DTR Prep
Prepare to Engage
Whether you are starting your day with this activity or wrapping up a long day of technical work with this, take a moment to ground yourself in why you became a student at Turing. This Career Development work is arguably the most valuable component of your education that will lead you into your new career.
Take a moment to reset if needed, meditate, or do some physical stretches/movement to get yourself into the space you need to be in to engage in this work. Some optional guiding questions follow.
- Why did you come to Turing?
- What is the thing that will motivate you to keep going on the days/weeks you feel most challenged at Turing?
Purpose
You will be a contributor in several paired and group projects working on complex technical challenges throughout your Turing career. You may be surprised to find out that < 1% of failing projects at Turing are due solely to technical deficiencies - in fact, the majority of failing projects are due to teamwork issues. In order to set yourself (and your teammates) up for success, it is critical to clearly communicate and set expectations with your teammates.
Before every project kickoff, we ask students to participate in a exercise known as Defining the Relationship (DTR), where you will work to set realistic expectations with your teammates around workflow, communication, etc.
Prior to starting Mod 1, it is crucial for you to reflect on what works for YOU! Obviously, this will change over the course of your Turing career as you learn more about your strengths and working styles, which is why this is helpful to think of as a living document.
Words of Wisdom
As you work through this document, avoid the following pitfalls:
- “I’m flexible!” or “I’m down for whatever the group wants to do!”
- This is typically where problems start. You actually DO have preferences and opinions - it’s better to communicate these from the get-go rather than have trouble come up later.
- “I can’t really answer this until I start school.”
- Deciding on how you are going to show up as a teammate after you are in a working relationship with others does not always turn out so great. Push yourself to think through these relationships, dynamics, and your needs now.
Preparing to DTR
Create a section in your Mod 0 Gist entitled DTR and add these questions as well as your responses.
Guiding Questions For this initial exploration into what you bring to a team, try to avoid thinking about your technical skills. Your answers to these questions should apply to any project/team that you work on:
- How would you describe your preferred working style? (Alone,in groups, etc.)
- What strengths do you bring to a team?
- What’s gone well or poorly in your previous group project settings? What can you do to either ensure those best practices carry over into projects here or to avoid common pitfalls that might come up?
- How do you prefer to handle disagreements that come up? (Yes, they will come up!)
- How do you communicate best? What tools do you need to communicate well with your teammates?
- How do you prefer to receive feedback? How do you prefer to give feedback?
- What scheduling constraints do you have? What are your preferred work times outside of normal school hours?
