Keys to Success

Success in this course depends on how you approach it. The course is intellectually challenging, but by setting realistic expectations, you’ll be prepared to overcome many difficulties that might arise. Take some time to prepare yourself by reading these tips and suggestions.

Boot Camp Mindset

Being committed, compassionate toward yourself, collaborative, and confident will translate into a successful learning experience. The following sections present ideas for how to apply that mindset as you navigate the boot camp.

Be Committed

Like any skill, advanced Java engineering requires diligence, practice, and a desire to improve. These things can’t be taught in a classroom—the effort must come from you.

Besides attending class and completing the activities and the capstone, you should try to put in extra hours of independent practice every week. With that in mind, try to set aside time for extra practice or study in advanced topics. Doing so will help you stick to a schedule and manage your time, which is key to your success.

Remember that making mistakes is part of the process! You'll encounter errors, but with each problem that you solve, you’ll add another instrument to your tool kit.

Be Compassionate Toward Yourself

Throughout much of this boot camp, you might feel like you're between victories and struggling to come up with solutions. You might feel discouraged, like everyone else gets it and you don’t. This feeling, commonly called imposter syndrome, is a lie!

Everyone struggles and feels frustrated with Java—regardless of their expertise. The field is huge. Everyone has areas where they excel and others where they struggle, so resist the temptation to compare yourself to others. Don’t downplay your strengths or focus only on your weaknesses, and remember that you're in a safe space to make mistakes. The fact that you want to be in this course is the best indicator that you belong here.

Be Collaborative

This course involves more than just technical skills—it’s also a chance to build the type of community that you’ll need to succeed as a professional in the field. Remember, no matter your level of knowledge starting out, that every student is going through the same experience. Many of you will have similar doubts and fears, and many of you will share hopes and expectations.

As you work through the course, follow these tips to start forming your professional community:

• Reach out to other students to form real or virtual study groups (via Zoom).

• Create private channels in Slack to discuss the general concepts and ideas for applications.

• Leverage the knowledge of your classmates as well as that of the support team you already have.

Collaborating to find solutions is a major part of working as an engineering professional. Any professional role that you take after the boot camp will require a lot of teamwork, so treat this as an opportunity to work on your soft skills while you develop your Java skills.

Although you’ll complete some of the work for this course on your own, you’ll also work with other students to achieve success. You’ll learn how to guide someone through your logic, communicate your thought processes, explain your code, and establish solutions with a team.

Besides working on group projects, you’ll have opportunities to pair up with other students to complete activities and think through concepts. For example, you’ll participate in pair programming, which is a common technique in agile development. This technique involves having one student drive, or write code, while another student navigates, or reviews it in real time. Take advantage of these opportunities as enthusiastically as you can. They offer terrific experiences for you to discuss during job interviews down the road.

As you'll soon discover, the collaboration extends well beyond your classmates and this course. You belong to a larger community that exists online, where engineering professionals ask questions, get feedback, discuss solutions, and learn new ideas. The Stack Overflow online forum, for example, offers an open community for coders to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

One of the greatest advantages of this course setting is the network of professionals that you’ll build; your classmates will become hiring managers or employees of companies who will seek more engineers in the future! In this way, the community of learning that you build in this boot camp will supply a bridge to your future endeavors. The strength of that bridge depends on the amount of effort you put into its construction.

In other words, now is the perfect time to get to know each other.

Be Confident

Remind yourself each day that you're here for a reason and that you can succeed.

The work that you’ll do has tremendous value. It will translate to hard skills, and you'll truly get out of this program what you put into it!