On preparing for - and FINALLY taking - the Launch School RB109 assessment

I finally, finally took the Launch School RB 109 assessment — and passed!

I have been delaying taking the assessment for weeks and months now. At first, I didn’t feel prepared, and life kept coming in the way. My study has also been fairly disrupted, and so it’s been difficult to assess, for myself, how prepared I am.

But I buckled down over the last few weeks and did a lot of practice. A LOT. I went through Megan’s incredibly useful resources to prepare for the assessment, and I did problems many times over, realizing each time that I was learning something new, or had actually managed to figure out a better problem-solving approach.

I’m also so thankful to the number of people I practised with for the assessment [especially Megan!] and all the study groups I went to — the community is really amazing. But this really wouldn’t be doable without Alex, who spent hours live coding with me until I felt confident enough to take the assessment.

I also learned to not panic. This was a challenge, since my entire life I’ve never panicked during an exam. I’ve been under-prepared, over-prepared, prepared enough, but I don’t freak out. That I had started panicking while live coding was unnerving, and I think that really is the test in some ways: not just being the best coder, or having the most efficient approach, but being able to be present in the moment, clear, and explain what you’re doing to another person.

One of the pitfalls, though, of waiting and prepping for so long is that I feel I was over-prepared and fixated in some ways — I had done so many problems that when confronted with one that was similar, my brain immediately leapt to all the other solutions to similar problems I’d solved before, instead of the problem at hand. This tripped me up briefly when I ended up with a fairly complex way of solving the problem during the assessment, and I couldn’t figure out how to end up with the right solution. The TA advised me to take a step back a few times and talk through what I was planning to do, and I finally figured it out. Of course, the minute the assessment was over I realised I had created a really complex approach to what was a simple problem. But I’m really proud of myself for not panicking and freezing [and for passing!]

The assessment - and the long, long road I took to prepare for it — taught me a lot. I have to be more structured in how much time I’m spending on Launch School study [and this is where I’m going to be using Toggl going forward to track my time] I’m also going to be more efficient with how I take notes [something I didn’t do as well during my initial months of study], and I have to be more clear and operate at a higher level of abstraction when thinking through my problem-solving approach.

Onwards!