Open

On most days, you will see multiple open session events in your Turing College calendar. These are the times during which you can freely drop-in to a call with a Junior Team Leads or Senior Team Leads and ask any questions that might be relevant to you.

Are open sessions mandatory?

If you joined Turing College in December 2024 or later:

• Open sessions are not mandatory. However, we want to make sure that everyone is aware of the ability to join open sessions and how they work to provide on-demand help. We also want all learners to have practice asking good questions. For these reasons, we highly recommend joining open sessions regularly.

• Reminder that stand-ups are required. Please read more about stand-ups here

If you joined Turing College in November 2024 or before:

• It is mandatory to actively attend 2 open sessions during your first month of studies. Active participation means coming to an open session with a prepared question and discussing it with the mentor.

Joining open sessions

Join open sessions using your calendar in http://intra.turingcollege.com . You do not need to join a session at the beginning of it and you do not need to wait until the end. E.g. if the open session starts at 14:00 and lasts until 15:00, you can join at 14:30, ask a question (if no-one else is discussing another topic at that time), get an answer, and leave at 14:45.

If there are other people in the open session when you join, it’s polite to say hi and either listen while the other topic is being discussed (maybe offering your own insights/asking followup relevant questions), or to write a message asking the mentor to message you when they are free so that you don’t need to listen while a topic irrelevant to you is being discussed.

Asking questions in open sessions

These questions asked during open sessions are often technical, but sometimes people join them to simply talk with the JTLs/STLs or ask questions outside of the main program topics (e.g. questions about learning in Turing College in general or looking a job).

When coming to an open session, try have a question prepared in advance. This is a great opportunity to practice asking good questions, which is going to be crucial when starting a job in a new industry. A well-prepared question not only clearly states your issue, but also explains the steps you already tried to do and why they didn’t work. A mentor will always try to teach you to find answers to similar problems in the future instead of just giving a one-off answer – so any background information you provide will make it much easier for them to do so. Keep in mind that you can even ask the mentor to give feedback on your questions themselves!

Also, well-prepared questions are especially important for real-life work situations, since you do not want to appear lazy. At the same time, in a new workplace, you absolutely must ask good questions in order to show that you’re capable of working in a team and learning from others. Not asking any questions, mistakingly thinking that this shows cleverness and independence, is actually one of the top reasons why people fail their probation periods (or don’t get offers at hiring partners after specialisation modules that involve working together with them). Open sessions are therefore very valuable for practicing and becoming confident in asking such questions.

Finally, you should not expect that good questions will always come naturally and that all you need to do is go through the material waiting for a question to naturally come up. This can become extremely obvious in the first month of your studies when it is mandatory to join two open sessions with a question prepared for each one – it can seem that everything that you are working on is quite easy and obvious. If you find yourself in such a situation, try viewing the process of finding a question as something that you should be doing actively, as an exercise to deepen your learning – curiously look into more nuanced and complicated parts of the tasks that you are doing, trying to find something that is not clear based only on the material given. This exercise of actively engaging your curiosity to find unique perspectives will prepare you for the kind of learning that is expected at Turing College – the further into the programs you go, the more you will be expected to demonstrate unique insights of your own which can only come if you are going beyond the surface of the topics.

For your convenience, the open session changes are announced in the Discord channels #jtl_schedule_da (Data Analytics), #jtl_schedule_ds (Data Science), #jtl_schedule_de (Data Engineering), #jtl_schedule_wd (Web Development).