An Attempt Was Made
Grad school is hard, like really hard, especially if you’re a working adult with adult things that are being expected of you. My grad school journey was pretty smooth initially. I was taking two classes a semester, spring, summer and fall, and getting great grades. I really threw myself into it. I challenged myself with classes in things that I had no background in or the barest minimum amount of knowledge. I took two database management classes and shocked myself by really enjoying it. Database administration really appealed to that part of my brain that loves to organize things. I enjoyed my class in Java and my web development classes with their bird’s nest of coding languages and inscrutable tools. I enjoyed them so much that I decided that I wanted to pursue web development as a case study project. This was the “capstone” to the whole program.
My web development teacher agreed to be my advisor and I started planning to build a whole website all by myself. I created wireframes and logos and planned for a database that I would host on AWS and created a schema. The planning was going great, I was ahead of schedule. My advisor thought that my designs were fantastic. That’s when the tone of the semester changed. I set up my development environment and went to work. I got some basic coding done. I had the html and CSS of the first page all set. I had started on the Javascript. I was using React and Node.js just like in class. I was applying everything that I had learned and more. And then I started hitting walls. Some of the walls I was able to chip my way through, some I was stuck behind. I bought books and stared at StackExchange and GitHub for hours. I reached out to old college friends I hadn’t talked to in years. Nothing seemed to answer my questions though. My friends only had question after question for me, trying to figure out exactly what I was doing so that they could maybe try to help since everyone who codes does things differently. Many of their questions I didn’t even know how to answer.
The semester dragged on and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had one broken page out of the many that I needed to get done. My advisor suggested that I take an extension semester, so I did. The next semester, the first thing that I discovered was that I was completely missing (and had never learned about) a navigation bar. I obviously knew this would be necessary but had never learned how to implement it properly. It was an unknown unknown to me. I only happened to stumble on the information by chance. This set the tone for the rest of the semester. I started implementing the navigation bar and attempted to run it one day. I didn’t get any errors, but it also didn’t work. I just had a blank white page. After digging through the console for a while I discovered that the problem was something that I am still not entirely sure how to explain. The code itself had a problem. An update had been made to a part React at some point and nothing that I did would work unless it was fixed. But I had no idea where to even start to fix this miniscule esoteric problem. I asked my advisor, but he didn’t seem to be able to give me a clear answer. If it was because he didn’t know the answer himself or because he wasn’t allowed to “hand me” answers I don’t know.
I spent the rest of the semester making little to no progress and beating myself up. At a certain point I had to admit defeat. I was upset with myself and with the program. Clearly, I needed more than 2 semesters of basic web development classes to build a fully functional, multi-page website in one semester. But why had no one advised me against it? And why had I been dumb enough to trust that the program on its own would have prepared me for its own capstone project? What did I learn from this whole thing? I learned that trying is ok. I don’t try things well, I like to plan ahead and know that I will be successful. But I took a little shot in the dark with this and I failed but I survived. Would I try to build a website again? Absolutely, but not under that kind of pressure or time constraint and I would love to find a mentor to walk me through the process and give me more real world experience. Most importantly, I realized that I should have trusted my first instinct. Web development was not the core study area that I started the program with, but that’s a success story you’ll have to read about later.
