So, yesterday was orientation for Lambda School. Information about how to join was shared on Slack, and we used Zoom to actually meet. Zoom is going to be our main classroom, in this brave, new virtual world. I’m new to both of these programs. I’ve been using Slack for a few weeks, because of Lambda, and yesterday was my first experience with Zoom as well. I like both technologies, although I think I prefer Discord to Slack right now. We’ll see how that looks in a year.

The Zoom session was hosted by Jazmyne Muhammmad, who I think was out in Las Vegas, and lasted about an hour. It was very informative and definitely worked to humanize the onboarding process. There are six different tracks starting on Monday, including my full-time full-stack one. That one is actually unusually large. All of the other tracks have a team lead, but ours has two of them due to size. There’s a pool of 300 team leads though, so we won’t be without support. They’re all former students, so they should know the experience that new students are going through pretty intimately.

The session went over a lot of the nuts-and-bolts about how classes are structured, about the Income Share Agreement and other technical details. It also went into softer matters that are equally important, like how to act in class (especially web etiquette, since this is an online class) and what’s expected of us, socially, both in class and later on, on the job.

I found myself, at the start of the video!

So, for the past hour or so (yeah, I’ve been getting up at 4 AM on most days for the past few weeks. Its when I write a lot of this stuff) I was reading through different channels on Slack. There was a list of suggested channels that another student put together, and I looked at them – there are even more channels for so many topics. There’s even one for Lambda students who write blogs about the school. It has zero content right now, so I’m going to ask and see if anyone else has been blogging their experience and see if I can get some activity going on it, along with sharing this stuff there.

One of the channels was family_support, and its both heartening and heart-breaking to see people’s families and whose lives they’re trying to better, along with reading about some of the horrible situations people are trying to escape through education. I can relate to the new parent posts and the people trying to balance being present for their kids while making it through the class, but my heart really goes out to the people just trying to escape.

I read about people running from domestic violence – a lot of it was from parents. There’s a person whose wife and kid left him, because they don’t have the patience to help see this through with him. There’s a couple raising an autistic kid and worrying about not being there when he has episodes and needs comfort and reassurance. There are people who lost their lives and were homeless, who are, even now, barely scraping by. There’s a person who moved from Tibet to find a better life in the US and hasn’t seen his wife and baby in three years – and she was just 3 months old when he left! There are homeschooling parents and single parents and first-time parents going through their babies’ teething for the first time.

One mother shared this video, which she used to explain to her young kids what she was doing at Lambda. I’m going to show it to mine (it’ll be a nice change from CookieSwirlC and MasterOv, and CocoMelon… I know dozens of Peppa Pig episodes by heart!):

So, anyway, I never completed college. I’m self-taught with just about everything I know, but I’ve come to realize that I can’t learn programming by myself at a fast enough pace to transition careers from I/T to development, which is why I’m going to work through Lambda. Jazmyne said, repeatedly, that its going to be really hard, and I believe her. It looks like there’s a decent support network available though… and at least one person on the Slack said that she read someone else who completed their track and advised, “There are going to be times when you want to quit. Don’t.” I know there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m only just getting on the train, so this is going to be an experience.

It looks like the earliest that my track can be completed is May 29th, but people can and will complete it later, because if there are concepts that we don’t grasp well, we can move to later cohorts and retake parts of the class. Hopefully, this doesn’t end up being a year-long saga for me, but I don’t know if, at my age, I’ll run the marathon in the same time as I might have 20 years ago.

Oh, and I need to finish 4 more blog posts about the pre-course to close out the entire thing. I’m going to try and do that before the end of the weekend. I imagine that my posting will dramatically decrease once classes start.

Onward and upward!