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📓 Self-Exploration Week 1 Expectations

Self Exploration Section Expectations - Week 1​

Welcome to the first week of Professional Development. During this week, you will mainly be following along with the plan that you made during the Professional Development Planning section.

Research and Planning Logs​

During this week, and the several weeks following, you'll want to make sure that you are keeping track of your progress by using a Research and Planning log. What your Research and Planning log looks like will be up to you, but what we want to see is a consistent commit history of your work throughout the week.

An example of this Research and Planning log might look like this:

research_and_planning.md

### Research & Planning Log
#### Friday, 08/13
* 8:20: prioritize to-dos
* 8:40: research libraries for animations
* 9:30: try out react-spring library, review docs + examples
* 1:20: implement react-spring library in sample project
…

On Thursdays, your instructor will be using individual 1:1s to check the progress via your Research and Planning log, and help you adjust your approach as needed. Feel free to bring questions to these meetings, or to ask for assistance during your professional development work.

Please keep in mind that you must work during class time, and the commit history must represent a full day's work for each and every day.

Whiteboarding Practice​

Additionally, as a class, we will continue to perform Whiteboarding interviews and practice. Coordinate with your Dev teams about when during the day you might want to perform these practice problems. The goal is for everyone to go at least once a week until the end of the term.

You will find example Whiteboard prompts every week, but you are welcome to bring other prompts if you've performed the prompts before or if they meet your needs better.

During this section, try to avoid using tools like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot. This is intended to help you with interview preparedness!

To Pair or Not to Pair?​

During this self exploration period, choosing how to approach your own material is up to you. If you find that other students are exploring the same materials as you are, you're welcome to work together to share resources, study, or even participate in pairing to create applications while practicing your new technology.

Otherwise, working solo is more than acceptable during this section. There are a few requirements for either scenario.

Requirements​

  • Attendance policy still applies. You are still expected to attend Epicodus during normal class hours, and sign in and out of Epicenter. If you are an online student, we expect you to be in a voice channel in Discord server during normal class hours.
  • Continue to sign in with a pair. Even though you may be performing independent work, you can still support your peers through this process. We encourage you to help each other with bugs or design decisions.
  • You may use your own machine. Similar to team week and the independent projects for each course section, roughly half of students will need to bring their own machine. The wifi network will be available during this course section.

Independent Project​

There will not be an independent project that happens during the Friday period as normal. Instead, you will continue working through your Professional Development Plan; make adjustments for the next week, and tie up any loose ends from your week.

There will, however, be a submission due on Epicenter. During this week, we will start filling out a Capstone Sign-Up sheet that is intended to narrow any of your current selection Capstone ideas down into a singular goal and expectation for yourself. If you're still struggling to choose a project, this is the time to think about it and bring it to your instructor.

This sheet will be shared by your instructor, most likely in the form of a Google document, that will be publicly editable in which you will fill out a name and description of the program you have in mind.

Next week, we will use the Friday independent project period to intentionally define our Minimum Viable Product and spend some time researching potential tech stacks.

Submission​

Submit the link to your Cohort's Capstone Sign-Up Sheet once you've filled in your entry to the Capstone Sign-Ups code review on Epicenter.

Visit Independent Projects and Code Reviews for details on how to submit your code, how feedback works and course completion requirements.