I am cooperative-practical, I thinking straight and work efficiently. But I also work well with others and understand them for the most part. I know this is true because of my feedback from former employers who echoed nearly the same thing. I've been told by a friend that I'm the most consistent person she knows. I try my best to mean what I say, work hard, and care for others.
I work best when given general guidelines and being treated with respect. When I'm treated with respect it shows me that whoever is addressing me believes in my skillset, and this generally motivates me to do my part. I love working with others towards a common goal. Guidelines or resources is also important to me. Of course I know sometimes I need to find the answer myself, but I've had bosses in the past who tend to "move the goalpost", expect things from you outside your responsibilities and then try to reprimand you for it.
My greatest area of improvement would be shyness/reservedness. I can be easily influenced by others and I wish to be more brave and firm in myself. I would like to challenge myself more to think creatively and go above and beyond requirements. This is where genius can really strike.
I'm fairly confident in my soft skills, so as a software developer I can leverage my skills by being an active teammember, pushing projects to their full potential, and also by helping create a pleasant work environment and comradery among my colleagues. I really enjoy learning the ins and outs of how things work. So I look forward to bringing this curiosity to software and believe I can become a great source in the workplace.
My strengths and working preferences definitely tell me that (especially at first) I'll be wanting to work on a team so it can provide some guidance and direction. I enjoy knowledge and becoming an "expert" at something, I think this will serve me well in software. I'm detail oriented, organized, and efficient.
What efforts do you make to manage your learning process? Are these efforts successful? What challenges have inhibited your ability to manage your learning process effectively?
I do a pretty good job with chunking tasks. I'm very organized and make my to-do lists more than once a day. These efforts are pretty successful, I cycle through and prioritize what I need to do each day. The biggest challenge I have in learning is remaining focused. If my phone buzzes I'll instinctively check it right away, or other small interruptions I'll entertain. I want to do better in remaining focused on work time so I can be more efficient.
As Sierra mentioned, when a project/task is too big, it's taking up too much cognitive resource and you should chunk it more. I've inadvertently been doing this. For example when "Essay 3" on my to-do list becomes too big, is looming on my list for weeks, I start to break it up to hit the smaller incremental goals like: "Read 3 resources, Write 2 pages, Research ___ topic". Also, I very much believe in the concept of cognitive resource and think I could implement it more by giving myself more breaks in work sessions. I'm very perfectionistic and driven, but it can cause me to overwork myself. Work I do while fatigued is not good work, and it's not helping the material stick in my long-term memory. I've noticed even just implementing pomadoro break's have been very beneficial to this issue.
What role does your emotional state of mind play in your learning? How do your successes and failures at learning affect your emotional state?
If I continue to fail at something and can't understand why it definitely saps some of my motivation. Sometimes I'm very motivated by failure, but when it's persistent it certainly becomes demoralizing. I'm usually pretty driven and have a healthy sense of competition. If I see someone else excelling at something, I know I'm capable also and I want to get there.
Over the last few weeks I've been realizing that I will definitely need to scale back on my hobbies while at Turing. I like to be very physically active, but a bigger priority than that is my rest (sleep) and nourishment (diet). I still will need the physical outlet, but I'm guessing it'll probably be about 1/2 as frequent as I do now. I want to try my best to sleep well, 6-8 hours per night, and eat as best I can. If I get poor sleep for more than a few days in a row, I 100% will get sick. My priorities will be: Turing work, rest/diet, and physical outlet last.