Bootcamp Learning Plan
28 Sep 2023
What is your long-term goal or career pathway?
Like my goal and career pathway in foundations, my long-term career goal is to get into the Game Development Industry in Wellington. Obviously, this is quite a specific goal, so at this stage, if I can get any general programming role to build up a bit of experience and a portfolio, that would be awesome.
What do you think your biggest strengths and limitations will be in Bootcamp?
I think my strengths and limitations of learning during bootcamp are similar to what my strengths and limitations have been during foundations. I think bootcamp will be better for me, though. I'm a very social person, and I find in-person learning a lot more fun. This, in turn, makes me happier and, therefore, more motivated and faster at completing work. The downside of in-person learning is that I can sometimes be a bit slow to get out of bed! During bootcamp, I'll just need to make sure to keep a tight schedule so I'm not late for class.
What do you think your biggest non-technical challenge at Bootcamp will be?
I'm not really sure. I've never spent as much time working on something as I will be during bootcamp, so I'm assuming I will run into challenges with the intensity of the course, but I'm excited about the intensity, and I think it will be a learning style that will suit me. Otherwise, my biggest non-technical challenge might be getting enough sleep before class and making sure to always show up on time.
Human skills I would like to see developed at Dev Academy
Teamwork is a big human skill that I would like to improve on. With my previous programming, I've seldom worked in a team and very rarely had to adapt my way of working to fit around other people. Learning effective teamwork, both for cooperating smoothly with people and being able to work around other people's style of working, I think will be very beneficial skills for me.
What are your expectations from the Bootcamp team?
I expect the bootcamp team to clearly understand the content we are covering during the bootcamp course so that they can properly help myself and the other students when we are struggling with what we are being taught.
What are your expectations of yourself on Bootcamp?
If the help is related to understanding content that we are being taught, and if I am heavily struggling with a particular topic, I will make sure to request extra help from the bootcamp team and other people who understand the content better than myself. If the help I need is workload-related, I think my parents are very useful to talk with to gain insight and perspective into some different strategies I could maybe try to adopt to better get through the intense learning.
Foundations Learning Plan
5 Sep 2023
The main way I will manage my workload during this program is to try and always stay at least slightly ahead of where we are meant to be in the workload. This helps me motivate myself to continue to stay slightly ahead and prevents stress and demotivation when I start falling behind. I find that when I am slowly falling behind in work, I find it harder and slower to catch up than if I was ahead and wanted to complete more work.
Each day I will also make sure to get out of the house and get some exercise. It's easy to have a lazy morning and spend the afternoon and early evening studying, so I will make sure to put some time aside each morning to get some fresh air and exercise.
I expect the facilitator team to clearly understand the content that we are learning so that we can get adequate help when needed, and of course, help us understand what we are doing wrong when we are having an issue.
At the moment, I don’t really have any other commitments other than studying for Dev Academy. During foundations, there is a period of 10 days where I will be away down south, so I have planned with my facilitator that I will complete an extra week's worth of material in advance so I am only a few days behind when I come back.
What is your long-term goal or career pathway?
At the moment, my long-term career goal is to get into the Game Development Industry in Wellington. Obviously, this is quite a specific goal, so I have challenged myself to try and get into general IT work to build up a bit of experience and a portfolio to make me more appealing to employers in the Game Dev industry. On the side of my shorter-term goal of getting into IT/programming, I’m developing my skills with 3D rendering and game programming to hopefully boost my knowledge in the area.
A description of your strengths and limitations when it comes to learning
A strength of my learning is that when I am enjoying myself and stimulated, I can speed through large quantities of work relatively quickly. However, the flip side of this can definitely be a weakness of mine. When I am completing work that I am already familiar with or don’t enjoy much, procrastination can often kick in! In these situations, I often struggle to find the motivation to complete the necessary task and will work on it at a very sluggish pace.
What skills (non-technical core/human skills) would you like to see developed in yourself while at Dev Academy?
I would like to develop a strong understanding of Javascript/Typescript and also the broader fundamentals of programming. With my previous experience with programming, particularly with games, I was entirely self-taught (primarily through YouTube!), and so I believe I missed a lot of base-level understanding of how to teach myself effectively, best practices, and why something works the way it does. I would like to see Dev Academy teaching me some of this knowledge gap.