professional.md

 

Prior Experience	Mastery of fundamentals and an understanding of how they are used and constructed. Must have sound mental models of atomic and lightly-integrated concepts.
Goal	The professional phase is where we can start challenging learners and push them to their limits to discover their engineering capability. Learners at this stage should try to develop a deeper intuition about tradeoffs and context, and focus on engineering patterns and architectures. At this point, performing the task is relatively easy, but when to perform the task and to what depth is now the focus.
Support	Students at this stage get the best return on their time and experience from an instructor who can facilitate focused discussions and guide research-oriented tasks. Developing deep intuition comes from discussions and engagement, not just practice and memorization. At this phase, instructors should hold high-level discussions around context, architecture, design, trade-offs, and engineering philosophy. It's time to apply all the previously acquired fundamentals to the most difficult engineering problems at the boundary of one's capability.
Mental Model	The mental model at this phase is on how all the pieces fit together in a variety of ways, with special attention to each design's tradeoffs and use cases. Whereas before learners acquired smaller problem patterns, this stage is about zooming out and developing more sophisticated architectural and infrastructure patterns.
Learning Structure	Once we transition out of fundamental concepts and into larger libraries and concepts, the surface area of these topics grow exponentially, and employing a detailed, no-compromise Mastery-based learning approach becomes impossible and unnecessary. At this phase, it's important to help learners navigate the huge surface area of topics by employing larger and more sophisticated mental representations, which we can now do by building upon the smaller mental models acquired in the previous phase. In the Professional phase, we use an instructor-led, top-down learning approach, allowing us to zoom out and apply core skills in a variety of interesting settings and projects in order to analyze their trade-offs and consequences. It's through this process that a professional engineering mindset starts to form, and confidence in tackling any engineering problem starts to develop.
Duration	At Launch School, the Capstone duration is 4-7+ months.