Purchasing a course as an investment in yourself
Soon I took a break from work, went to rest, found a new job “closer to IT” and continued my studies. This time, having an understanding of the basics of Swift, I decided to buy the course for the sake of feedback and tasks close to reality.
Since the airbag and salary allowed me to do this, I applied for an installment plan for the course in 2019. In August I became a student at a private university. Yes, I specifically do not name the university I entered.
Recharging, without which I would have gone nuts Kirill Krainov
By the way, I upgraded my old iMac, because I didn’t see the point in replacing the device with something else. Its main hardware will last another 5 years at least, and I didn’t have enough RAM for full-fledged work even with educational projects. I put 16 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD for the system inside. With this configuration, Xcode IDE (development environment for iOS and macOS applications) began to work faster.
Again, balancing between study and work, I lived in the “work for the dream” rhythm. At the same time, I have already started attending interviews in order to understand the requirements of employers, surround myself with guys from the IT field and communicate more with IT colleagues.
At this time, I studied and worked, applied for internships in other cities, went to a face-to-face interview in my city. To be honest, somewhere I received refusals, and somewhere I simply could not complete the test. However, these failures pumped me. I fixed my gaps and worked on them in order to close these gaps at least at the level of less than junior.
About the process of self-education
Here I would like to talk about how I organized the process of self-learning. At first, I got questions from my tutor on a paid course, and also spent hours of my free time on Stack Overflow.
How was it with the video tutorials:
at first I watched the video in full to understand what it was about;
outlined important points;
coding for a tutor (yes, it looks like playing console games on YouTube);
after a while doing homework.
Regarding text materials:
also outlined them;
wrote down on paper the relationship between the elements, i.e. visualized for better understanding;
greedily grabbed each example / task in order to implement something through the code.
In fact, this is what is happening now:
I train during the day. In the evening I take tasks on sites like codewars to be ready for the next day.
Of course, at first it was difficult for me, as a person with a liberal education, to understand the moments written in technical language. But then I remembered that I was learning English, I was learning English in an extended version and at the university I was “taught to work with meanings”. As a result, I explained to myself in simple terms what I could not understand.
At the same time, he used ordinary everyday examples.
About 10-11 months have passed since the purchase of the course, June 2020 has come. The time for defending a diploma has come on the course. I’m already tired of sitting in the sandbox, I wanted to fight. At the same time, I saw an internship, which I basically passed. I studied the financial issue, morally and financially prepared for the downgrade in everything – in money, in position.
But the main thing here is not a downgrade at all, but a transition from one studied “comfortable” sphere to a new one, like jumping into an abyss. Fortunately, after passing the selection for the internship, the jump into the abyss did not happen. Yes, there are points that I do not fully understand, but I try to clarify and delve into them.
At the beginning of the article, I said that English was useful to me. I am sure that for people who have already taken place in IT, this information is obvious. Training materials from a mentor, documentation, Stack Overflow, Xcode fails/warnings, some part of the interview, trainings in the company – all this is in English.
As you already understood, my transition from marketing to IT took about 12 months. It was accompanied by financial costs, a reduction in some habitual expenses (such as not buying a new iPhone this year, etc.), as well as a reboot of the brain.
And as I said at the beginning, this transition has not yet taken place completely. At the same time, on a paid internship, I perform educational tasks. Therefore, if something is missing for me, I have the right to go to the same Hackerrank or Codewars and look for additional tasks there. Result?
To summarize, I want to go through the important points:
what I had at the moment of making the decision: work in marketing from 10:00 to 19:00, savings, desire to create applications for iOS;
goal: to master an interesting specialty;
time: plus or minus a year, taking into account the time to think about the decision, trial and error before purchasing the course;
costs: the cost of the course (installment plan), the cost of upgrading the monoblock (paid immediately);
process: not the most romantic, as popular culture reflects it;
result: intermediate – getting an internship as the beginning of the journey. However, yes, I changed my profession.
And most importantly: what I want. I want to do an internship, get a junior iOS developer position and work. I have three months to improve my iOS development skills and become a June after my 25th birthday.
P.S. By publishing this article, I’m probably making a survivor’s mistake – talking about a successful case of retraining. At the same time, I can’t call it a survivor’s mistake, because there is still more to come.
P.P.S. Moreover, I perfectly understand that my words about my unloved work in marketing look like the words of a snickering major. Maybe I’m kind of snickering, but I’m not ready to live my life doing something completely alien to me, which was the result of the path of least resistance.
Admitting your mistakes hurts. It is even more painful to understand about the lost years in the wrong way. It is unrealistically difficult to catch up. It’s hard to rewire the brain. But I want it, otherwise why is it all.
Dear friends, I hope this post was helpful for you. I will be glad to any questions and comments! I will be especially glad to hear recommendations and advice from people who switched to IT from some of the most opposite areas – PR, journalism, teaching, translation, etc.