My Journey Through Altschool Africa: Month 1
2Tim.2.15 - Work hard so God can approve you. Be a good worker, one who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly explains the word of truth. (NLT).
Hi, I am Okonu Deborah, but you can call me Debbie. I am not here to talk about who I am or what I do, but I am here to take you through my Journey as an Altschooler.
Firstly, I’ll like to appreciate the current Leads of The University of Portharcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria (Uniport) Tech Community, for sponsoring my registration fee into AltSchool Africa, School of Software Engineering. If you’re reading this now, thank you so much. I couldn’t have been able to register without your sponsorship. Thank you, God bless you richly.
Yes! I wrote the entrance exam, and by God’s grace, and the help of some of my very good friends, I passed with a 93%.
And here I am, a student of Alt School Africa, School of Software Engineering.
But before we begin this journey, i would love you to do me a little tiny favour.🙃
Get a glass of wine, or juice, or water. Lol, and sit tight. Because, It’s gonna be a pretty long journey. But not to worry, it won’t be a boring one. Trust me, it’ll be totally worth it!😉
Off We Go!🚀
What is Altschool?
You might be wondering, what this altschol is all about. But do not worry, I’ve got the perfect and simple answer to that question.
As the name suggests, AltSchool Africa is different from the traditional institutions. We are a school for individuals looking to gain technical skills and kickstart a career in Software Engineering. AltSchool Africa takes a non-traditional approach to learning by teaching courses directly connected with the selected track.
To know more about Altschool Africa, you can visit their website at:
Welcome To Altschool Africa 😊
Let’s fast forward to when we officially started…⏭️
That’s right! The on-boarding section. All those who passed the cut off mark, were sent a form to fill and afterwards an invitation to join the official slack Channel of the school.
ohh, I guess I forgot to mention, it’s an online school, and it’s pretty self paced too.😁
So, we were been told how to use the Learning Management System (LMS), and every other thing we needed to know to guide us through the learning process. All these happened within the first week. We also had a live onboarding meeting.
Where I got scared, was actually while watching the introductory videos, I came across where they said, Exams Would only take about 40% of Final grade, while the remaining 60% would be from weekly activities, assessment, quiz, capstone projects, engagement and attendance too😬.
Then I said to myself,
The journey has just begun.🚀🚀
Week 2:
Diving into week 2 of learning🤸🏼♀️, We learnt about Introduction to computer science.
What computer science is, the different fields in Computer science and computer components.
So these part was quite easy for me to comprehend, cause they were basically what I learnt in secondary school, but, it was kinda a higher version. Lol. Ohh, and more technical 😏.
So honestly, this week 2 was more like, Altschool saying; Welcome!
Lol, it was quite short, and honestly I completed the videos before the week elapsed 😬.
Well, let’s see how the next week goes🤸🏼♀️.
Week 3:
If I am to explain this week using less words , this is how I would explain it; 🔥🔥🔥. Ohhh yes! This week was fire! Lol, not literally though, but I know you get the logic.
And it was at this point, I knew, I was in a real school. 🥵
>>>
Here we learnt about Introduction to Programming.
Who knew that introduction to programming would be this voluminous.😬
We were being taught so many terminologies that has to do with programming. Some of which we would actually see during practical section.
I got to understand Big O notation finally, our tutor, really explained everything very well. Especially during the life classes we had. Yes! We didn’t just watch videos from the LMS, we also had live section where we were given the opportunity to ask the tutor questions on areas we weren’t quite clear on.
So far, this week has been one of the longest!
Well, if you’re reading this and you’re aspiring to register into alt school Africa for next year, I would say, don’t fret. It’s not as difficult as you think.
Week 4:😊
Honestly, I really enjoyed this week..
We only had live classes this week to summarise all we’ve learnt for the past 3 weeks.
And I was so excited cause I had a lot of questions to ask the tutors.
The most exciting part of this week, was on the 29th April, Friday, we had our very first Fun Friday!!🤸🏼♀️
Though, I wasn’t able to participate fully cause of network issues. But, when my network was stable, I enjoyed every bit of it 😁.
In Conclusion,
My first month as an altschooler was terrific. Lol, and exciting too.
Learnt a lot and met a lot of great minds too.
I have a lot of expectation for next month, but I’ll try not to keep my hopes high. Lol
And just hope for the best!
One thing I love about Alt school is the fact that, they only make available the current week videos on the LMS, Yes! While I was in week 2, I couldn’t access the videos for week 3.
This helped me to take my time, and learn step by step.
My advice to you is this;
Don’t be in a hurry to learn, learning takes time. Yes! You want to gather the knowledge and get a job and start making your money. But if you rush through your learning process, you’ld realised you just wasted 1 year of your life doing nothing, cause when its time to prove what you claimed to have learnt, you would only realise that you didn’t actually learn anything but just rushed through the whole process then.
Step by step, is the key♥️
Thanks for going through this one month Journey with me. Hope your wine isn't finished yet, we still have more months ahead of us. Lol😉😁
See you next month!♥️
