Yesterday at DBC seemed very hazy for me. A lot of people told me that I sound sick; I feel perfectly fine though. In addition, I must have been super tired this week because I slept for 12 hours straight last night. I had check-in groups at 9:00AM, and feedback forms to fill out after the groups. Today was spent doing two things, reviewing the mock assessment on Thursday and weekly projects.

Energy at Dev Bootcamp

The energy definitely feels like its dwindling since I first started here. There seems to be a lot of internal struggle that is happening because the teachers seem very isolated from the students. I’m not sure on what’s happening, but it makes me a little sad. A lot of the students are upset as well because this makes it that much harder to get questions answered when stuck on some part of a challenge. However, the instructors may seem to have noticed their isolation because of a surplus of coaches that have been hired recently. They’ve been working hard to maintain the order and have been succeeding, for now.

Cohort cohesion

Some of the phase_3 students were discussing how during the earlier days of Dev Bootcamp, the previous cohorts were very close. They always played together outside of Dev Bootcamp, helped each other get through the material, and contributed back to the Dev Bootcamp community. They really questioned the admissions board and if they were getting softer. A lot of students in my cohort don’t even remember getting interviewed. I know for my interview, a questioned was asked and then it was me trying to solve the question for 30 minutes with no resposne from the interviewer at all.

From my personal experience thus far, even I sometimes feel like some of the students in my cohort are only here for their own benefit. Some students isolate themselves from the group all day in order to maximize their time studying code. I understand that the education system as of right now creates a mentality in students that the students must take as much as they can from an institution in order to succeed. However, this sort of mentality really hurts the culture that Dev Bootcamp is trying to culture. The success of Dev Bootcamp doesn’t come from the instructors or any “higher-ups”; the success comes from students giving back to the Dev Bootcamp community in some way or another.

I had a discussion about this with an awesome cohort member and he said that, “Well, some people are just like that,” or “some people just don’t think like that.” I agree with him 100% because there are many different people in this world. However, it really hurt me to think that some people will always try to better themselves only by taking, and not give back to the community. It also hurt me to think that even at this age, people still aren’t mature enough yet. Well, my father always told me that I will never have the power to change how other people think or act; I will only have the power to only change the way I think and behave.

Googling vs Mastery

I received my assessment yesterday, and I was told that I failed my assessment. Although pair programming is awesome because you always get another perspective on things, it really hindered me to truly master the concepts and this assessment proved it to me. A conversation I had with a fellow cohort member was whether or not everyone was truly understanding the material being taught, or if we were just becoming google search masters, not knowing what we are copy and pasting into Sublime. I asked if anyone knew Big O Notation and no one was able to explain to me what it was; this was a topic taught to us during phase_1. When I look at other students’ code in order to compare what they did versus mine, most of the code doesn’t work sometimes, or it is only half completed.

“Julius, you will be able to google up topics that you are unsure about in the real world at your job,” my fellow cohort member told me. I know that you will be able to. I know that not a lot of people can straight up code without googling. However, I personally feel like I am cheating myself if I don’t master a topic before moving onto the next. Also, if you don’t have mastery on a specific topic, I think your code will reflect that and not be DRY and beautifully refactored. The balance is probably in the middle somewhere between googling for answers and being able to understand the topic you are googling.

Although some things at Dev Bootcamp seem shaky now, I do hope that it’ll get better. Maybe the Kaplan buyout has something to do with this as well. Well, all I know is that I only have 4 more weeks left until Dev Bootcamp is over. Let’s make them count.