Congratulations on graduating from App Academy! Give yourself a pat on the back. At this point, you're likely feeling burnt out. You just went through weeks of a bootcamp that was designed to push you to the limits of what you're capable of learning in a short amount of time.
At this point, what you don't want to do is to completely unwind and relax. Now, absolutely take a weekend to rejevuenate and rest up. But once you start the job search, you should strive to find that sweet spot of working the hardest you possibly can at a sustainable pace.
That means that you should definitely take care of yourself: get enough rest, eat well, exercise often, do things that you enjoy. At the same time, that should be balanced with the same level of hard work that you had during the bootcamp. The job search is the hardest part of this entire experience. It will require your maximum effort.
Purpose: This is a guide for the first 8 weeks of your job search. It provides recommendations on how you should think about your job search, how you should organize your time, and what you should be working on and studying.
Approach: Every day, you will have a set of readings which start with a large set of Learning Goals. As you make your way through the work, these Learning Goals are meant to serve as guidance, and outline important points you are supposed to learn. Our recommendation is that you make flash cards out of each learning goal. As you complete the material, fill in the answers to each flash card when you come across it.
On a weekly basis, this should be your workflow:
Read daily learning goals --> Readings and Videos reinforce learning goals --> Make flashcards with learning goals --> Take practice test --> Take Hacker Rank Test
At the end of each week you will find a HackerRank link with an assessment based on the topics from the week you just covered. That assessment will be a great way to track how well you've grasped the topics so far and what you need to improve on. Make sure you review your flashcards and notes and practice each weekend before taking the weekly assessment.
Consistency is highly important, which is why it's important to find a sustainable pace. You want to, at all cost, avoid "0 days". In other words, avoid days where you don't make any progress towards your end goal. Every day of the job search is important. Here's one way to think about it: if your goal is to find a job in 12 weeks, then, assuming that you work 6 out of the 7 days of the week, you have 72 days to get yourself a job offer! Every day and every hour counts!
Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. - Dr. Richard W. Hamming