My First Month Experience as a Hawkins Fellow

28 May 2019 - Basna Ranjitkar

It has already been a month of joining the program as a Hawkins fellow. In these four weeks, I have learnt a lot about the tasks I should be doing as a software engineer.

Flash back to the day I first came to IW Academy feeling excited and thinking how the classes and fellow friends would be. I happened to get the confirmation mail of being selected as a Hawkins fellow only on the evening of April 16 when the class had already run for two days. I missed the classes and I had to recover the study I missed. So I reached to IW an hour early to learn what I missed. The friends are so welcoming and it was not hard to learn what I missed.

The classes are running following the syllabus. The environment is so motivating seeing all academy friends eager to learn and committed to the task. The lecturers are always motivating us to work hard in these three months for our better future. Our class starts from 10am sharp and there is stand-up where we in group speak out about our progress to the project manager and the day follows with an hour-long lecture and hands-on practices for the rest of the day.

Here is no spoon-feeding like we were done in school and college level. We are taught about best practises of using the code, resource sharing and given idea of how hectic job market can be. We are always motivated by our lecturer for self learning. It is important because when we will be doing real job, self learning is necessary because we might have to learn new language for the project. From the first week we were assigned assignments so that we would learn on our own and search and explore new things to complete them. This pushed us to explore new things on our own. We are told that the real job market will be more hectic than how we are feeling now to complete assignments. So regular hands-on practise will make easier. Here we are sat together randomly daily so that we get to know each other, be comfortable and be a good team player. In jobs, we always have to work in team so this is a good practise.

I feel very lucky and thankful to the Code for Nepal for selecting me for this fellowship. It is a good opportunity to apply what I have been learning to volunteer for Code for Nepal and work for utilizing data.