Staying motivated.

After finishing my 7th semester of college (in computer science of course, let's forget those 7 interesting semesters studying civil engineer). I found myself having a hard time focusing and improving further, I knew I had a lot of time in my hands but to be honest, I was a little bit burnt out.

I studied a lot in very little time for my google interview, and while It did not yield the best results, it took a toll on me. If I could have distributed my time more evenly (maybe not try to cram a lot of knowledge in 1 month) would have been way better.

So I decided to take a break, for the first time in a while, no side projects, no tinkering no nothing for my whole winter break. I just relaxed, played games and had fun with friends. It was nice to be honest and I would recommend everyone to take breaks like that from time to time, but once that break was over I needed to stay motivated.

I had a problem with that, because I didn't have any real deadlines, since it is my last semester in college, there's not many exciting classes like last semester's compilers class to keep me motivated. (our AI class is really sub par and the only class that's worth anything is distributed systems)

So the first 2 weeks of classes I had a hard time doing much, but that's fine, school isn't my problem right now, school is easy. The problem was, getting motivation to study, at a decent pace for job interviews in the future. It's hard to start before you even get the interviews, but at the same time, as I learnt in my google application experience, you're already too late to learn everything if you already have a date.

So how did I fix this problem? It was something that I never realized I needed so much until I got a message from a friend. Co-working, he had a project due soon from work but he was having a hard time getting the last part of the project done. So he messaged me to get together and work, I wasn't going to help him on his project, I was gonna work on whatever I wanted or needed. So I worked on learning a new language, maybe do homework, or even just practice algorithms, while he worked on his project. The interesting thing about this, was that If either of us had a problem, we could talk it through, even if I didn't know anything about the project, I had at least some decent input about how I would approach a problem in general. Even if I was completely off the mark, it helped him see things from a different perspective.

For me the effects were different, of course it helped that he is a more experienced developer, so I can ask any question and he'll probably have a decent answer. It was the fact that I was working with a peer that I respected, it pushed me into working and getting motivated to learn more. This is very important for me, because it made me realize how important it is to be challenged by your peers to not be complacent.

From now on, I will always strive to be surrounded by peers that are as smart or smarter than me; and are more hardworking than me. That way, I can keep my motivation going by striving to be like them or better.