I have a bachelor’s degree which helped me get a great job in the DC area but I know I’ve advanced as far as I’m going to without any further education. While I was looking into master’s certificates and various other ways to further my education, I learned about coding bootcamps. I didn’t think much of the idea at first but as I kept considering how to proceed my mind kept taking me back to the boot camp idea… learn a solid skill relatively fast and be able to apply it immediately. In my mind, what I’d do with a formal master’s certificate was a lot more abstract and I just wasn’t as comfortable with that. They’re not colleges and they’re typically not accredited so I was still pretty sceptical about a bootcamp but the more I learned about what was involved, the more comfortable I became - after all what would I rather graduate with, another piece of paper from an accredited college, or a portfolio of work I can showcase and be proud of? Once I understood that a bootcamp would help me accomplish the latter AND after I found Flatiron with it’s great reputation and super helpful admissions team, I decided to take the plunge.
I didn’t randomly choose to learn more about coding. When I was a kid I loved the behind the scenes stuff with computers. An aunt donated an old 386-based Compaq desktop to me sometime in the mid-90s and I was in love with it (and all it’s 4 megabytes of RAM :). I wanted to be able to create content on the web so I fired up my 14.4 bps modem and found a dictonary-sized webpage on how to write HTML. Printed it out as a guide and before I knew it I was making fan-sites for my favorite movies and TV shows. Eventually I taught myself a good amount of code and even taught myself C++ where I made some awesome text games. It was great fun, but then I graduated high school and for various reasons opted for a BA program and my coding skills all but evaporated. Here I am 20 years later and I want to get up to speed and hopefully be able to start a career in something I really enjoy doing. So here I am at Flatiron and loving it so far!