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The Boot Camp Diaries Week 6: Trust Me, I’m a Professional
This week was professional development week at Learn Academy, and my biggest takeaway is I’m Not Ready. We were warned at the beginning of the week that reality was going to set in, and yet I didn’t really believe it. After all, I have a job already. I really didn’t think I would feel the pressure doing interview practice and internship prep with my cohort, but I did.
Once upon a time, I had a five-year plan, and I was on my way. I was going to be a college English professor, married with kids, living somewhere in Northern California, and maybe I’d find time to write my novels on the side. The harder I worked toward that potential future, the more I realized it wasn’t what I wanted at all. So I blew it all sky-high, shattered aspects of my personal and professional stability in terrifying and freeing ways, and haven’t made a five-year plan since. That’s not to say I let the wind blow me where it may, but I no longer try to see the future clearly. My goals are very different and have more to do with how I want to feel and be as a person rather than what I want to have or outwardly achieve.
All that to say, I know I probably won’t work for my current company for the rest of my life. I might, but I might not. I couldn’t foresee a time when I would have wanted to leave my last company either, but then my former boss dropped the bomb that she was closing up shop to focus on motherhood (no hard feelings – I’ve heard kids are a lot of work and raising them is important). Plans, even if you have them, don’t always matter. So this week really cemented for me that there will most likely come a time when I will need to search for a job and then engage in the tremendous dumpster fire that is the application and interview process.
Meanwhile, attempting to stay in the flow of coding by working on personal projects has highlighted just how much I don’t know, have somehow forgotten, haven’t internalized. There is no “no child left behind” in boot camp, and I feel like I’m running behind the bus with my coat flapping and my arms waving while it gets farther and farther away. What should have been a week for shifting gears and catching my breath was actually a week for ramping up my anxiety ten-fold, which is always fun.
</ XOXO >
[Photo credit: Adi Goldstein via Unsplash]