My journey at TIIDELAB started over a year ago. After the first attempt at the main cohort (4), I was able to scale through three different stages of the admissions process before dropping out. Knowing the worth of TIIDELAB and how good they are at growing youth into the tech world, I took it upon myself to follow their every step via social media to get used to their program and try again. Fast forward to early 2023, I saw a notification about their upcoming pre-fellowship, and after some weeks, the application was on. The application and admission process were smooth as I have been on my toes for over a year, waiting patiently for this wonderful opportunity.

Here comes the deal day; it is the onboarding ceremony for the pre-fellowship program. It was an amazing day for me, as I was overwhelmed with joy and happiness to finally see myself as a fellow at TIIDELAB. We were highly welcomed and properly introduced to the management of TIIDELAB. Just briefly after that, we were also handed the road map of our program throughout the six weeks, and seeing this makes me understand that I am in the right place at the right time.

We started the first two weeks with an introduction to HTML and CSS, as this is the first basic knowledge any software developer should have at the beginning of his or her journey in tech. Afterwards, we were taught version control (GIT and GITHUB) as a tool that easily saves your code remotely, allows sharing and collaboration with people from different parts of the world. Other features and the importance of GitHub were also highlighted for us. We were given tasks at every point to help us practice our best and be creative in our ways. Building our portfolio was one of the major tasks in the first month.

Progressing to the month's end, we were introduced to the basics of JavaScript, as this will help us to understand functions and DOM (document object model) manipulation in other to apply this knowledge in building our team project.

At TIIDELAB, your professional skills are also important. TIIDELAB management believes that to grow and keep moving in your tech career, professional skills cannot be pushed aside as this will also help you solve technical problems. Personal branding, team building and development strategies, presentation skills, technical writing, and public speaking skills were also taught by Mr Shamsudeen Aderoju.

Drawing the curtain on this article, I want to appreciate everyone at TIIDELAB for their tireless effort towards giving us an amazing and strong foundation, not just in tech but in our careers generally. My special appreciation goes to Mr Shams and Uncle BigBay for always being there to support, teach, guide, and help whenever we call upon them. To my amazing teammates, you guys are the best