Values

T minus 15 days til phase 1 of DBC begins! When I first started shopping around for software boot camps, I found that Dev Bootcamp places a large emphasis on emotional intelligence, and the person as a whole rather than another product of the machine. This is what ultimately helped me make my decision to commit to this program, and is very deeply grounded into some of my core values.

Some of My Most Important Values:

• Family
• Inspiration
• Self-Reliance
• Courage
• Honesty
• Efficiency
• Excellence
• Close-Relationships
• Challenge
• Social Justice
• Passion

Honestly, I could keep this list going, but for the sake of this blog I will stop here. I feel like each of these attributes tell a piece of my story and shape how I make my decisions day by day. The only value I'm going to choose to focus on right now is honesty

Honesty

Honesty in the most traditional sense would be being true to others, but I think the part of honesty that I hold near and dear to my heart goes much deeper than speaking true words. Honesty includes being honest to oneself. Honesty means being brave enough to be true to the realities that I face and not misconstruing them to feel more comfortable about my environment. Honesty means looking at the world I live in and accept that it's far from perfect, but looking at my own two hands and deciding what I can do to make it a better place for me and those closest to me.

In the sphere of stereotype threat and how I will use my time at DBC to combat it, I really don't know what I will be able to do. I know that in order to make a larger and more meaningful impact in my community and the community of my students whom I love so much, I need to increase my sphere of impact. I need to build myself to be in a higher position of power because as a teacher there are only so many lives I can affect. I know my goals as a social justice educator and now living advocate for young women of colour and our opportunities within the tech sphere are extremely limited. I hope that the emotional intelligence we learn through DBC integrated with my daily reflection and practice of being honest, humble, and true to myself will help me grow into a position where I can truly make a difference. So that girls of colour don't need to be minorities amongst the minorities.

I could probably go on about this forever, but that's where I’ll leave it for now. I'm extremely passionate about social justice and I know that having the courage to be excellent and embrace my passion will all stem from my ability to remain honest with myself and what I am and am not able to do.