Week 9 of Fractal Tech's AI Accelerator & Engineering Bootcamp
After the start date of my second externship got pushed back, I found myself adrift, in "waiting mode".
There's a popular ADHD meme that centers around the tendency to spend the entire day waiting for one single thing that's on your calendar later that day, essentially not being able to start anything else in the meantime. That's what this week felt like.
Instead of ambitiously jumping into any of the several projects that I was excited about just last week, like continuing on my portfolio/website/resume/etc., or starting Nand to Tetris or CS50, or continuing to build out some of the apps I'd started on, I found myself with a kind of anxiety dealing with having to wait, or dealing with change.
I was so mentally prepared to start a new externship this week that, when that plan changed, my brain basically just shut down and started pouting about how much I had wanted to start this week, and how I wasn't sure if I could still do the externship if it was pushed back a week.
Pouting aside, the decision about whether to still do the externship was a legitimate question. With the new start date, the externship would be during week 10 and 11, leaving only 1 week left, which wasn't really enough to do a capstone project or a third externship, which I was planning on doing with Kai on his game, (Celestial)[https://celestialdecks.gg/about/].
Halfway through the week, I finally just got on a call with Mario, the Bats-Toi CEO, and communicated everything that was on my mind and my proposal for a path forward. It went much more smoothly than I ever imagined it would in my mind, and we decided that I should focus on finishing the bootcamp and that we would discuss a contract-to-hire position as soon as I finished.
This was a lesson in just asking for and saying what I need and what I want. Instead of ruminating about how everything wasn't perfect and how I wasn't sure what I wanted, I learned that the way out of this headspace was to find the courage to just communicate what I need and stop worrying about being a burden on everyone around me.
With that in my back pocket and a potential externship with Kai, my plan was to focus back on learning low-level programming by doing CS50 and/or Nand to Tetris.