23/07/2023
On Bootcamp Disillusionment and Burnout
I took a major decision in my life this year and decided to join a part time Data Science bootcamp to pivot my career in a completely new direction.
I am currently a brewer, but I have always had an interest in coding, but I've just always really really struggled to learn programming alone.
This is likely turning out to be one of the best decisions of my life, because as it turns out I really love doing data science things and dealing with data, but after about 2 months of pushing to learn as much as I can, I crashed hard.
This is some reflections on burnout and how I feel amidst it.
The Decline
I was fully immersed in learning data science. I was doing supplementary reading, taking on my own personal projects, learning from courses on Udemy and Youtube, doing a completely insane amount of coding problems, making sure I fully understood every concept.
Then one day I sat down and thought "I don't want to do this anymore.". It was like a switch had been flipped. I had gone from being completely immersed in learning, to not wanting to do anything. I spent days wasting away, feeling guilty about not doing anything, but simultaneously not feeling able to do anything.
I feel like I have yet to recover from it. I struggle to focus on lectures, I struggle to focus on live code sessions. Where I used to talk and contribute, I now just stay silent and feel sad. Where I would push out my comfort zone to ask questions and get support, I now just work alone.
Breaking Free
I did have one project that partially snapped me out of my rut. A completely unguided project where we had to work on a machine learning model to predict house prices (it was a Kaggle competition). That day, I spent the best part of 12 hours working on the project, so there is some spark still there, it's just that it's hiding away within me.
Unfortunately, whilst this project has shifted the baseline up a little bit, I'm still feeling fried.
The worst thing is that when I think about these things, I feel sad. Like I've gone from doing incredibly well at everything, feeling fulfilled, to just being okay at it.
It's all too reminiscent of University where my first year went very well, then after that, it all went down the drain and I was unable to ever recover from my poor mental state.
Anti Rewards
Have you ever found that you find a song you love, you listen to it over and over again, then one day you just can't stand it anymore?
I found great joy in solving coding problems on Codewars. I did a completely mad amount of problems, racking up about 600 solutions in 3 months. I almost found them addictive and I hit the top 0.8% of users on the site for number of problems solved.
But since the crash, my brain's anti-reward system seems to find coding problems repellent. I can barely find myself able to read the problem, let alone sit down and write code.
Not only that, but I feel like somehow by not doing these problems, my brain is losing the ability. Right now as I'm typing this, my knowledge of SQL queries I worked so hard to practise is surely being deleted from my head.
Now I would love this to be an inspirational story about how I managed to break free of these feelings and am now back to my old self, but I'm not. I don't know how to break out of this state of mind, but surely merely being in this state of mind is having a negative impact, causing a negative feedback loop, making everything worse, making me feel worse. The guilt making me unable to actually do the one thing that would no doubt actually make me feel better - taking a break.
But perhaps, at the very least, some of this might resonate with someone else who is going through the same thing.