Thus far, I have enjoyed pairing with my cohort mates from all across the country. I love how this helps me learn by seeing how others think and how they approach problems. Most times, I learn a faster or better way to solve the challenges than I had thought to. I also love how just discussing a problem sometimes leads us down a path that gets us a solution. If we had tried to do this on our own, we would probably not think to even look at some of the ideas and resources that we do. I just completed a challenge that required us to implement recursion. Something that hasn't been taught in the curriculum and we decided to implement it by researching it a bit. It felt great when we both pretty much came to the same code at the end. I think the most difficult part of pairing is the feeling of being less knowledgeable than your pairs counterpart. But this is getting easier to deal with becuase I always try to remember, the person that I am pairing with could be in the same boat and I would be a great help to them in explaining the uncertain things.
When reading through the feedback I recieved thus far, I feel good about them. Most of them are positive and tells me that I am not being a bad pair member. However, of all the feedback I recieved, I only had 1 person give me actionable feedback. The feedback was that I try to look at the problems from different view points. I totally agree with them. I have been trying to take their advice and so I try to solve the problems in 2 different ways. When writing feedback, I find myself feeling a bit awkward and not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings. I try to give kind, actionable and specific feedback(ASK). I start by recalling the good parts of our session and inculde those. I try to be as specific as I can when doing so. Then I finish by offering any advice that I felt would have made our session even better. When writing feedback, the hardest part so far for me was to find anything to offer in terms of things to act upon. Everyone has been beyond great. I think it stems from the fact that we are all almost in the same boat. We joined DBC to get the maximum out of it. We are putting in 1,000% and so who could ask for me?