The End, Sort Of

Yesterday was my first day back as a software engineer, but all the extra work that I picked up (some voluntarily-ish, some not) for GIR is still going.

None of my 5 students who took an Incomplete successfully finished their work yet. I’m giving all of them until the week before Spring semester starts to finish, as all of them plan on taking the next computer science course and thus cannot be delayed further than that. I’m still closely monitoring their progress, helping them debug code, and grading their work, and my plan is to give them the final hopefully by Jan 20 as I know they need to have their grade updated to an actual letter grade by the first day of Spring which is Jan 25.

I literally just spent the past 3.5 hours helping one of those students go through 2-ish projects and a homework assignment. I thought this was over, but I guess not. I’m pretty tired and over all of this school stuff.

Aside from that, I’m still helping students build an app. I haven’t written retros for the past two weeks since they were both holiday weeks and there wasn’t really much going on. In general, they’ve learned a bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, as well as how to brainstorm an app idea, make mocks, use GitHub, and work in a team — skills that are all important for real industry life — and are currently working on their respective apps in their groups. I’m really excited by their ideas and progress, and I’m hoping they’ll eventually be able to launch what they’ve been working on!

Lastly, some of my students reached out to have mock interviews because they have interviews lined up with Google. That’s pretty cool! I’ve done one mock interview so far and it was actually pretty fun, as it’s pretty much like watching them code and then debugging with them, the same as when I helped them on homework.

I’ll write another actual “The End” post later, as this doesn’t really feel like the end yet. It feels like the middle because although my semester ended about a month and a half ago, I’m not completely done right now with all this pending work. I felt mostly done when my semester ended and I’ll feel completely done when all of this pending work is actually finished, hence the in-between feeling.

Going back to real adult, real-world job coding feels good, and it’s great to talk to adults as opposed to students all day. My work calendar is no longer OOO for GIR and also deleted the description about GIR in my internal work profile, same with LinkedIn. I’m a bit sad but also excited to see where my career goes next.

I was inspired by this teaching experience to look for part-time teaching positions, and I received an offer today for one school and I’m going through the interview process for another. That’s pretty exciting!

All in all, GIR was a great experience, and I’ll write another wrap-up post to really deeply reflect on it all.