Qwasar programs are tough and they train you to Silicon Valley standards, but it's not just the technical skill level that's challenging. Our programs will test you, push you outside your comfort zone, and involve your whole being. Sitting in a classroom for a lecture is far more passive and less involved than our programs, and thus easier. Our focus is on learning designed for the 21st-century, consider us a new galaxy in the learning universe.
An Untraditional Learning Experience
How learning works at Qwasar is completely different from the traditional classroom or lecture-based model. Most learning experiences today are passive: you sit in a space and someone talks, be that in a classroom or via video. Knowledge is delivered to you: you don't have to search, you don't have to think critically, you don't have to be resourceful, you don't have to answer your own questions. Someone does that for you and presents what they think is relevant. The problem is, you won't be employed to recite or deliver knowledge: you will be employed to solve problems, collaborate, design and deliver production-ready code, complete peer reviews, and think critically.
Our programs are designed to train you in both hard skills and soft skills for success in respective job areas. Skill development requires practice, engagement, and has emotional and mental ups and downs.
At Qwasar, there are no lectures, no professors, and no teachers. Everything we do is founded in projects, exercises, and role plays, meaning it's all hands-on. This means that you will have to be engaged, create, analyze, and produce, all activities that are significantly more tiring than passive learning but enormously rewarding.
Building Skills, Not Transferring Knowledge
Your main focus at Qwasar is to learn skills, both hard skills and soft skills. Everything that you do in our programs is designed to help build skills. Just like sports, building skills takes time, practice, determination, trial and error, not giving up, and repetition. Skill development is a whole-body and mind activity.
Lectures and online videos focus on knowledge transfer, which was vitally important when the education system was originally designed, at a time long before the internet. Today, knowledge is not scarce and it's easily accessible: just search on Google. This means that you aren't being hired for your knowledge, but for your skills, what you can do, your ability to solve complex problems in a team environment, and to think critically to deliver 21st-century products that are well-built. At Qwasar, do not expect to have knowledge delivered to you! YOU are responsible for identifying what you don't understand, being resourceful, collaborating, thinking critically, and trying a solution. Learning what to research, how to identify what is and is not relevant, and how to design and build a solution are VITAL skills for your success in the 21st century.
Why This Kind of Learning Is Tough
Unlike traditional learning, active learning is much more involved mentally, emotionally, and socially. You will expend much more brain power and energy in researching new terms, identifying what's relevant, coming up with possible solutions, making a decision and weighing trade-offs between solutions, building and testing your solution, and solving what's not working. In a lecture, you just sit there and receive information.
Investing time and effort to build a solution, only for it to not work can be frustrating. Project-based learning has ups and downs, meaning that you will have to manage yourself mentally and emotionally, something that you don't have to do when you sit in a lecture. Trying and failing, then trying again and again and again demands determination and persistence, also things that are not part of passive learning.
Delivering work at production-ready standards is a much more engaging activity than watching a lecture. Overall the entire active learning process is much more involved, has higher standards, and pushes you in a way that lectures never will. That being said, you will undoubtedly be far more prepared for the workplace and for long-term career success in the 21st-century.
Passive Learning Isn't Emotional; Active Is, So Manage Yourself
Because you put in time, effort, and engagement into creating and building a solution to the problems and projects we give you, naturally, you will be more attached to your work than if you just sat in a lecture.
Further, when your code doesn't work or you have a bug that you can't find, it can take determination and pushing yourself to finish the project, to find and fix whatever is not working. This often takes longer than expected, which can lead to disappointment in or frustration with ourselves.
Overall, the ups and downs of project-based learning are emotional, and thus you will have to manage yourself, your approach to your work, adjusting expectations for what you can and cannot get done in a given amount of time, and what parts of the software development cycle you are strong/weak at as well as how long they take.
However, there is nothing more satisfying than finding the bug, fixing it, finishing a project, and conquering something that at first seemed almost impossible. The sense of accomplishment is not at all present in lecture-based learning, and it's a means of building confidence in yourself, your skills, and the power of your determination to achieve what seems impossible. That is powerful.
A Completely Different Approach to "Grades"
How learning works is different, and so are "grades." At Qwasar, there are no such things as an A, B, C, D, etc. or a scale of 0-100. You either pass or you fail: in the real world, your code needs to be up to production standards, coded to the norm, and working well. If your code isn't up to standards or doesn't work, in the real world, it doesn't get published and you have to fix it. So it's the same here at Qwasar.
Failing is an opportunity to learn. It is not a bad thing, it is not a signal of wider failure in you as a person or in your life. It means that you have hit your zone of development, and this is where the real learning happens, where you expand your skills and knowledge, and where you grow as a person. One of your biggest challenges may be learning to see failure as a good thing and as an opportunity to learn. This can be a big mind shift for some people.
Beat the Machines, Win Against Job Automation
At a bigger level, yes, Qwasar is a completely different approach to learning than traditional systems, but it will become the new normal. When you look at what skills are very hard for computers to do, problem-solving, collaboration, and creativity come out on top. This means that these skills are key to keeping your edge in a world that's ever facing digital transformation and automation.
Learning skills though is tough. It's like learning an art, a musical instrument, a sport, surgery, carpentry, and so many other things in life: it takes practice, trial and error, determination, and not giving up.
We hope you will join our community with a mindset of not giving up and a willingness to learn! Apply today to join one of our programs and join a new learning universe built for the 21st century.
