Wrecked
It took 8 days. Only 8 days.
Wednesday, September 27, 8th day of my Data Science Immersive class at General Assembly. I thought it would take a lot longer than it did before I felt like I could get nothing right. But Python, I learned, is a different breed of animal. Much like SQL, there is room for shortcuts but absolutely no room for error. And if you make an error — very easy to do by the way — you don’t move forward in your coding task. Plain and simple.
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And I was not moving forward at all. In my mind, I was howling. After an hour of sitting at my laptop, my eyes simmering like eggs from the screen, trying and failing to simply get past one problem out of several assigned to the class, I finally broke. With permission from the instructor, I stepped away from my desk, walked outside the classroom, past the exit doors of General Assembly, down the steps, and out the front door to take a much-needed mental break.
That was yesterday. For a safe 24 hours, I felt like a tremendous failure on many levels and not only with Python. For sake of both privacy and expediency, I am only sticking with the Data Science portion of our program. It turns out I am not the only one feeling that sense of inadequacy that comes from learning something new and guzzling the proverbial firehose of education. Many of my classmates feel the same. It is humbling.
What I learned though is not something easy for me to accept: when resolving deep failure in a multitude of elements that make up a good life, tackling each of those failures one by one is, for better or for worse, the prudent approach.
For myself, that means I have to be even more serious with focusing on my Data Science Immersive class than what I previously expected (and that’s saying something). It means my vision of living a monkish existence for the next 11 to 12 weeks is a requirement, not an option. I am a social creature, so this is not going to be easy. It is, however, the right thing to do.
I am alone. Until the December holidays, I need to be alone wisely.
