When I started Phase 0, I knew how important that pairing was for the folks at DBC. I mean how could anyone NOT now, with how much they let us now through out the Phase0 prep material. And if I am being honest, I was definitely a little hesitant at first. I never really loved group work in school, either at the high school or university level. I mean I didn’t hate it, I’ve always been able to function and work well with people in groups who cared about our projects, but I had been conditioned to a little wary of them, because often times at school their would be at least once person in a group who was at best was just going through the motions. If you got stuck with one of these people in a paired 1-on-1 project it was, well, game over.

I could not have been more pleasantly surprised with my pairing experiences at DBC. Reflecting on this it totally makes sense; everybody who is here wants to be here. And not in the college sense where everyone ‘wants’ to be there, but often times are just going through the motions. Everybody at DBC has made tangible sacrifices to be in the program, and the level of commitment that I have witnessed is truly inspiring. I have yet to participate in a pairing challenge where I wished that I had just worked on the project myself. Of course sometimes its important to do just that, but it has also been really helpful and constructive to be working in an environment that is so collaborative by nature. From what I hear this is a lot like how it works for programmers in the real world, and if it is anything like what I have experienced at DBC, I cant wait.

Of course an important part of working in any group is giving and receiving feedback in order to improve a number of different things for future group projects. With that in mind, DBC has been wonderful in not only creating a platform for constructive feedback, but also helping each of us understand what it really means for feedback to be constructive, and how we can individually work on bettering ourselves from the feedback we receive. To use my own experiences as an example, I’ve always known that I have a problem of rushing through instructions many times to a fault. Its something that has effected my work for as long as I can remember, and is something that I truly have worked on in the past. But it wast until I received feedback from a pairing partner explaining how when I rushed through the instructions during our session together I didnt only negatively effect my understanding of what we were supposed to do, I had also done the same for them, that I knew it was something that was going to make me into a lousy pair if it continued. I mean its only natural for people to feel rushed if they feel like they are holding someone back because they are still reading the directions. And that was exactly what happened, even though we both would have benefited from spending a little bit more time going over exactly what it was that we had to do, me being in a hurry to blast through the directions made my partner do the same thing, so it hurt us both

When I got this feedback I didn’t make me feel angry or defensive like one might think it would, and thats because of two things DBC did. 1st DBC made sure that I was going to be receptive of criticism, as they did their best to instill in us a desire to work on our emotional perception of ourselves, especially with in the context of a group environment. Also the lessons from the first few cultural assignments at DBC helped teach us what it meant to write constructive feedback, that would speak with authority, yet be kind enough that it would be easy to feel receptive of anything our partner could tell us of how to better our working habits. I truly am glad to be working in this kind of environment.