It’s the latter half of the week, and I am exhausted. I’ve been taking in a lot of new information lately with little time to process it. Coding has been interesting. I’m excited to learn since I’m brand new to programming with C++, but it’s hard to retain any of it since we are going so fast with hardly any review. I know it’s just supposed to be a quick fly-by of the code before we move onto different languages. We don’t need to have this mastered; it’s just for exposure, but I would’ve appreciated something more beginner-friendly.
I’m still getting used to the program schedule, so my time management isn’t great yet. Some days I’m just sitting at my computer for an hour waiting for the next session because I finished my daily tasks. At the same time, I’m tired at the end of the day from learning new information in the sessions and participating in extra-curriculars. I think once our team gets farther into our project things will balance out better.
Movie night earlier this week was lots of fun, though. The auditorium definitely felt like a movie theater. I’m enjoying the lunch and lectures as well. We have heard from Jim Oliver and Eliot Winer so far. Some themes I keep hearing about are failure and imposter syndrome. I thought this was kind of odd at first. Surely when you get to graduate school, you know what you are doing by then and have your skills figured out. That doesn’t seem to be the case. During graduate school is when you fail the most because of the research.
Motto at a lot of Silicon Valley companies, including IDEO, one of the leading product design /industrial design companies in the world, is “Fail early, fail often.” You have to be careful that that attitude doesn’t lead to chaos and burn-out, but I think what it really means is “iterate a lot.”