Online Bootcamps — Staying the Course with Executive Function Challenges
In previous posts, I shared with you some tips for being successful in online coding bootcamps when you have executive function challenges, and specific tips for autistic individuals enrolled in one of these bootcamps. In this next installment in the series, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into one of the main challenges I’ve seen students with ADHD and other sources of executive function difficulty face: staying motivated throughout a months-long program to reach completion and graduation. I draw upon my own experiences teaching/mentoring and learning in online bootcamps as well as my studies in Landmark College’s Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity program to give you Five Tips for “Staying the Course” in an online bootcamp.
1. Hack Your Routines
One of the best ways to keep momentum as you work through an online coding bootcamp is to be intentional about building habits and routines. There are many strategies for doing this, so you may have to experiment as you get started to see what works best for you. The key is to make studying, working on projects, and generally making progress in your program a habit, and build it into your routine. You might consider “chaining” the habit of studying onto a daily habit you already have — if studying first thing in the morning works best for you, try putting a reminder for yourself to study right next to the coffee maker. Commit to studying every day, even if it’s only for a few minutes, right after making your morning beverage, until studying becomes part of your routine. That way you can take advantage of a habit you have already formed. The key is to find something you’re already successful at doing every day and pair your studies with it.
2. Consider Your Overall Health and Well-Being
While you’re working on building studying into your routine, you might consider taking an inventory of other habits you have, especially those related to health and well-being. I recommend spending a few days or a full week tracking sleep, diet, exercise, water consumption, and any mindfulness or other mental health practice you have. It’s probably too much to take on an overhaul of all of these areas of health while you’re also studying in an intensive online course! But it can be worth having a “snapshot” of where your habits currently stand and seeing if there are any easy “wins” you can make in these areas. How and when we eat, sleep, drink water, and otherwise take care of our bodies and minds strongly influences our ability to learn, focus, and stay motivated, especially if we have executive function challenges. You might try using the habit-chaining tip to “pair” drinking water and eating healthy snacks with your studying by keeping these things easily accessible in your primary study location.
3. Build in Reflection
One of the best ways to improve on any of the areas already discussed as well as get stronger in our chosen field of study is to engage in self-reflection throughout. Instead of jumping straight from one unit, one assignment, or one study session to the next, build in a habit of pausing and jotting down the answers to a few quick questions for yourself. What was one “aha” that I learned from this? What was something tricky that I’d like to review again later? How were my focus and motivation levels? How did I feel about this material? You can add your own questions, of course. The idea here is to track patterns of where we excel, where we struggle, and what keeps us motivated. The fancy term for this is “metacognition,” and it has been shown to help improve learning outcomes!
4. Personalize Wherever Possible
Once you’ve built a habit of collecting the “data” from the previous steps about your own learning process, you can leverage this data and what you already know about your learning style and your interests to personalize your educational experience wherever possible. In many bootcamps, you have the opportunity to work on a portfolio project of your choosing. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you “have” to pick a certain type of project to stand out to employers! There are many unique and interesting topics for projects (whether that’s an app or a machine learning model), and you will definitely have an easier time staying motivated if you pick something you’re genuinely interested in. This same principle of personalization applies to how and where and when you study, and it might mean that you spend significantly more or less time than the curriculum indicates you might for a given section. (A lot of bootcamps give time estimates, and in my experience, they can sometimes way underestimate or way overestimate how long it will take individual learners since they are based on “typical” students and nobody is truly “typical”!)
5. Hone Self-Advocacy Skills
Finally, once you’ve built the habits, gathered the data, and put personalization plans into place, you may still find that you doubt yourself and lose confidence and thus motivation. It helps to practice speaking up for yourself about how you learn, what you’re struggling with, and your successes and accomplishments! Oftentimes, your bootcamp will have a community Slack or other discussion forum, and you may have an individual mentor to work with one-on-one. Even if you don’t have either of these, you always have LinkedIn! These are all great opportunities to practice sharing your process and experience and asking for what you need — whether that’s support from your mentor, an accountability partner in a fellow learner, or crowdsourced advice or referrals from the broader LinkedIn community. This practice of speaking up for yourself and asking for what you need can be terrifying at the beginning (or always), but it can be a huge factor in building the network and community to keep you motivated and engaged through your bootcamp and beyond. And on top of that, building this skill early on in your career will help you when it comes time for job interviews, salary negotiation, tough conversations with future managers, and more.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this third piece in my series on thriving in online bootcamps as a neurodivergent learner. I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below if you’ve tried any of these tips, or others, and what has worked well for you! If you’re interested in some of the specific challenges associated with professional networking for autistic individuals, stay tuned for the next post in the series.
