The first morning after graduation, I felt driven to build something from nothing. For three months prior, all I did was absorb code, write code, build functioning things out of little more than the unassuming letters and symbols on my keyboard.

I had been one of twenty-five students in the General Assembly Web Development Immersive program, and one of twenty-one who graduated. We came from an array of backgrounds; actors, writers, cooks, and marketers, but we all had the same goals: to make a significant change in our lives, to become developers. What’s more, we had the audacity to do it in three months.

During the twelve hour days, we took code challenges in JavaScript and Ruby, listened to lectures on Big O and event bubbling, built CRUD apps in single afternoons, and simply absorbed everything else through osmosis. It’s called MMA education: learning the MEAN stack through ground and pound.

The educational environment we bubbled ourselves in was difficult, but it was also a safe space. GA had worked hard to give us every opportunity to become a full fledged community. We may have been working on homework well past ten or eleven at night, but we had each other to lean on, and a little extra solace from the free beer in the lounge.

That first morning after graduation, there was no assignment to turn in, no project to present. Our homework assignment was now to build a career. The due date is iterative. After graduating, you find yourself looking out to the world with trepidation and hope. It’s a pirate on the plank kind of moment, toes hanging over the edge of the board, you jump into the ocean and hope to float.

It feels almost unnatural, the way the world slows down when you’re not in the midst of full throttle education, Nascar style. For three months, the program is your life; nearly every waking moment spent with your classmates, helping, building, and working with each other. Then the lull strikes: transition. It’s a whole new set of tasks: finding contacts, sending resumes, networking, interviewing, and patiently waiting for those call backs.

But even as you bite your nails and wait for the right team to bring you in, you still work daily to build your skills and grow. Always be coding. Always be learning. Those last three months, we dove into the ocean and immersed ourselves in code, but it’s only when you dive down that you realize how deep the ocean really is.

The fantastic thing about going through the GA program, by the end of it, you have the tools you need to make it. Some people look skeptical when I tell them I feel confident that I’ll be able to functionally learn a new coding language in a week. They look at my three and a half months of experience and don’t think it’s possible. But I know it is, because I’ve done already done it. Twice.

After the program, I feel strong in my current skills and excited for the new ones I’ll pick up as I go; learning on the job, and teaching myself for fun in the off hours. I focus on my favorite technologies like Rails, AngularJS, and now even game development in Unity (because why not), and I work daily to deepen my understanding in those spaces.

After GA, I started writing in C#, a language we never covered, and found it really isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s liberating to feel this comfortable in something that felt so foreign just months ago. Of course the world often presents problems we never covered in class, and already I find myself up against some head scratchers. But now I know how to parse the documentation, how to find answers, how to walk through my problem step by step, and ultimately climb that mountain, solve it, and move on to the next.

For me, that’s what coding is. It’s a series of mountains to climb. The climb often looks difficult, sometimes it feels impossible, but if you have your gear and if you learn to break down your summit into a series of single steps, you can scale each ridge, scramble up the rocky terrain, and make it over the peak, ready to climb the next one. One step at a time.

Right now, for myself and my fellow GA graduates, the current mountain we climb is that of transitioning from graduate to full time developer. It’s another step by step process, one which 96% of the last class climbed within 90 days. Those numbers make me smile. I think it’s safe to say that we now hungrily anticipate moving forward from the job search to our next challenge, one that we’ll conquer confidently one line of code at a time.