Beth: "Burnout is real, especially if you choose to attend an immersive program. Sure, starting out, they’ll probably tell you you’ll be working 70+ hours a week. They tell you it’ll be challenging and draining and you won’t have a ton of time to hang out with people and go on vacation and do things that normal people do. (“They” for me was a combination of the internet and the program itself.)

But, it’s hard to know just how draining and exhausting it can be until you’re in it. When I started, I neglected exercise and personal time and threw myself into learning and absorbing everything I could for fourteen hours a day, and ended up burning myself out by the middle of week three. Getting to that point isn’t just detrimental to your physical and mental health - it also greatly impacted my ability to learn, as well as my confidence levels (which, anyone in this industry can tell you is already relatively fragile especially as a newbie - imposter syndrome is a very common occurrence). Going forward from that moment, I made sure to exercise regularly, get outside at least once a day, and see friends every now and then. These activities took some time out of my day from coding and learning, but they were so vital to me staying sane. I wrote a little bit about this wall that I hit, and the subsequent realizations I had, in this blog post.

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t regret choosing an immersive and intensive program for a second. I specifically sought out programs that were going to have that schedule and the rigor that the Fullstack Academy curriculum does, and I vaguely knew what I was getting myself into. Those late nights pounding my head against a desk, those extra hours when I should have been sleeping or out with friends, is when I did a lot of my learning. It’s hard to know exactly what it feels like until you go through it, though, and moments like that could have definitely at least been mitigated if I had been looking out for myself."