I think my greatest strength is my interpersonal skills and ability to connect with people on any level and any topic. I consider myself to be accepting of people’s views no matter what their views are. In the career I am leaving behind interpersonal skills (soft skills) are very important and my success in sales was in part driven by my ability to connect with people. I hope to develop my soft skills even more and use them in my new career.
I work best when I am appreciated for what I do. I also do my best job when I can see that my work is making a difference, when it helps somebody. In sales the only true identifier of how well you do is your proximity to your quota number. And you are only as good as your last big sale. For me to do my best work I need to feel appreciated for the work I do and not just how good my sales numbers are.
I think I have several areas that I would like to see improvement in. One of them is confidence. Confidence in my abilities and that I can succeed in something totally new. I tend to underestimate my abilities and skills. Another area of improvement, which stems from my lack of confidence is modesty. I tend to not want to talk about my achievements and successes because I view it as bragging. This certainly did not help me in my sales career.
Networking and connecting with people is very important when starting a new career. I hope that my interpersonal skills will help me learn better and find a good fit for my first real job out of Turing. I also hope that my technical abilities will help me learn the material faster and understand it on a deeper level.
I think that knowing yourself in general helps with career choices and job setting. Knowing your strengths is just as important as knowing your short comings. I will use my strengths to help me become the best software developer I can be.
- 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 try to set specific times to work on homework and projects. I also use Gcal to bracket out specific amount of time for specific tasks. This is not always successful as I easily get distracted by a number of things including phone notifications (when i forget to put phone on do not disturb) or just when my mind starts to wonder. In general, I am not very good at time management, or at least i think i am not. This is something I need to work on and I intend to.
- How do Sierra's and Coate's material relate to your current process for learning?
Sierra’s keynote made some amazing points. The idea of breaking things into smaller pieces is absolutely the way to go. I have had a number of jobs in the last 7 years and each one was only a little bit different but each had a number of components that were totally new. I noticed that it takes me about 1-2 years to feel confident in the task at hand. They say that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at whatever you do. That is deliberate 10,000 hours, not just any 10,000 hours. The notion of this fact gives me a bit of hope that if i don’t understand something I just need to practice more and eventually I will get there.
- What role does your emotional state of mind play in your learning? How do your successes and failures at learning affect your emotional state?
I think my emotional state plays a huge role in my learning. I know for a fact that when i have outside stressors I don’t learn as well. However, I also keep in mind that it’s a fact of life and just knowing this helps me control my emotional state. Successes and failures very much affect my emotional state. However, I always try to look back at times where I thought I can’t learn something or do something, where I hit a wall with seemingly no way out or way forward and remember how I always eventually succeeded and how good it felt to get to that point.
- How will you prepare yourself to be at your best with your learning process while at Turing?
In all honesty it’s hard to say right now. I have so many ideas and thoughts on how I will approach my learning process. It’s hard because I yet to know what the real day to day learning will be like. I am sure there will be many different things I will end up trying, from precise time tracking, to meal prep, to study seasons to self learning and a number of other things. One thing I know for sure, I am making Turing my number one priority for the next 7 months, there is nothing else I will be doing that is more important than this.
