This week has been tough! I've had back to back big projects due for the past three weeks. Let me tell you, learning this new software takes patience! It is very time consuming.
There is no book. Aside from the first assignment, no suggested resources. Just a few lines of instruction and maybe 5 minutes of explaining for each assignment and rubric. My professor doesn't teach the software. The TA's do. Basically they tell you to start the assignment and you raise your hand when you need help. And there are 5 of them with a very large class. One of them is always telling me to "just Google it, I was self taught" And I'm like, girl, if I wanted to be self taught, then I would have just done that to begin with and saved the thousands of dollars I paid." But anyway, there is no way I would be doing this in my free time if it wasn't for the structure of school. YouTube, Google, and AI are helpful but it takes soooo long to get things unstuck and sometimes it's just a weird glitch. So I really hope they correct a few of the inefficiencies of this class. Because we waste a lot of time just waiting for help.
I have the greatest TA who is so patient. I was having a wave of inadequacy and a bit of regret wash over me. Do I really need to learn this? And then I asked him for some help. And he's literally so patient and helpful! I understood just what to do when he explained it and it was easy to do it on my own after that. I was so grateful!
It's funny how one moment can feel so frustrating! And then just five minutes later there is a complete turnaround. And I'm feeling so happy and just designing to my hearts content. Which is the part I actually love. I saw my design, and I knew it was good and suddenly I felt a little more confident in the endgame of this learning process.
And we know that our dopamine pathways are activated by that feeling of intimidation. It feels so good when something daunting becomes easy.
So I'm putting one foot in front of the other. The grades are good, but I'm still not proficient. I'm hobbling through this! Knowing in a couple weeks, I will be glad I stuck with it. And then I will spend time repeating the steps on my own projects and hoping for that reinforcement and speed that comes with time.
