Formation Fellowship: Boarded-On
Toot toot! This train is taking off whether or not I’m on it.
So, it’s Saturday of my Formation Fellowship Onboarding week. I’ve met with my Formation Manager, I’ve blown through all the onboarding tasks on my Roadmap, I’ve set up next week’s roadmap…you could say I’m all aboard and ready for the long journey ahead of me.
And hoooo boy what a journey it will be. Let me just recap on the past three days.
On Wednesday, the good folks at Formation finally sent me some links — most importantly, to the Fellow handbook, but also to a couple other Coda documents that I still haven’t quite figured out how to use. (I’m sure I’ll know when the time is right.) I excitedly dove into reading the entire handbook, which…I quickly realized was a mistake.
Cue massive overwhelm. One does not simply *read* the handbook start to finish. It’s super in-depth on a bajillion topics, including stuff that isn’t even relevant for me right now. System design? Um. I am going for a junior position, right?
Thursday I had a much-needed introductory call with my Formation Manager, Cara. Cara was great. She helped me understand that no! the handbook is definitely not something I should be reading start-to-finish. It’s there for reference on essentially any topic that any Fellow should run into. She confirmed that I will not, in fact, be touching on system design. (Maybe next time, heh.) She also showed me the ins and outs of my roadmap and timeline, which, let me tell ya. They want me to do all the codebase work in the next two weeks (GULP) and get through the data structures and algorithm training in a month. Binary tree whaaa? More importantly and freakily-outily: my timeline has me set to begin the job search by the beginning of December. The beginning of December. It’s flexible but wow. Ima be working hard if I’m supposed to be ready in three months.
After my chat with Cara, I set off to finish all the onboarding tasks on my Roadmap, which went fairly quickly because lot of the tasks were reading over things I’d already read in my initial read-through of the Fellow handbook. But it was good to get a refresher.
Yesterday, then, I finished up my onboarding tasks and took a nap. When I woke up I had no less than 47 emails in my inbox, comprising of calendar invites and Mattermost notifications. My backlog for next week had been assigned. Cue second freak-out.
Because holy cow, my schedule is all of a sudden jam-packed. Like, let me look at my calendar…yeah. Next week I have between 2 and 4 different sessions per day. And those are just the sessions. I also have tons of reading, algorithm drills, and OMG 7 bug fixes on a codebase I’ve never seen in my life.
Can I do it? Yes. I can. That’s what I’m telling myself. I’m terrified, but, in the words of Shakira (truly, this song will be my anthem during Formation),
Birds don’t just fly
They fall down and get up
Nobody learns without getting it wrongI won’t give up
No, I won’t give in ’til I reach the end
And then I’ll start again
No, I won’t leave
I wanna try everything
I wanna try even though I could fail
Which, yes, it’s silly to be motivated by a song from Zootopia, but literally one of Formation’s outlined values is “Fall a hundred times, stand up a hundred and one.” The song arrived in my life at the right time.
I’m scared and overwhelmed and not sure I can do it, but I know that my attitude and grit will get me through to the job offer at the end of the tunnel.
Stay tuned for my reflections on Week 1!
mins
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