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2013 Fellow Ali Sheppard graduated from one of the most technical universities in the country, but had never built a webpage until Training Camp. Read about her experience diving into programming for the first time post-MIT during our first challenge: Redesign the VFA Website.
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From the very first moments of training camp, we were challenged to push ourselves into discomfort and to embrace this unique opportunity to expand beyond our traditional competencies. Though the summer is only just beginning, we have already had numerous opportunities to take this charge to heart and seize the chance to challenge our comfort levels. Last week, on Day 2, we were assigned to new teams and the website challenge was presented. The task itself was straightforward: redesign VFA’s current website to better serve VFA’s purposes. But for many, myself included, this challenge was the first opportunity of Training Camp to push ourselves into areas of discomfort and to embrace the opportunity to explore something completely outside of our respective disciplines.
As the challenge was described and we were divided into teams, conversation quickly turned to the skills and strengths of our group. Slightly embarrassed, I admitted to my new team members that despite coming from an incredibly technical university, my skills in the actual technical components of this challenge were essentially nonexistent. But, it was clear that someone would need to help our team’s lead developer with physically coding the site, and based on the distribution of work and my background in visual design, it made sense that I would take on this role.
My minimal experience with maintaining websites in WordPress was certainly not adequate preparation for this task, but I hoped it would be a start! I soon realized, however, that the files sent by my teammate were, quite literally, written in a foreign language. The next hours were filled with questions: I needed to download a new program just to edit the files? Which fonts were actually usable? How do I add a table or create columns? What is the actual difference between CSS and HTML?
After pestering teammates with what felt like a million insignificant questions, I thought I was finally getting the hang of it; as long as my teammate built out the framework and template for the project, I could easily alter the physical design to reflect the aesthetic and design choices we had made.
When the team decided to completely change our strategy around hour 35 of the challenge, it became clear that someone else would have to work on building pages to house the content we had already created. While our amazing developer was creating new features to improve the current VFA site, other team members were creating new content for our microsite, and I somehow found myself with the task of building these new pages that were a part of our revised approach. Numerous Google searches, hundreds of questions to teammates, and a lot of trial and error later, I’d created new pages. The results were certainly not perfect, and were by no means the archetype of the class of page we were creating. However, they were functional, conveyed the necessary information, and served their purpose well.
I certainly didn’t think that it would take leaving MIT to push myself to experiment with coding. If I could manage to avoid any real contact with programming at MIT, I thought I could certainly avoid it anywhere. Over the course of five years surrounded by peers for whom these skills were second nature, I preemptively decided that this was not where my strengths lay. When I stumbled upon the urban planning department at some point during my freshman spring, I quickly assured myself that I would be done with the true technical rigor of MIT as soon as I finished my general institute requirements. Though many aspects of urban planning involve a degree of technical rigor and knowledge, I quickly realized that this would not be my area of focus. I had found what I was good at and passionate about, and have been largely content to grow along this path, becoming more of a specialist than a generalist outside of the realm of urban planning.
My academic background and a passion for urbanism are what led me to VFA in the first place and I naively envisioned training camp as a continuation of this trajectory. The first week, though, has already proven me drastically wrong – it is already clear that training camp is as much about exploring areas outside of our core competencies as strengthening the skills that we already have. The website challenge was a perfect example of this: within a few short days, I realized that the technical skills I had been avoiding for so long were now an inevitability. Though unexpected, the first week of training has already revealed how many opportunities we will have to embrace the discomfort and learn from our fellow Fellows over the next 4 weeks.