My first couple of weeks at my coding boot camp.
If you read my precious articles about boot camp’s then you know at first I was skeptical of them in general. I felt this way mainly because of the initial cost to attend one (most cost up to 10k) as well as the expedited timeline (often 15 weeks). It didn’t seem that their promise to teach you everything you need to learn to land that first tech job could possibly be true.
Now after 2 weeks my opinion has changed. Especially in regards to the specific boot-camp that I attend.
codesquad logo
I viewed coding boot-camps with the wrong mindset. I thought that learning started and stopped at the boot-camp, that’s the wrong lens. In grade school does the learning stop after the bell rings? For you slackers who probably answered “YES!” the correct answer is NO (and believe me I had that mind-set all through high school haha). You still have to do homework and study. These are both activities done outside of the building you call school (in case the word HOMEWORK wasn’t hint enough).
The boot-camp is there to provide structure and that traditional classroom setup we’ve known since grade school. Sad to say, but most us need that structure imposed on us to actually do something. Free-will can be a dangerous thing. Especially in this world of Netflix and YouTube. Don’t know about you guys, but I could lose a couple of hours watching anime reaction videos on YouTube and not even notice it. Besides that, it provides a solidified timeline to having at least a basic grasp of the topic before moving on. Boot-camps do a great job of introducing topics in a tangible way. Code Squad brings in guest teachers from the industry to teach a class almost every week. To date we’ve had two engineers from GitHub teaching and helping with any problems we may have via slack. The boot camp gives us the nail and it’s our job to hammer it in.
On top of that, boot-camps immerse you in a diversity of thought. In my 15 person cohort, there’s a guy with a MBA, a couple of people who majored in the arts and music, a person who is very involved in the LGBT community and even someone with a political background. You may ask “why does this matter?” all these people have no coding background and that’s the point, diversity. Being in a diverse learning environment is always a plus. Whenever we come across a problem in class one of these people may approach it with a new point of view that may make others understand it better or may solidify someone’s knowledge who already understands the material. Its just great to see people coming at problems in different ways from my own, opening my eyes to other options when I get stumped.
Being surrounded with like minded people from all-different demographics and walks of life just showcases how powerful code is and how tech is the future. My cohort in this boot-camp is becoming my tech family and I look forward to seeing us all reach our goal of becoming developers. Cheesy, but you get the point.
