There’s one main lesson I have been able to takeaway from these last 18 weeks and that is that the best way to learn is to do. You don’t learn to ride a bike by simply studying the steps and the theory. You must get up on that bike, start pedaling and lose your balance as often as it takes. Of course, this sounds obvious, and we all know this right? It appears, however that it is so easy to forget to apply this method to things outside of riding a bike. My confidence has waxed and waned with every introduction to new material and the challenge to implement those skills. New material brings me to doubt what I know and what I can learn. It was not until we got on that bike, began coding out our project and coming upon a seemingly unending thread of errors that everything started to click.

While I know a lot more than I did in March, my mind constantly reminds me of what I do not know how to do. At the end of every module I feel joy at having passed. That joy is immediately followed by the dread of a new project and being faced with what I do not know how to do. As I prepare to apply to jobs and enter the workforce as a Software Engineer I worry about my lack of knowledge. Any future employers will find out I lack knowledge in a certain language, or topic and discard me. When one of my instructors observed this was a worry many students had, she imparted some wisdom. “You do not need to know how to do things, you just need the experience of sitting there and going through the hard things and finding the solutions. You need the experience of learning”….

For project 2 in Module 2, we were paired up and each partner was in charge of building a micro-service from back-end to front-end. The micro-services, a Sales API and a Services API would be pulling data from the inventory to manage and keep track of sales and services. In similar fashion to Module 1, in this module we had a practice project before the final project. In similar fashion to Module 1, I felt like I had absolutely no idea where to begin or how to even get through the practice project. After 4 weeks of learning an astonishing amount of information, it all felt like a blur, and I realized maybe I did not know what I thought I knew.

In the first two weeks of the program I felt overwhelmed and alone in my struggle with understanding the amount of information that had been thrown at me. It was only the first week and already I felt behind. How could this be? Was I just not cut out for this? Had this been a mistake? An impossible journey? I compared myself to my peers, mainly the ones that participated and so obviously were NOT struggling with understanding and solving python problems. Luckily, the timeline of my despair coincided with my one on one meeting with the cohort lead. I opened up to her about my struggles and she wisely encouraged me to seek out a study buddy. Although I knew she was right, the thought of being vulnerable and having someone find out how dumb I was was not something I felt comfortable doing. I played with the idea of sending out a slack message asking if anyone was looking for a study buddy. Maybe I did not need a study buddy. I could do this on my own.

A question that has followed me throughout my family's journey as immigrants to the United States has been "how can I do __?". In my parent's vocabulary the word "No" did not exist when it came to opportunities to have a job to support the family. When asked "do you know how...?" my father's initial instinct was to confident affirm despite not actually knowing how. It did not matter that he did not know in the moment because he knew that he could learn how between then and the moment he had to do the job.