Maker’s Academy has its own gravity defying sense of time and space.
One week of intensive learning feels like taking a trip to the moon and back to another universe, and play it on repeat for 13 weeks straight.
In the past week, we have learned our second language, Javascript and built an interactive thermometer with JQuery. Most of all, we witnessed the future of ourselves when the seniors graduated with their amazing final projects, introduced by Tansaku, aka Madame Ruby.
I was particularly touched by what Tansaku said about why he traditionally dresses up in a costume at graduation – to honour the spirit of Makers’ grads for having the courage to leave everything behind and put themselves through an extremely uncomfortable process to learn to code in 12 weeks.
I could not agree more.
As if time had suddenly slowed down, we juniors gushed over the awesome final projects produced by the seniors, many built in technologies or languages that the coaches aren’t even totally familiar with. I was floored by an app developed to help people discover new music through shared interests that used Neo 4 J, a graph query language to visually represents database. How cool is that!
It’s terrifying to know that in 6 weeks time, we are going to be up there showing off our own final projects in front of friends and family. You can’t help but to wonder if it’s at all possible, but you go ahead and do it anyways.
That’s Maker’s spirit.
Lab week Gratitude
Lab week / hiring week has been rumoured to be the low point for many past makers as the seniors prepared themselves for the ‘real’ world and the juniors get a chance to catch their breathe and explore / experiment with whatever technology they fancy without any structure.
For me, it was the perfect time to rebalance and reflect on my journey thus far and playing with the MEAN stack. We even had extended happy hours (not that kind) when people get together and made sweet music while playing giant Jango. Yeah I know, it’s a playground with no age limit.
Learning to learn is not about keeping your head down and going at it in solitude. Though having a plan is a good thing, I have learned not to beat myself up so easily.
Most of all, it has been most rewarding to recognize my own fear of scarcity mentality, aka. not doing enough, not learning fast enough, not good enough. By sharing it with others, we can change our mindset towards one that is full of abundance and sufficiency. Like Dana said, we can make friends with time and ourselves.
I am enough.
All the hearts go out to September grads, and welcome Novemberites!
Mongolian Princess Codes 