Ten Tips for Success in Online Coding Bootcamps for Neurodivergent Learners (Part 2 — Autistic Learners)
As mentioned in Part 1 of this 2-part series, online coding bootcamps have been on the rise in terms of both student popularity and validity in the job market. Online coding bootcamps often serve as an alternative or mid-career supplement to traditional degree programs, and typically focus on one of a few top technical fields, such as Web Development, Software Engineering, or Data Science and Analytics. The emphasis in these programs is to offer learners the job-ready skills they need, and help them build a portfolio and interviewing skills to prove it. Most important for our purposes: they typically offer a flexible learning environment that allows the student to manage their own learning environment and schedule.
This flexibility can be both a blessing and a curse for autistic learners. While sensory needs and communication differences can make traditional educational settings extra challenging for those of us with this type of neurology, it can also feel overwhelming to be responsible for providing our own structure in order to learn effectively. Drawing from my own experience as a neurodivergent tech professional and online learner, my work as an instructor and mentor for various online bootcamps over the years, and my studies at Landmark College in their Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity program, I’ve put together this list of 10 tips for success for autistic learners looking to study in an online coding bootcamp.
1. Choose Your Environment Intentionally
This one will sound familiar if you read Part 1 of this series, but for autistic individuals, there are some more environmental considerations we need to make. For many autistic learners, sensory considerations will need to be number one for setting up a functional environment — not just distractions. Consider all of your senses here: is the lighting appropriate or does it cause discomfort? Are there any appliances in the room making irritating, repetitive or high-pitched noises? How is the temperature compared to your preferred temperature? Do you have your preferred objects (if any) handy which you can use for stimming? An important consideration here is that you may not get it all right the first time — you may not know all of your sensory needs right off the bat. And that’s okay! But if you haven’t yet, this is the time to start paying attention to them and noticing what helps you focus best.
2. Set Up Visual Reminders & Cues
For most (but not all!) autistic learners, and many non-autistic learners as well, visual reminders and cues are extremely helpful. This might mean putting a sticky note on your coffee maker to remind yourself to check your study todos first thing in the morning through a process of chaining habits to build a new one. It could also mean having a physical planner open on your desk next to where you study so that you can see every task you intend to complete for the bootcamp that week at any time. (I find this a lot easier to remember to check than having only a digital todo list which I have to remember to open.) It might even mean setting up visual reminders for obligations you have outside of the bootcamp to make it easier to remember to step away.
3. Make Long-Term AND Short-Term Schedules
Many of us excel at one or the other, but not both of these types of time management. In order to succeed in a career in tech, and in one of these self-paced online bootcamps, it is essential to build both long-term and short-term schedules. The long-term schedule should include major milestones like bootcamp completion, any deadlines for major projects, potentially regular meeting times with a technical mentor or career coach, and maybe even mock interviews which need to be scheduled during particular windows. Sometimes none of these deadlines are fixed by the program (except the end one), and you have to be responsible for deciding how to space them out appropriately, which can be tricky. That’s why it’s helpful to do it at the outset, focusing on the long-term.
From there, you can set your short-term schedules on a daily or weekly basis, including setting aside regular study periods and intermediate self-imposed deadlines for the steps required to complete your larger projects. Especially if this field is completely new to you, I recommend checking in at daily intervals for the first week or so, and then weekly after that to make sure that the time you’re budgeting is reasonable. It’s perfectly normal to overestimate how much work we can accomplish in a certain amount of time, or how much time we’ll have to study during the week, but it’s important to catch those mis-estimations early on so they can be adjusted and don’t add up.
4. Leverage Your Interests
This one is especially important for autistic learners. When I mentor students, I tell everyone this: when selecting a topic for a portfolio project, it’s more important to pick something you’re genuinely interested in than to pick a topic you think you’re “supposed” to do, or something you think hiring managers are looking for. It doesn’t hurt to pick a topic related to a field you’re looking to break into, but it’s most important that you do a good job on the project. Some of the most outstanding projects I’ve seen completed were on a range of unique topics, but what they had in common was that the student felt inspired to go above and beyond the basic requirements and really show off their skill. This is much easier to do if you pick something you’re genuinely interested in building or analyzing as opposed to something someone told you that you “should” work on.
5. Periodically Review the Big Picture
Most online bootcamps are structured in sections or units, and the good ones often have some kind of “learning objectives” or overview at the beginning. It’s tempting to skip over these to get straight into the material, but I actually recommend just the opposite: read them each time you go to study the material from that unit. Read them when you complete the unit. If you’re working with a technical mentor, don’t be afraid to ask them questions about the relevance of what you’re studying to the overall goal of the bootcamp. Especially in highly detailed, technical fields, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of the material itself and lose sight of why you’re learning something in the first place. Not only will it help you remember what you’re learning better if you understand why you’re learning it, but it can help maintain motivation, too.
6. Set Clear Goals
This is another recommendation I make from the outset of any large endeavor like a coding bootcamp. Most of these programs are set to run over a period of several months to a year, and it’s very common for our lives to shift and change during that time and for us to lose sight of why we’re taking on the bootcamp in the first place. It’s a good idea to keep visible reminders of your goals as well.
Similar to reviewing the overview of each section in the course, having our high-level goals available to us as constant reminders helps keep us from getting lost in the weeds of trying to learn all of the details. These bootcamps are typically jam-packed, and oftentimes there is a lot of material that won’t be directly relevant to you or your goals, or won’t seem immediately relevant. The clearer you are about what your goals are, the easier it will be to discern relative priority of the different learning topics, and the more precisely you’ll be able to formulate questions about that relevance (whether to your assigned mentor for the course, if you have one, or to internet communities, or simply to Google).
7. Learn What Accommodations Would Benefit You
This tip could also be more generally titled “develop self-knowledge”. One absolute necessity to studying on your own over the course of a program like a coding bootcamp is the ability to know yourself: what your strengths are and what areas are extra challenging for you. The good part is that working through one of these programs is also a great way to develop this self-knowledge, if you’re intentional about it. As you work through the course, be aware of what supports you find yourself reaching for or wishing you had, and see if you can ask for them. You might find that you need an extension on some deadlines, or you need more one-on-one support than is typically offered. Sometimes these accommodations can be made as part of the bootcamp itself, and other times you’ll need to reach outside of the program to find the support you need. The beauty of this process is that it’s all helping you prepare for a career where you might need to request similar accommodations to be successful.
8. Develop a Habit of Self-Reflection
As you go through the process described in the previous tip, you’ll find it helpful if you also build skills for in-the-moment self-reflection. It’s one thing to sit down and write out what you believe your strengths and areas of challenge to be, but it’s another thing entirely to take stock of “what worked and what didn’t” immediately after a study session or project completion. For example, you might consider yourself to be a slow reader, but when you actually compare the time it takes you to complete a reading assignment with the recommended time, you find you’re just about average. But on the flip side, you might think your memory is excellent but when you actually quiz yourself on the key terms you learned yesterday, they’re not as readily available as you expected. The best way to build self-knowledge is to actively measure our abilities, and this has to be done close to the time we actually use those abilities. This process also gives us the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of any accommodations we’ve put in place for ourselves.
9. Build Self-Advocacy Skills
Self-Advocacy is the “icing on the cake” of building all of this self-awareness. Once we know our goals, our strengths and areas of challenge, what accommodations we need to be successful, and we’ve validated these self-assessments, we need to develop skills for speaking up to ask for what we need. As with the previous tips, this one will also help build transferable skills to the workplace and other areas of life. Once we know, for example, that we need a quiet work environment to be successful, we need to learn how to ask for this in a work setting in a way that’s most likely to succeed. We can practice this skill the same way we practice any other for the duration of the bootcamp. This might mean asking your housemates to leave you alone during specific hours of the evening so you can study, or it might mean proposing an alternative topic for a project than the one you’ve been assigned. It’s good to practice with relatively low-stakes requests so that you can build confidence for when you might need to make bigger requests later on.
10. Leverage Technology!
This is another one which will sound familiar if you’ve read Part 1 of this series — but that’s because I strongly recommend making use of technology for self-organization for all online bootcamp learners, neurodivergent or otherwise. In the previous article, I stated that I think all students would benefit from at least a technological support for time management (such as a calendar app), for note-taking, and for managing tasks and deadlines. My personal choice for these three areas are Google Calendar, Evernote, and Todoist, but everyone’s preference and personal style will be different. The key is to spend some time exploring your options, find something that works for you, and then use it. It’s best if you can integrate it into your daily habits, such as by always checking your task management software first thing each day, then confirming that your daily schedule (in your time management app) accommodates all of the items with some buffer, and then repeating this process at the end of each day to ensure you are set up for the following day.
I hope you found this two-part series on how to thrive in an online bootcamp environment as a neurodivergent learner helpful! I use many (if not all!) of these strategies myself, both in my studies and in my daily work, and I have to say that being intentional about how I set up my learning environment and process to support my unique neurology has been one of the greatest moves I’ve ever made for my career. My goal is that from reading this blog series, others will feel empowered to do the same.
