“What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
Those were the words that were ringing through my head at the end of my first “official” day at NSS. For the entirety of the evening, we sat and watched as the Evening Cohort 5 class presented their capstone projects. Much like the first day on campus just two days earlier, I was experiencing many different emotions, mostly fear and dread. For their capstone projects, the students had to take all of what they’d learned the past 5 and a half months, and apply it to making a web application. Most of what I saw was pretty impressive, so it was cool to know that in that short period of time, I would have all that wealth of information. The downside is I am going to have to learn all that information.
Those feelings of “fear” and “dread” were conjured up thanks to those students that presented that evening. Most of them gave us new students pearls of wisdom like “It’s ok to cry” and “You’re going to wish you were dead”. I have a full-time job, a wife, two young children, and a mortgage, and I already feel dead most of the time. To be clear, when I say “dead”, I mean tired, not dead inside.
What the hell have I gotten myself into?
Sitting in my seat that night, I already had thoughts running through my head like “I bet it’s not too late to get a reimbursement on my tuition”, and “I wonder if they would notice if I escaped through those windows”. The worst part of it was that I couldn’t even really turn to a fellow classmate and say “are you as scared as I am?” since I wasn’t really familiar with any of them yet.
There was some light at the end of the tunnel, however. After the students were done presenting, our head instructor told us to try and not be too overwhelmed. She told us that, yes we’ll learn a lot of information in a short span of time, but we will be armed with numerous resources to aid us through the process. Resources such as group members that we can turn to, several instructors and their assistants, and plenty of opportunities to mess up and learn from our mistakes.