Empathy and self awareness are hugely important in terms of how you treat yourself and in turn, the others around you. I find it can often be a lot easier to show comapassion and care to others than it can be to oneself, especially when learning something new. For example - I am very quick to get frustrated with myself and engage in unhelpful self talk, all the while giving encouragment to a coursemate on Slack. Self awareness means taking better care of yourself while learning and knowing when to take breaks. It is also catching your negative thought patterns before you give them too much air time. Self awareness is equally important when engaging with others. It is being aware of how you are showing up to study or work each day. It is also being aware of how you are showing up to group projects, to pair programming, to difficult conversations. Equally important is empathy. No one can bring their best selves to the table 100% of the time. We need to recognise that no one is perfect and everyone deserves to be treated with compassion. Crucially, in the pressure container of bootcamp we need to recognise that everyone deals with pressure and feelings of self doubt differently.
I looked forward to the core learning each week. It felt like a time to play around in the meta of all the learning we were doing. Writing about values and identity earlier on in foundations set some intentionality to the tech learning and was useful to refer back to when the tech started to feel super challenging.
To be honest I found the core learning to be a welcome break each week to the tech learning. With no prior coding experience I have found the tech pretty intense. The most challenging core blog was the initial identity, strengths and values piece. This was in part because it was the first blog and writing a personal blog is not something I have ever done before. Secondly it was the awareness that I was baring my soul to a bunch of people I hadn't met before and sharing stuff that I hadn't examined in myself in such detail in a very long time.
Because interpersonal skills and self awareness are vital when engaging in group projects or as part of a team in both bootcamp and beyond. One of the most invaluable skills you can bring to a team is your ability to be a team player. You add value to a workplace not just due to your technical skills but how you help shape a healthy work culture.
I think the balance between core and technical content was ideal. I found the sprints that began with core content added more intentionality to my learning for the rest of the week as concepts like growth mindset or active listening were fresh in my mind. Even if we didn't have core content I would have felt there wasn't enough time for all the tech. I reckon core was vital that very reason!