Life After Graduating a Boot Camp
Tags: devjournal, writing, motivation, journey
Published: 2022-04-26 20:21:32

I am almost a year removed from graduating from Flatiron School and entering the world as a software developer. I do not have a job currently but I am working on getting one. I have made some choices after my graduation that probably have affected me in a negative way and I am taking full responsibility for them. The only way to make changes it to put that in the past and to move on to make better decisions for myself. I have an uphill climb ahead of me for sure but I know that someone reading this may have had a situation similar to mine. I know that our community is amazing and probably one of the best in the world. I am only speaking to my time in a boot camp and interacting with other students and instructors there.

Let me explain a little of how I got here and why I decided to finally start writing about it. I graduated in May 2021 and was so excited that I was able to push through to make it to the end. I had a hard time with some of the things I learned but I sucked it up and came out knowing a ton more then I did when I started. The amount of things that you learn and have to try to Life After Graduating a Boot campremember as best as possible wasn’t easy at all. I have read and heard a lot of people say that you don’t have to remember everything that was taught to you. You just have to know how to look up things in a productive manner to solve the issues you are having. I am a lot better at finding solutions then I was before but I know I can do more to learn how to do it more effectively. 

When you graduate from Flatiron you are assigned someone to help with career services that helps you with everything that you need to do to land a job. This is the part when I made a bad choice not to go down that path and to instead focus on working more then anything. I can tell you that it has hurt me a tremendous amount probably more then I can even express into words. I am probably a lot less likely to have a resume that would look appealing to future employers then someone that had the help that I could have had. But there is no point in dwelling on the past and I just need to put more effort into this now more then ever. I want to try and start blogging more then I have, hoping that maybe that would help me try to explain some of the things I am trying to do with finding a job. I am not very well written and I don’t claim to be. 

My background is in manual labor and that is pretty much what I have been doing for most of my life. I turned to becoming a software developer for the simple reason of not wanting to beat my body up anymore. I have had multiple rotator cuff surgeries and I am at the point now that I am not able to have another one if something happens. I know that in this career that I will be able to work and support my family without having to worry about something else happening to me. Now I just need to buckle down and start working as hard as I can to be able to finally land that software developer job that I want. Don’t ever give up on the things in life that you want cause you never know how close they really were/are.