Structural Integrity
17 Feb 2021Piece by Piece
Structure is key for success. If there’s any idea that has been solidified in my mind after this week, it would be that structure is a pivotal part of reaching any goal. No one has ever stumbled upon success or mastery of a skill. It is easiest to follow a structured program where you improve and learn regularly. After a week of being exposed to the RadGrad program, I can vouch for structure and order when it comes to achieving my goal to be a software engineer. It is common knowledge that becoming a professional in any given field requires practice and dedication. What is sometimes overlooked by many is that a structured program could be an extremely useful aspect of one’s practice. Take a monumental task like running a marathon. One doesn’t just decide to complete a marathon on a whim. To an untrained athlete, it would be almost impossible to one day decide to run over twenty miles in a given amount of hours. Obviously there is a lot of training involved prior to being able to complete a marathon. But what kind of training? Well, I’m no long distance runner but I would take a structured approach to hold yourself accountable. Start off with a small and easy task like running around the block once or twice. Each week, increment the difficulty and distance of the running. Make sure to challenge yourself at every step of the way and by the end of this training program you will come out a different person.
Look to the Future
Similarly to marathon running, software development is not an easy mission. After going through the RadGrad New user tutorial I have discovered a structure that I can follow to convert the monumental task of becoming a software developer, into smaller bite size missions and experiences. I discovered new opportunities for classes and extracurricular activities that I had not known before. Classes like programming artificial intelligence and machine learning were things that sparked my interest and I had not known that my university offered these courses. Extracurricular activities like the AT&T hackathon and the cybersecurity event are also interesting activities outside of school that I could get involved in to further my career. In the RadGrad program, I was able to rearrange my schedule for each semester of university and plan ahead as to what courses, extracurriculars, and internships I would plan on taking. This was extremely useful. Having every activity or course that interested me laid out by semester was awesome. I was free to manipulate each activity as I pleased and this gave me the opportunity to spread out my tasks evenly across the next two years of college. RadGrad was able to break down the process of finding interests, courses, and extracurriculars and make it easily digestible and manageable.