In this video, Galvanize Full Stack student Lucy Cifferello talks about what inspired her to learn to code, what she's learning at Galvanize, and what she wants to work on in the future.
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My name is Lucy Cifferello, and I'm a Galvanize Full Stack student.
I had a lot of odd jobs here and there, kind of figuring out what I wanted to do, figuring out what I didn't like to do before settling into where I am today. One of those jobs I was working as a sales associate at Nordstrom and there is actually where a client introduced me to Galvanize. I was just working with her and we got to talking and had a really great conversation about what she does. She works in the tech world. She mentioned Galvanize as an avenue for just starting to get involved.
I was curious so I went home and checked it out. And in my research of Galvanize I found some other coding tutorials online and started playing around with things and just realized that hey this is pretty cool. I really like this. I'm good at it to start. And mostly what I realized was I have this nature where I love to solve problems. I like to figure out what's going on under the surface and make those things work and resolve them. But another really big part of me is my creative nature so I started coding and I was like wow this is creative and helps solve problems. I didn't really realize before that there was a field that meshed those two things so beautifully and so well for me so that was really exciting.
A typical day at Galvanize is we come in the morning and get acquainted, have a little stand where we share interesting things that happened in the world, events that are going on at Galvanize or in the community and anything we need help with. So it's just a check-in for everyone in the class, which I think is awesome that we have that moment to share and communicate with each other. And then, typically, throughout the day we have certain breakout lectures on different topics that we decide. We have time to free code. It varies between having a more structured schedule and having more time to do things on your own with support from your instructors, which I love. I love the flexibility. If you're feeling like just being in your zone, you can do that, but if you want a little more direction, you could go to a group and have someone walk through steps with you. We have events at night too so I'm always going to meet-ups and I would definitely recommend that.
The most important thing I've probably learned at Galvanize so far is this process of thinking about breaking down a problem. A big part of what we did very early on was really working on breaking things down into little pieces, looking at these very small elements and how they pull into the big picture. And for me that really changed how I processed a lot of information, looking at things from a different way. But seeing things broken down and being able to do that and developing that process for myself really has made a big difference.
