This “Socio Formador” journey began way before this year in my scenario. Somehow I knew eventually that I would become some sort of teacher. It is not my dream job but, I remember back when Inflection Point hired me, I was a 21-year-old kid who knew nothing, and thanks to the great support that I found in IPS employees, some of whom I can now call friends, I got to learn how to code.
So, before I tell you how we started this program, I’m just going to mention how things happened, and why we can now laugh about it. I remember more than 15 weeks ago, the first time they asked us to be part of this project, and told us, “You will get into a Zoom link, with maybe 3 to 5 students, which might have some questions about the subjects they are learning and you will try to help them” PLOT TWIST, We ended up giving full +2 hr. classes, two times per week to a group of 50+ students, and in my case managed two Angular projects, so yeah… someone just missed a thing or two. Funny, right?
I have a belief that says: “You have to give back to the universe what the universe first gave you”, and this project was the best chance I have had so far to teach what others had taught me.
I won’t lie, I was a bit nervous, just thinking about having in some cases more than 50 students listening to me, and trying to teach them some tech stuff, wondering what kind of questions they would have, thinking that maybe they would have more experience than me, even though I’ve been doing this for over 7 years. However, going into the first class, was amazing, for the few or many people that know me, know that I love to talk a lot, so that helped me to conduct the first class brilliantly: I was getting a lot of questions which luckily I was able to answer, we had a few programming exercises, and at the end of the class, everyone was very happy, the students got interested in what I taught them and the professor was very excited.
The second part was giving support, being there for the students, getting into calls that lasted up to an hour, and sending them documentation, videos, and any type of help. There are two things that I loved the most, and one of those was, teaching them very basic things, which we “Senior” programmers now know how to handle, it just brought back the memories to me, of being a Jr. developer who spent hours or days, and at the end, it was just a missed spelled on the code. The second part was watching them jumping out of their seats, after solving a problem that took them a couple of days because if you are a programmer like myself, you have lived that experience maybe a few more times than you are proud of.
Going to the Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus was on a whole new level. Getting into the classrooms and starting to evaluate the projects every two weeks was amazing, also sharing our experiences and advice on each stage of their development was great. We were trying to prepare them for the “real world”.
Now that I got back the classroom memories, I can not thank enough professor David Cantú and his peers, which played a key part in the student’s learning path, having constant meetings with them helps us (Hadwin and myself) to learn how to think like a professor, how to evaluate things, how to talk with students, I can remember how they encourage us to ask more features and add extra complexity to what we already asked because they knew that their students will deliver, even though Hadwin and I didn’t trust their demands towards the students, they encourage us to believe, and thanks god they push us on that way, the result of that… outstanding projects.
I think the last couple of weeks were chaotic for them. I remember one week before they finished the project and final demo, my peer Hadwin and I asked them for a “pre-UAT”, which is just a fancy term we, IT guys use to refer to a “practice” demo before the real demo, and, it was really funny how they thought they had everything ready and figured out, but almost every single project didn’t work as expected, with almost no effort we crashed their projects, we asked them questions and asked them to run some scenarios. They realized that their projects were not ready for the final demo, then again we gave feedback to each team, encouraged them to improve, shared some tips, prevented them from making future huge mistakes, and overall, prepared them for the final presentation.
For the final part, I have not much to tell, most of the projects were great, some of them stood out, and left me speechless, but the one thing that made everything worth it, was, the messages they sent us, with their gratitude, telling Hadwin and me that we were the best “Socio Formador” they ever had, hearing from others students feeling jealous of their “Socio Formador” from other companies, wishing they had us instead, and having great feedback overall, because that tells me that somehow we actually made some impact in their professional lives and, finally, I gave back to the universe just a little of what it gave me 7 years ago.
