With my Internship as a Frontend Developer coming to a close on Tuesday, I thought I'd take some time to reflect on the biggest lesson I learned during these past four months. Sure, I learned a lot of practical skills, like how to animate SVGs, how to build components based on Material UI, how to use typing properly in TypeScript, and even how to write a FastAPI endpoint, but the overall lesson I learned will change my approach to learning for the rest of my life.

Whenever I learn a new subject I typically spend a large amount of time planning my learning process. I enjoy curricula and I enjoy lesson planning. So it's natural for me to want to lay out the perfect path to knowledge that will help me excel. In theory anyway. The problem is that I have trouble following through with these plans, due to an all-or-nothing perspective (thanks, ADHD) - I want to either know everything all at once or...not bother to learn anything at all.

The amazing thing about my internship is that it gave me deadlines for learning new things and tangible goals. Why learn about TypeScript? Because I needed to get rid of TS errors so my code would compile. Why learn to animate an SVG? Because the designer I worked with wanted a gauge component that moved with user input.

I've known about the value of project-based learning, but I always found it hard to motivate myself when I didn't have an end-use in mind for the project. Seeing the project at work take shape in front of me, with real business use, was fascinating and motivating.

How will this change my learning process going forward? Well, first of all, I'll try to get another job as soon as possible, so I can learn more in that context. But while I'm looking, I've learned that I need to shift my study perspective to be less about studying and more about doing. I need to get my hands dirty building things and figure out new technologies so that I can build new things.