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After graduation, now what?

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Claire Fields
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2 min read

Last week I graduated from my coding bootcamp at the Turing School of Software & Design. For those who aren't familiar, Turing is a 7 month, 1500+ hour, accredited bootcamp (the only accredited one in the US) where students specialize in either front end or back end engineering. The program is project-based, with a new solo, paired or group project kicking off every week or two for the entire length of the program. On the front end side, there are also daily classes on javascript fundamentals, basic computer science, React, and much more! For the majority of the program, between class and project work time, I found myself working Monday through Saturday from 9am-9pm. Basically, it feels like drinking from the a firehose the entire time and at the end, burnout is real.

Despite burnout, the real work has just begun. Many people have asked me how it feels to be done with school and my response is consistently, "It'll feel real once I have a job." As the founder of Turing said in his graduation speech to us, "Graduation is cute... but..."

I've leaned into some self care and time outside in the last week, but I've also made time to network, apply to jobs, and even had a couple interviews! These interviews have exposed a number of weaknesses in my ability to speak technically, so I'm excited to learn more and document my continued journey on this blog. Let's get to work! 💪

Some of my learning goals moving forward:

  • Learn 1-2 global state management libraries (starting with the Context API)
  • Research state architecture in React, in general
  • Refine my knowledge of the differences/pros/cons between GraphQL and REST APIs
  • Build a portfolio website using server side rendering with Next.JS
  • Build a simple full stack application with an Express backend, postGRS or mySQL for a database, CRUD functionality on some dataset
  • Learn Jest/Enzyme for testing (I am familiar with TDD using Mocha, Chai and Cypress so far!)
  • Add authorization to my capstone project, among other features that didn't quite get finished
  • Practice several leetcode problems a week, to work on recursion, data structures and algorithms, which are a big gap in my knowledge
  • Continue to contribute to open source projects with Code for Denver
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