Forem: B(ritta)ny

Knock knock, it's Imposter Syndrome!

B(ritta)ny — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 16:30:34 +0000

Have I triggered your fight or flight response yet? Are you sweating? It's ok, we all are.

After writing my previous blog, I took a bit of a break from writing (as you can see). Not only because I was too busy freaking out over learning ReactJS, but because I also wasn't sure how to follow up from the attention my previous post received.

After sharing my post on my modeling and personal/tech instagram accounts (as well as my dad sharing it with every contact in his phone) I received a lot of love back from friends and colleagues on my journey, but that was all expected.

What came as a surprise was when I'd noticed an account on twitter had shared my post which ended up leading many others to sharing my post. So many people had messaged me about how they resonated with portions of my story and many were happy to know that they weren't alone in their journey or within how they felt on said journey.

Unfortunately that ended up being a blessing and a curse because when it came time for me to start writing again... I suddenly felt like Michael Jackson after Thriller popped off.

How was I supposed to write something that was just as good?

Oh no, after setting the tone with that, will people want to read whatever crap I put out next??

Am I smart and knowledgable enough to blog about technical topics? I can't teach anyone about coding!!

Am I even interesting enough for general blogging?

Well, after taking a long, late night walk to clear my mind last night, it hit me: I'm experiencing imposter syndrome again... and this time it's about my blog! Let's write about it.

Loosely speaking, it's the act of doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud.

I'm sure everyone has experienced this in some degree at some point in their life, but I feel as though this mental bully does a real number on those in technical fields (especially bootcamp students). Although I've actually dealt with it a lot within modeling, I'd dismissed it as something I'd victoriously conquered when Flatiron School's first onboarding materials spoke heavily on it.

Yeah, that was not the case.

During phase one, I felt great until we started talking about the DOM and how to manipulate it. Suddenly I felt like the program was a train moving a mile a minute and I was desperately grasping to the back railing with sweaty, slippery hands, attempting not to be flung off. I saw other classmates understanding topics in the lectures and even being more advanced with their problem solving methods with their coding, while I was still trying to understand the topic from three days ago. That feeling died down a bit when I got to the coding challenge, studied the mock challenge to really get an understanding of everything, and ultimately did really well. It disappeared completely when we worked on the first group project and I was completely holding my own in the parts of the project I was working on.

That was great and all, except that exact same cycle came back for round two in the next phase. Heyyy, imposter syndrome. How you doing, girl?

Listen, it's not exactly something I think we can truly admonish from our mind's hardwiring. I do, however, think we can take measures to recognize and combat it quickly. Here's how I've been going about dealing with this nuisance:

Notice the pattern

In this particular case, I'm dealing with IS during a structured program and it happens the same way each phase since each phase is structured similarly. I already know that the first week is going to be pretty straightforward. It's usually just learning the beginnings and fundamentals of whatever new language/framework/etc we're learning and it's easy to grasp and digest. I'm also quite aware the second week is when IS busts down my door because we're getting into the more complex concepts while still being fed information at the same speed. Of course there's going to be things I don't understand immediately (my gifted kid syndrome says otherwise but that's another topic for another day). I have to remind myself that I just need to really slice up each lesson and use other sources to learn it in my free time if I'm not fully understanding from the course materials or lecture.

If you notice you're dealing with IS consistently with the aspect of your life, there's often time a pattern to the mental wall, and if you can identify that, you can combat it early.

Reward yourself for the little wins

One issue I have is if I don't immediately understand something (or if I notice others are understanding faster than I), I tend to beat myself up over it. I have to remember that doing so isn't helping me learn. In fact, it's completely blocking my ability to learn because I'm then in the mindset that I'm daft and won't ever understand what I'm trying to learn.

I've started rewarding my mini-wins. Whether that be writing a successful line of code that passes a test, or it's just a concept actually clicking in my head, I reward myself in some way, shape, or form. That's often me going out to get a coffee and pastry or something of the sort. The rewards remind me that I just need to take baby steps. The course is moving fast but that doesn't mean I can't slow things down after hours to supplement my learning. Take it easy.

Remember you're not alone

Remember how I said I was watching other student's comprehend and excel above and beyond what we were learning? Well, when I took a step back and really thought about it, that was maybe a couple students out of the 70-80 we have present during lectures. My cohort's daily stand-up/stand-down sessions have seriously helped quell my anxiety of being the only one not understanding things or feeling overwhelmed by the amount of new information we're being fed in such a short time while being expected to completely grasp it and implement it within our own code. We all say a challenge and a win from the day/previous day and many times that's a majority of us saying we don't really understand a topic completely. It really helped to remind me that this is, in fact, an accelerated course and we're all going through it. Also our hilariously meme-filled discord channel where we're all extremely transparent with our thoughts has made it clear we're all out here attempting to stay afloat in the same hole-ridden boat. Love those guys, they keep me sane and all honestly feel like fam.

For a professional over-thinker and ADHD-haver like me, IS can hit me swiftly and incognito. Using your intuition and a few helpful practices really go a long way when getting out of this mental trap. At the end of the day, whether the tips above help or not, the most important thing is slowing things down, assessing yourself, and really focusing catering your coping mechanisms to your own lifestyle. No human is the same so not every method will work for everyone. The most we can do is take it one day at a time.

That being said, I'd love to hear your experience(s) dealing with imposter syndrome and if you have a certain trick to combating it that works well for you, I'm beyond curious to hear in the comments!

It's Never Too Late

B(ritta)ny — Sat, 14 May 2022 04:56:51 +0000

Alright folks, time for me to brush off the dust on these blogging fingers and toss this first post anxiety out the window. Fair warning, this might be my longest blog post despite it being my first on here.

Let me first start off by introducing myself.

Hey everyone! My name is Brittany Kelly, but ever since I started modeling back in 2017, I've been going by Ritta... hence my name on here and many other platforms relating to my tech life being B(ritta)ny. I'm a 25 year old woman currently based out of New York City. Formerly a D1 college athlete, I'm now a full time fashion model and have worked in both the US and Europe. As you can guess, I'm now making my "move" into the tech industry like many others.

Why is "move" in quotations? Well, theres a few reasons:

I'm not leaving my modeling career behind, just adding on a tech career to my life.
I've always been a techie. This isn't a new discovery in terms of interest; In fact, it's a rediscovery of a lost love.
I bounced in and out of tech majors in college... but we'll dive into that later.

So let's start with point number 2. Tech has always been a huge love in my life. I remember my family having one of those gateway PCs with the giant monitors back when I was 4 or 5. I was always interested in how the terminal would appear whenever the computer was powered on, loading up the windows OS. Of course I was also all over the internet whether it be computer games (the majority of my computer time), learning languages, or a little later when I discovered blogs and learned what anime was (the good ol' days of watching Fullmetal Alchemist ep 14 pt 3/4 on YouTube).

Aside from gaming consoles, one of the best Christmas gifts I ever got was my first laptop when I was around 7 or 8. That's when I really dove into blogging and even ended up building my own tumblr and blogger layouts with HTML and CSS (also YouTube but their channels quickly became less and less customizable).

Fast forward a bit through my childhood of gaming, sports, anime, language, and music of all genres, and we land in my sophomore year of high school. I had just transferred to a new school and I was excited to be able to take both digital design and game design. I excelled in both since they were two subjects that I was wildly interested in, but I ended up not continuing on with game design due to the teacher seemingly hating to teach, and I ended up dropping my extra elective slot in favor of having a free period to sleep before volleyball practice.

Fast forward yet again to my freshman year of college... and point number 3! Don't you just love how I took the time to make an ordered list and ended up not going with the ordered flow?

I entered college at the University of South Florida on full athletic scholarship along with an academic scholarship under my belt as well. Seeing as tech and language were my first two loves in life (aside from sports), I was obviously going to choose a major that was on the same wavelength of one of those. I ended up choosing the International Studies major.

Big mistake.

This major was absolutely not what I expected it to be and I ended up switching to Mass Communications the next semester. At this point I had ended my collegiate athletics career due to the accumulation of injuries I'd sustained over the years, mental health, a growing rift between my family and I, and overall burnout. The issue with this, is that even though I grew up having an interest in basically everything, I hit a point where I dropped most of my interests to focus on athletics. It's unfortunately extremely common for athletes to come out of their career extremely confused about what to do next if they end up not going the pro route as they expected. This is exactly what happened to me.

I ended up taking a semester off and later ended up at a community college where I studied game design and then quickly switched to digital design. Around this time is also when I gave modeling a chance and fell in love with it. I then realized that college was really going nowhere for me due to not having a solid vision of what I really wanted to study, and the structure of college overall didn't flow with the way my brain thinks and processes. Undiagnosed ADHD was also kicking my butt. I ended up taking an "indefinite break" (pretty words for saying I dropped out) and focused solely on modeling.

Jump ahead a few years and suddenly we've hit 2020 and I've been "living the dream" living in New York City for about a year now and modeling as my full time job.

COVID-19 has entered the chat.

Buh-bye modeling industry (and everything else) and hello void of confusion of self-expression and identity because I suddenly have to figure out yet again who I am and what I like outside of what I'm constantly doing. During the lockdown, I ended up dabbling in coding again via Codecademy but didn't stick with it and ended up taking a real estate licensing course instead.

Push forward to the end of 2021, a few months after returning from modeling in Italy for a few months, and I've been deeply contemplating what else I want to pursue in life. I'm a college dropout who has close to no corporate job experience. I needed something that was both interesting to me, something that could possibly be flexible (or remote) enough for me to continue my modeling, and also a field I could enter that is less degree based and more ability based. I ended up making a list of all the things I remembered loving growing up and at the core of everything, tech was always common component. So I understood that I wanted to do something within tech, but what?

As the research nerd I am, I started really deep diving into tech jobs and looking at the industry under a microscope. I ended up resonating with software engineering due to it aligning with things I've loved since I was a child, the endless paths you can branch into as an engineer, the fact that it is very plausible to get into as a degree-lacking person, and I also wouldn't have to axe my modeling career (Hey! It's finally point number 1). Of course the high pay is an obvious attracting perk as well.

I then start doing a load of research on the best ways to hone your skills without going through getting a 4 year college degree. I knew I could go the completely self taught route, but I also did always do better when I had a set route and guidance from a teacher when I didn't quite understand something. That's when I discovered bootcamps and was surprised to find that this was the type of straight-to-the-point learning environment I wanted from college but couldn't have due to the structure of the college system.

I then started coding everyday via Codecademy's software engineering route since I knew I wouldn't be able to start a bootcamp until a little bit into the next year due to me needing to go back over to Europe for the first two months of 2022. I'd be there until the end of fashion ~~week~~ month.

I was coding almost every single day while I was overseas whilst also researching which bootcamp would fit my needs and be best for me at the time.

After returning to NYC in March, I announced to my family my complete plans about entering a coding bootcamp and what I wanted to do moving forward.

Although I had told them about my thoughts near the end of 2021, this was the first time I'd really laid out a solid game plan to my parents. They we're totally supportive of me pursuing an alternate career in something that I really had a long standing interest in and wanted to invest in my conviction (I'm forever grateful to them for consistently believing in me and my ability to excel at anything I truly put my mind to). I let them know exactly what school I wanted to enroll in and began the enrollment process for Flatiron School.

Flatiron School's accelerated full immersion software engineering program checked off all the boxes of what I needed. Along with being an extremely well recognized program, they also had many program start dates and there was one that would start soon and end right before the next big fashion week. I ended up applying for and being granted a partial scholarship and was fully accepted into the program after completing the pre-work.

Now here we are, three weeks into the program, one passed coding challenge down, one group project done, and phase one completed. I've had many sleepless nights, and quite a few mental breakdowns along in this short time...

... But I've been in love with the learning process the whole way.

I'm now able to build basic websites using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and we begin diving deeper into JavaScript along with learning React starting next week. I'm so excited every single day to learn something new and apply my knowledge in labs and projects. I've even gained a newfound love for group projects (I used to abhor them in high school and college), and actually just built a Pokémon Battle Simulator with two other teammates using the PokeApi as a basis for fetch requests.

The dopamine/serotonin I get when the code I've written in a lab passes all the tests, or when I get a web app I've programmed to work the exact way I've envisioned, is the exact same feeling I had when scoring a winning point in a volleyball match or completely shutting down a rival team's front row with blocks. Absolutely indescribable. It's the biggest sign that this is what I'm supposed to be doing and I can't wait to see where this path takes me.

I've also loved the connections I've already made through my classmates, other social media sites like twitter, and how I've been able to grow closer with some of my other friends who either already work in tech or are also in the midst of migrating into tech.

This is the beginning of a journey that's actually a new arc in the longest journey of figuring myself out as a person and I'm wildly anticipating the next installment of the story. I'll be documenting the whole journey on here, micro-blogging and thought-blurbing on twitter, and vlogging on YouTube (don't hold me to that).

WHEW. If you made it through this whole post, I applaud you and thank you for taking the time to learn about what lead me up to this new saga in my life. Stick around, theres so much more to come!