20 hours and not 20 years
Hurray!! Finally, I have managed to complete one of the many online courses out there on the same topic😜. Through this post, I would like to share my experience of completing this course. Trust me, I won’t go into any technicalities.
Honestly, this journey was full of highs and lows, full of distraction and focus, full of enthusiasm and reluctance, and obviously, it was full of learning. Before giving a glimpse of my journey, let me introduce the course to you all. It is the one and not the only :
Python for Data Science (https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses/python-for-data-science).
The estimated effort mentioned in this course is 20 hours. Knowing this fact and assuming that I take my own sweet time for learning stuff, you may ask me how did I experience highs and lows, distraction and focus in completing a 20 hours course. My description may seem like a description of a 20 year-long period. Let me come to that in just a moment but let me first tell you why I took this course.
Reason for taking up this course or … did this course take me👀?
Looking at my LinkedIn profile, one of my friends said: “Bro, you don’t have many certifications, your profile isn’t strong.” This comment was the tipping point in my growing insecurity after seeing so many course completion posts on LinkedIn day in day out. It almost seemed as if I was no more in control and this course caught me when I was the most vulnerable. Hey…come on, do you think I will be this honest on this platform. No, seriously, let’s keep jokes aside, shall we? I really took this course to be one step closer to a thing I am interested to work on. I am obviously not going to disclose it here, maybe after I start working on it, I will come up with a post about it.
Now, let me feel good about my consistency, here is the GitHub link:
https://github.com/ysurs/Cognitive-class-python-course.
This course also pushed me to update my GitHub profile and become a regular visitor there. Now that you all know the background, let me justify why I compared a 20 hours effort to a 20 year-long period.
Experience
I am dividing my experience into 3 parts which are as follows:
- Start
The start was filled with enthusiasm initially because I had discovered the thing that captured my imagination and which I would like to work on. I experienced a feeling I had never experienced before. It felt as if I had found my calling. Out of habit, I started searching for courses and projects to be done to ultimately gain the competence to work on it. First step of that ladder could have been anything but I hate feeling insecure so I started looking for an introductory course in python. One confession here is that I have watched hours of YouTube videos, taken up some other courses on the same topic.
As I was doing R&D on the courses to take, I came across hundreds of courses on the same topic. I read reviews of many courses which ultimately made me more confused. On some days, I would start with one free course and on other days I would question the quality of that course. This led to periods of distraction and focus. The lows of my journey crept in when I realized the amount of time wasted in taking a seemingly simple decision.
2. Mid
This period was the longest and certainly seemed like a 20 year long period. Everyday, I used to watch, read and hear people doing good in some or the other domain. Now it was no longer limited to what my neighbor was doing(for comparison purposes only🤷♂️), it was what the world was doing. Friends posting their achievements in a particular field, lets say cybersecurity, would unknowingly persuade me to develop skills in cybersecurity. People achieving high ratings in competitive programming would unknowingly push me to try CP and in the process, would make me doubt the reason why I took up this course. This made me realize that although software products are being built to give us a common forum and are connecting us, I feel that they also have the power of making us vulnerable. I don’t reject the claim that this is the best time to be alive but I would go on to add that we should actually know what we want to do. It should not be influenced by some social media post.
3. End
Experience during this part was good, not only in terms of learning but also in terms of clearing some misconceptions. The biggest misconception which I have had for a while was that I used to focus on the quality of the resource rather that the efforts of it’s user. I realized that ultimate learning happens only when we apply things learnt and not complete certifications after certifications. The learnings from this course will definitely be useful in the next steps.
The key takeaway from my experience is that now more than ever is the need to believe in our own ability, our interests. In the present times, we may end up comparing our progress with the rest of the world and ultimately not knowing what we want and what we enjoy. Courses, software products are being made everyday to catch us off guard and confusing us. They want to catch us when we are the most vulnerable.
At the end, as a note to myself and to anyone reading this, I want to say, learn what you have always wanted to learn, there may be people better than you, better courses but your imagination and effort is unique to you.
