On Resilience
Some people breeze through life with everything coming easy to them. Other people—most people—struggle. Those are our people.
Turing places value on the struggle, not shame.
There’s this sense of merit in the struggle. Of overcoming isolation. That’s because Turing’s training is rooted in resilience. Our people come with a past. They have grit. They are storied. They embrace the inevitability of struggle. And that kind of resilience is what serves them well and sets them apart.
As Turing Director of Employment Sal Espinosa says, “Nobody comes to Turing because everything is going really well in their lives. They want to make a change, try something new, do something different.”
It’s true. Most of our students didn’t shout out “programmer!” as the answer to that quintessential question every third grade teacher asks. What do you want to be when you grow up? When talking about the kind of students we attract and retain, Turing Founder Jeff Casimir follows:
“Turing is a second chance to find a path that they want to be on, impact an issue they care about or earn money to have the life and family they want. There’s something special about people for whom things haven’t come easy.”
But what’s important to note here is that even though Turing is usually a plan b, c (or sometimes d) for our students, it’s in no way settling. Quite the opposite. It’s a “long merge lane”—as Jeff puts it—onto a highway with readily accessible opportunity awaiting at every turn.
Turing meets you wherever you are on the journey and molds you into what you may become. But you do the work. Our people are not the type to shy away from it. Many have already worked hard and thankless jobs. Jeff adds, “When you push through that kind of work, you don’t forget it. When you get into places of privilege, no one has to remind you of how good it is.”
“A Turing grad doesn’t know the most about programming. Turing grads know how to make the best of when things go wrong.”
How do you recover? How do you learn from it? How do you keep pushing forward? To shamelessly ask those questions and work through them each time you face a bend in the road is what Turing teaches. Fail. Learn. Recover. Repeat. That’s what builds resilience. Over the course of seven months, our students build a ton of it.
This cultivation of resilience enables Turing students to successfully merge onto that highway and overcome any obstacles that come their way. It makes them an incredibly valuable, versatile asset to your team.