First Week Learning JavaScript at Claim Academy

My first week at Claim Academy has been an overwhelmingly positive experience! I was nervous that I would not be able to stick with such an intense program, but now I feel extremely optimistic. I have always had an interest in computers since I was a child and knew that I wanted to pursue a career in something having to do with computers. In high school I took an HTML/CSS class as well as a Java class. I excelled in the HTML/CSS class, but never really followed what was happening in the Java class. I actually spent the whole semester copying code off of the kid next to me. Feeling completely lost put a bad taste in my mouth for coding because I am the kind of person who does not like being bad at something. I knew at that point that I wanted to stay away from software development and focus more on web development. After high school, I enrolled at the University of Missouri Columbia majoring in IT/CS at the college of Engineering. I hadn't put much thought into where I would go to college and chose to go there because it was the easiest choice. I knew a bunch of people going there, in state tuition, and with my ACT scores and GPA I was automatically accepted. When I finally got there I remember talking to my advisor and going over my four year plan and saw what my course plan would actually look like and to my disappointment they actually did not offer any classes that focused on what I was trying to learn. Most of my classes would be filler classes like History, Psychology, and other seemingly worthless electives. Because I was in the college of Engineering there were also strict Math requirements which quickly became an issue for me. I dropped College Algebra both semesters and quickly became frustrated, feeling betrayed or duped into something that was never going to get me where I wanted to be. I fell into a depression that I masked with partying and avoiding my responsibilities which made everything worse. I finished the year with a .925 GPA and was dismissed from the College of Engineering. My parents were surprisingly not as disappointed in me as I thought they would be and encouraged me to go back Sophomore year and try to work through it. I knew that if I ever wanted to get back into CS/IT I would have to get all A's for a few years and knowing myself I never signed up for classes and stayed in St. Louis for the next 4 years working part time jobs at moving companies, car washes, warehouses, and at one point a pizza joint. In 2019 my life long best friend passed away and by the end of the year I had hit complete rock bottom. It felt like my freshman year of college all over again except even worse. I was thinking about my future and my life decisions up to that point and felt like I was a complete failure. In the beginning of 2020 I talked with my parents and my father brought up coding bootcamps. I had never really even heard of the concept or knew that this was an option and all of a sudden I had hope that I could turn my life around and actually make something of myself. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I was going to have to put in the work to make a change and that it would require a good amount of effort. I had become unhealthy, overweight, and lethargic to the point that getting out of bed every day was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. I decided to break things down and gave myself a year to get things in the right direction. I started exercising and then lifting weights. I began to feel better and my brain started to work normal again. I started watching coding tutorials of HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and Python and signed up for freecodecamp.org. I completed the HTML and CSS lessons over the course of a month while my buddy worked with me helping me set up an IDE and install Wordpress. At this point I realized that this was something I could pursue and decided to start researching my options for local bootcamps. I found Claim Academy and read reviews online and thought that it was a great fit. They were still offering in person classes and from reading online reviews they seemed extremely career focused and offered many resources to really accelerate the process of landing a job. I made the plunge and by the second week of 2021 I was actually here learning JavaScript. I look back at my life just one year ago and am amazed at the difference. The best part of this is that it is really just the beginning of the journey and there is much more to come. On day one I knew that I had made the right decision. During orientation they went over their plan for us and I was pleasantly surprised that they will be helping us build LinkedIn profiles and guide us with writing stand out resumes. First Day was pretty easy just setting up programs that we would need for later in the week. Second day we started getting into JavaScript. We learned what strings, numbers, and booleans mean and how to declare variables. We also learned string concatenation and if-else statements.
The third day we were learning for and while loops and starting to combine the topics we had learned. Thursday threw me off because we had two lecture back to back without homework in between so it was two days worth of lecture material packed together at once. I have trouble sometimes connecting multiple concepts and understanding how they work together. I tried to get into the homework at home and found my mind going blank and thinking about all sorts of other things. I started getting frustrated. I was scared that already in the first week I was going to hit a wall and that the rest of the course was going to be a nightmare. Rather than stressing myself out about it any more I decided to chalk it up that day and just try to work on it at Claim Academy in the morning before the next lecture. I hung out with some friends and we worked on music and I found that after a few days of coding my ability to make music was enhanced and within an hour had a song made that I believe to be some of my best work so far. I was thinking of new ways to do things that I hadn't considered before. I also started thinking about code while I was making music and stopped worrying that I wouldn't be able to figure it out. When I came back to my apartment I found out that my room mate was bringing people back from a bar, so I knew there would be some annoyance trying to sleep. I hid in my room and was finally able to fall asleep around 2am. I surprisingly woke up the next day feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work. I came in to Claim a bit early and got to work. Almost immediately, I realized how to solve the first problem and from there things were clicking. This was a point where I have always kind of given up or stopped before while learning any language so I was extremely happy that I figured it out and I was glad that I had given myself a break. I get distracted very easily and have never done well in the past with actually doing homework at home. This was the biggest reason I had chosen Claim Academy over other options was because I know I need to be in a good environment to get things done. The rest of the day we got away from JavaScript and did some things in the terminal and briefly went over the Markdown language. We also learned how to use Git and push to GitHub. The first week has already had it's up's and down's but this is what coding is and I am having more fun learning than I am spending frustrated or confused. It is really an amazing feeling when things finally click. I am eagerly awaiting what the following weeks have in store!