Beefing It

Realizing you’ve bit off more than you can chew is a hard (meal-sized) pill to swallow.

At the beginning of December, I graduated from Flatiron School’s software engineering program. I was proud of the accomplishment, but feeling a lot of shame and embarrassment over the state of my final project. It just wasn’t something I was proud of. I was proud of a lot: what I’d learned, all the hard work I put into the bootcamp, and the four other projects I completed beforehand. But I simply wasn’t excited about the prospect of showing off my big final project to anyone, least of all potential employers. I was, in a word, bummed.

The weeks since graduation have been…eventful, to say the least. To put you in my shoes: fifteen weeks of sixty-to-seventy-hours of intense software programming (compared to the, uh, zero hours I was putting in at the beginning of 2020) will really burn you out. After it’s over, you’re unemployed and tired as hell, so you take a couple weeks off to rest and recuperate—to gather yourself for the (optimistically) three-to-six-month job search ahead of you.

You find yourself ready to jump full steam ahead into the search, and boom: it’s The Holidays. The December Doldrums give way to Christmas, then you roll through a sugar-fog to New Years, and before you know it, you graduated from a bootcamp last year and you’re not much closer to finding a job. What’s more, that damn project is still a lemon.

The first week of January tends to bring with it a hopeful, productive tide that raises even the most…