Bootcamp Genisys

Bootcamp Genisys, the start of a new age. I have heard a lot about Andela, one of them being Andela is full of geniuses and geeks like in the movies. The day to see these ‘geniuses’ was here. I came in earlier than expected time, I mean no one wants to walk in late on their first day. Then finally after a long wait LFAs arrived and walked into the building, in my head all I could think of is ‘so this is how geniuses look like’. Before we started our session we had a chance to interact with these ‘geniuses’ of Andela. And few chit chats later it was becoming clear to me that these are ordinary guys just like everyone else and there was nothing to be afraid of.

That being said, we had a talk on growth mindset, this topic carried the day. I have never seen a setting like this where people were not afraid to speak their minds, share ideas and to some extent disagree. First of all growth mindset is the ability to overcome a challenge by changing your perspective and accept your shortcomings. It’s more of accepting that intelligence can be developed and the best way to do this is exposing yourself to the information you need for you to grow. You can have your own definition of it but that’s what I took home. There are two kinds of growth, growth mindset and fixed mindset. A fixed mindset person fears changes and follows traditional procedures to achieve their goals.

I realized that everyone has had a growth or fixed mindset experience. Personally, the greatest challenge I overcame was coming to Andela despite the myths and all other setbacks. As I said earlier the stuff I heard out there about Andela really got to me. The weekend before bootcamp I got a mail from Andela with guidelines, and one thing that got me off guard was consuming a python API with Reactjs. Immediately I started to freak out, I have never written an API let alone done anything with Reactjs. Panic mode kicked in, and innermost me telling me I can’t do it. It took me a while to accept the fact that I don’t know these languages. Self-acceptance is a key principal towards growth mindset. After hours of research and googling, am really good at googling, I realized that all these things are familiar to me but the syntax just changes. During our talk, someone talked about how you respond to pressure really matters. In my case, I overcome this challenge by taking a minute to think about this relax and find out more about what is required of me.

If you are out there and you want to join Andela you shouldn’t believe everything people say. Somethings might discourage you some might give you a different perspective on Andela, and my advice to you is to come see Andela for yourself. In short, these myths affected me directly to a point I started to believe I wasn’t good enough. But now I know I am super qualified to be an Andelan.