Today I arrived at TechElevator at 7:30 am and left at 7:30 pm.
And it was awesome.
The day began with another quiz and I scored another perfect. I was particularly proud because I was only one of three students to score a perfect. Next, we had a three-hour lecture on conditional logic and the use of Methods. As was true yesterday, much of the material was familiar from my prework and the lesson didn’t seem terribly challenging.
After lunch we had another Pathway meeting where we went over the plans for the entire boot camp. This was both unsettling and exciting. Pathway focuses on the interviewing process and, I think for everyone, this is the most terrifying part. Getting the job is what this is all about. I can definitely see the allure of diving into the code and ignoring Caitie(the Pathway program director)’s admirable and tenacious attempts to help us. But I am determined not to do this. I have promised myself to try as hard on all of the Pathway tasks as I do on the coding exercises.
Though, admittedly, it would be hard to put forth more effort than I did today on the conditional logic exercises. We had thirty-five problems which could each take anywhere from three to thirty minutes to solve, depending if I got hung up on something silly. The quickest students worked from 1:00 till just after 6:00. I was there till 7:30 and there were still students kneeling over their keyboards when I left.
I felt almost high on the way home. The closest I could equate the feeling was to when I would work all day on a novel. My mind felt numb, stretched out and buzzing. My thoughts were scattered and restless. They still are. The only difference between the marathon sprints on a novel and those on code is that with the code I know what I got right and what I got wrong.
It’s nice to know where I stand for once.
From Retail to Programming 