One Month Post Coding Bootcamp: What Have I been up to?
After going out to get breakfast, I looked to see a notification on my google calendar from my career coach from GA and found that she wanted to do a group check in with my cohort. Then afterwards I took a look at the calendar and realized “Oh its the 22nd!”
For those who probably don’t know, I graduated General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive last month on September 22. After a grueling 3 months of sitting in front of a computer, crying over React, and nights of attending TA hours getting help with hw I can at least say with a little bit more confidence that I’m a software engineer. Instead of saying “I’m a career changer hoping to become a software engineer”
So what have I been up to since then? Let’s take a look!
Building Side projects
Since coding boot camp has ended, accountability isn’t really a thing anymore. We don’t have any projects that have to meet requirements to pass as well as any homework we have to submit via PR by 11PM each night. We’re essentially on our own now.
That being said, prior to attending GA, I had already taken another online course which exposed me to the backend side of things in web development. I had some skills, but not enough projects on the side. So much so, when my friend who I often go to for career advice basically yelled at me when she found out I was still applying to jobs in an industry that I deep down in my heart no longer wanted to work in, and told me you gotta build projects outside of what you did in the course.
This advice somehow popped up again by our TA in the middle of the React unit in the form of “build dumb shit”.
To do this, I’ve been participating in 100 days of code, which will probably turn into “Coding for the rest of my life” and I’ll be posting about it on LinkedIn more.
Networking and Reaching out to people
You may have heard this somewhere, but this was constantly repeated over and over again during the course during our “outcomes” workshops.
“80% of jobs are found through networking”
Unfortunately based on personal experience….this is true. Prior to attending GA, I had an opportunity to interview at a large fin-tech company that’s pretty well known for a “Python Reporter” position. Due to the fact that I didn’t have a lot of experience in technical interviewing, this was a disaster, I bombed the technical portion but I aced the behavioral/culture fit of the interview. I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to interview there if it wasn’t for my friend who was working as a project manager/SCRUM master there at the time.
Anyway, going back on what I was saying, networking is definitely a struggle. Right now I’ve been reaching out to my network, while subtly avoiding reaching out and expanding my horizons. Its definitely my introverted-ness that’s kinda making me avoid it. Though I’m on a bunch of slacks which makes it a bit easier to reach out to people and learn more about job opportunities through them, so I guess that’s a plus.
Applying to Jobs, and algorithm practice
Of course, since the course has ended, there has been a lot of applying to jobs either via referral from networking or by cold-applying by pressing the “easy apply” button on LinkedIn. In order to stay on top of outcomes (career services) we are required to apply to 10 jobs a week, attend 3 networking events/coffee chats, and check in with our career coach. We have to document which jobs we apply to in our nifty job tracker and also document how many rejections, phone screens, etc we have gotten.
Needless to say, this is very discouraging seeing the rejections number consistently go up while the other ones stay consistently at the same number is really really really discouraging.
Of course, algos is something I have to take time to practice too, but no lie practicing algos and all those white boarding questions is very…boring, I would much rather spend time building projects as opposed to doing algos, but you gotta stay sharp somehow!
Anyway! Thanks a lot for reading this entry, it’s not much and I know I rambled a lot!
