These past two weeks were all about me trying to find a job, and so far, not too much luck; at the same time, I haven’t been applying to that many. There’s that lingering feeling of “I don’t think I’m good enough for this” that’ll have me pass up something that I could probably do if I’m given enough time to adjust and learn. I dove into making bubble tea at work and learned the ropes in a snap because I was working lots of hours since I wasn’t attending college then.
My history with bubble tea
I barely had bubble tea before I began working at a bubble tea shop since there weren’t that many in the places where I used to live. In one place, there was only one local shop that sold it, and it was a dine-in/carry-out Chinese-American café that sold smoothies with tapioca pearls inside. My mom liked taro. I personally like passionfruit. Taro had a taste that I couldn’t get over. Something about the aroma that would linger in my mouth. That nutty, creamy vibe that Nutella has, but without the chocolate.
That café was the first place that I recall having bubble tea. It was situated on the side of a building, attached to a Marshalls. If you drove too fast passing by, you probably would notice a sign on the side of the building but you couldn’t make out what it said.
I was more of a fan of the food at that place. Lots of small plates that I enjoyed. A delicious wonton soup. I would like to visit again one day. I hope they still have good flavors going around. Perhaps, though, my hopes shouldn’t be too high. So much has changed in the place I used to live.
Later On
In high school, I had bubble tea again at Kung Fu Tea. I think the first time I went to one, I had a winter melon green tea with nata jelly. A few weeks later, while traveling to the mall with my friend, I had their milk tea. Wow. I didn’t know that bubble tea like that existed. I had Thai tea, and maybe masala chai a couple of times before that, but that really opened up a new world.
After finishing high school and my first semester of community college, I moved to where I am now. Four months passed by during that summer, before I began working. I tutored a kid every now and then when his parents thought he needed assistance with homework. In the meanwhile, I drew a lot of Aistrex-related sketches. The 21 Maestros idea formed. A first draft of Saviors was born.
But enough about Aistrex. We’re talking about bubble tea here, and why it’s important to me.
I had no work experience before then unless you count the tutoring gig. A flier of the boba shop’s hiring sign got posted on Indeed so I gave them a call. It was nerve-wracking. Calling on the phone gave me so much anxiety because I couldn’t see that person’s face or body, and you can’t press “undo” with any words you say. But I got over it with enough motivation.
About a week later I started working. It might’ve been a couple of months in—I can’t remember the exact date—that I got promoted one step higher. Except, I didn’t. I just took on more responsibility. It would be unfair to the others that have been working there for a longer time. I get that. I was one of the few people back then that already graduated high school. And with no college, I had all the time in the world to work. So guess what I did? I worked. I learned quickly, and when it’s busy, you learn a lot more and figure out what gaps you had in your knowledge.
HIIT in learning?
This may sound strange at first, but that first bubble tea job I had was exactly that. Rushes and weekends force you to learn. Work Black Friday? You’re in for a test.
These rushes of customers are essentially intervals of high intensity that you work. After a while, it may or may not die down for a little bit before picking up again. In exercise, HIIT is “high-intensity interval training”, which I would say is a paradigm of training where you do “sprints” of your exercise for short periods of time and then slow down or rest. Sounds similar to how I learned to make bubble tea, right?
I would say, hypothetically, you could apply this same notion to learning in its various methods of delivery if you’re comfortable with it. For bubble tea, I would try to get the most popular drinks drilled into my memory (both in my head, and muscle memory), and then when the rushes would come, I would try to make those until I didn’t have to look at the recipe sheet again.
It worked well. I remembered just about all of the recipes about two months in. I could argue that for some other shops that weren’t as busy, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do such a thing. Could that be the reason for slow service—the lack of muscle memory? Or was it just the shop I worked at that wanted to push out drinks as fast as humanly possible? I can’t be sure. It’s probably a mix of both.
And I’m not complaining about that. I’m grateful for the push; the added pressure.
What does that mean for me?
I don’t know if there’s a phrase similar to “imposter syndrome” that’s for that feeling like you aren’t meant to be doing something, but before you’re doing it… Maybe it is imposter syndrome.
My ability to adapt, learn, and change is what made me valuable. Surely, it takes time, but when you can be more efficient with how you learn, you can learn more, faster.
This holds true with other occasions where I needed to learn something new quickly:
- Studying the material for CompTIA’s A+, Network+, and Security+ actively from March 2022-July 2022, earning each certification about a month after the other.
- I handwrote my notes. All of them. That’s how they stuck to me. If I didn’t have the spare change for doing hands-on labs, I needed another way for the muscle memory to come about, which was writing notes by hand. Granted, I should probably review now since the specific details of each of those slipped from my mind. It’ll be good for me too.
- Learning InDesign, Herff Jones eDesign (a web app made specifically for creating, editing, and planning school yearbooks), and DSLR photography.
- For InDesign, the yearbook class had a short portion at the beginning of the year where we learned how to use it, but for the ease of managing all of the components, we switched over to eDesign. eDesign wasn’t nearly as robust as InDesign, but it was enough for the skillset of those who attended the class.
- I purchased an ebook on DSLR camera photography. I think it was only $5. I have to thank one of my online friends that I met through the MMORPG “ArcheAge” for sending me a gift card on my birthday because that’s how I bought that book. It was a great book too. But I couldn’t just read: I had to go out and actually take pictures. So if there was an event at school, I would be there! Plays and concerts throughout the year, along with after-school fundraising events.
- After unenrolling from public school after my 10th grade, I switched to an online school. It was a self-teaching paradise. Freed from the confines of schedules, I could just study all day and get on with the assignments.
But I can’t speak only of my successes. I have to talk about my failures too:
- I could’ve used that same energy towards learning Java programming in my very first non-web development programming class. However, I was just too enamored with excelling in my Drawing I elective, even though I was already alright at drawing.
- My drawing skills improved by leaps and bounds because the Drawing I class was four hours long every night. I took my artwork home as well and worked on it.
- That meant I slacked in my other courses at the time: English (which wasn’t actually that bad), Psychology (I did not have the time to interview a person for a paper, nor did I have a driver’s license to go out on my own, so I skipped that one and still managed to get a B in the class), and of course, the programming class.
- The time I spent trying to decipher patch notes in Korean for ArcheAge did not have focused efforts on actually trying to learn the language. I know most of the alphabet now, although I get tripped on the diphthongs. If I spent more time getting the foundations down, and then increasingly built up the level of difficulty of reading materials, I could’ve gotten more out of it.
When WGU made me revisit Java again
I’ve mentioned that I did a Java programming class above. When I look back now, the material I learned then was actually simple. But when I revisited Java at WGU in Software I and II, I had more time for all of that material from then to marinate in my head. Learning the basics of programming, a little bit of data structures, and the content I learned in A+, Network+, and Security+ helped with it too: the certifications helped rekindle a genuine interest in the field again after that fire died taking the programming class in community college, and I had more confidence after I took the class that covered programming basics.
Those two software classes took a good chunk of my semester: the first one took 14 days to complete the project; the second took a little more than three weeks. That’s about a sixth of my semester spent on two classes. To those who aren’t in a self-paced curriculum, that seems outrageously fast. But for me, it was a drag. WGU has a model that seems to be most effective if you work through one class at a time. It’s a focused effort. I easily spent five or six hours a day, on most days, during each of those.
But I alternated between going on long sprints of coding and then switching to watching YouTube videos on how to do something very specific in JavaFX (and I went crazy on the visual aspect. What else could you expect from someone who loves art and beauty?) to hair-pulling while reading Java documentation on various libraries (such as SQL and Time).
I learned a lot more in those two classes I spent at most, 40 days total in, than in the programming class from several years ago. I had a clear goal, enough background knowledge, momentum, and vigor. I was prepared.
So what now?
Writing this was reassuring. I might not have the network or that much praxis with tools, but I have that fire, kindled by light-roast espressos, Korean ramyeon, and other hot/spicy foods, and the need to do something with my time. It’s a fire, once burning hotly enough, that gives me a reason to gleefully hop out of bed in the morning and hide in my room for most of the day to study and mess around with what I learned.
If I had the money (and if I wasn’t planning on moving out any time soon), I would’ve probably bought lots of parts to work with for the hands-on portion that the A+ and Network+ expect you to be familiar with.
Right now, however, I am a little stuck. I’m by no means the best programmer out there since I really just started. I’ve dabbled in lots of things, but I haven’t mastered anything. The only thing I feel that I have a great command over is drawing, but even then, there’s still so much more that I can do to improve.
Because of my lack of confidence in programming skills, I feel like I wouldn’t be adequate enough for software development/engineering internships. At the same time, it’s something that I could easily remediate if I dedicate those oh-so-precious hours that I surely must spend scrolling through Instagram to look at memes towards programming for a few hours a day and learn.
On app/Academy Open…
I’ve stalled with the a/AO since I questioned if I really want to learn about web development. I think the course itself is great, and there are portions that I do want to learn, but I don’t know if going down the whole lesson list is going to pipeline me too hard into web development.
I’ve taken an interest in cybersecurity. Yes, it’s very broad. I don’t know what I want to do in it yet. But I think at the heart, it’s protecting information. In my job search these past few weeks, I was highly considering joining the Reserves of some military branch or becoming a security officer/guard. Something about it calls me; maybe the prospect of protecting and preventing harm. But I dug a little deeper, and I think it was these two things: strategy and investigation.
Well then, what are you going to do?
Threat intelligence and digital forensics seem most exciting to me. The red/blue/purple team stuff related to penetration testing seems fun too. My brain craves to take in lots of information to associate things together. If I wasn’t using Obsidian to be where I write a novel, I probably would be a lot more inclined to hyperlink the hundreds of files I have on this application.
I’m going to check out CompTIA’s CySA+ objectives and try to learn and possibly use the technologies/tactics in the objectives list. I’m looking at the new one coming out in June this year, so there are not that many books and courses on it yet, but I think there are a lot of those core tenets that remain year after year until something drastic happens that forces everyone to change.
I’m applying to internships and part-time jobs at the moment. If I get an internship for the summer/this coming fall, great! If not, that’s not too big of a deal. If I can even work at a different bubble tea shop, it’ll give me a brain exercise to learn something new and get accustomed to a new environment. I’ve applied to Starbucks too, which has much more customizations/items on the menu, so if I get hired there, I’ll have a challenge to look forward to.
I’ll write more later, once I hear back from the places I’ve applied. Writing this helped clear my mind. I think I spent almost two hours writing this non-stop, and I’ve surpassed 2,500 words now.
Focus is such a wonderful thing. The desire to learn is a big one too.
My worries for not being qualified enough are valid. But I’ve got to tell myself that even if I don’t know much, I have the capacity to learn. Learning is what’s fun for me. I even started trying to play guitar in the past few weeks because I wanted to stimulate my brain, haha! Can I read music? No. Chord diagrams are a big help. I’m playing by ear, right now.
—As with most things, I suppose.
Some of you may know that I started this personal blog after I stopped writing on my Substack blog. You can find that Substack blog here: https://aisgoblin.substack.com/
That one had several posts on my experiences with certain classes at WGU.
Again, I’ll post again next week perhaps. I’ve got to update my front page since I’m debating whether or not to truly finish a/AO.
I’ll add some badges to my about page, however!
I’ll see you all then.
