full learn some topic, take note of the topic and circle back later when you have time during the job hunt.

  • Be invested in developing a good relationship with your project teammates as you'll be working together for many, many hours and have to have many challenging technical discussions with them where you may not all agree on one solution. It's easy to let the stress of learning, project work, and prepping for the job hunt during Capstone affect your working relationship with your team, but if you don't take care it can create a bad environment. Be willing to talk with Chris Lee or your Capstone team mentor about any difficulties you're having and prioritize being empathetic. Remember, every Capstone alumni has gone through what you're going through and have landed a job and it will happen to you too!

  • If you're willing, start using a tool like Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/) to save notes on what you're learning and keep yourself fresh on the details. It will help enormously when you're job hunting and have to review all of the Capstone material again. A useful article for learning effectively with Anki can be found here: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

  • When working on your Capstone project, try to collaborate as much as possible on the coding aspect. Some teams will work together in the same virtual hangout for several hours a day, other's might split up the work and code individually. But be sure that everyone gets an equal amount of code to contribute to the project as some employers will check the commit history of a project. This can lead to some team members being passed over if they have the fewest commits to the project repository. So share the workload with each other as much as possible.

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