From Teaching to Coding

The Decision

Hello all! My name's Matthew and I was a teacher for over 5 years in Brazil, South Korea, and then back home in USA. I loved being in the classroom as it kept me on my toes with all of the crazy, but fun, directions students could take a lesson. In my last year of teaching, I was nominated to be the teacher of the year at my elementary school. So why am I now a junior developer and not a 4th grade teacher anymore? In short, the working conditions and the pay in teaching drove me away. Plus, I was always the "tech support" guy for family and friends, so I decided to give coding a shot early on this past school year.

The Planning Stage

So I looked into enrolling in bootcamps around my area. In Southern Arizona, there are not many to choose from. The dominant one is sponsored by Trilogy, is only part time, and reviews for it can look like this:

As for the people saying you get what you put in ... I put in my all, mastered the material , did all the assignments, did every career "milestone" bullshit they had us do.. up until about the last week when i scheduled a one on one meeting with the "career services" director , which turned out to be an hour long Skype call in which she read off job descriptions of listings she found by typing "web developer" into Indeed. I was appalled.
Anyway the only people I know who got a job in the field out of it, including myself, only got it because of nepotism or knowing a friend in the field. Seems like the case for all jobs these days so maybe the boot camp isn't at fault for that but I feel like my scam point still stands.

Or this:

... And hardly anything in between.

I talked over the bootcamp idea with my wife for a while and we came to the conclusion that the more you put into it the more you can get out of it. If the curriculum is old, then I will study more modern things online outside of class time. There is so much free content available that I could have gone the entirely self-taught route, but I felt like I needed some guidance and structure which the bootcamp could provide.

Before the Bootcamp started, I got a head start by studying on freeCodeCamp and Khan Academy. I would bounce between the two whenever one or the other became tiresome. Eventually I finished Khan Academy's computer programming courses and freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design Certification prior to the bootcamp starting. I also did the bootcamp's prework, which introduced me to using Visual Studio Code and a little bit of DOM manipulation.

Bootcamp Experience

Some of the criticisms from negative reviews online manifested themselves within the very first day of the bootcamp. About half of the class did not finish the prework. So I was considering taking advantage of the first week's full refund window. However, after talking with the TAs and instructor, I decided to stay because of the structure and their ability to provide enriching material if I needed it.

Classes took place on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6:30 - 9:30 PM, plus Saturdays from 10 AM to 2 PM. The course started in April, so I had a month of teaching left until I could dedicate myself full time to the coursework and extra material. When I was able to dedicate myself to full time studying (for 5 out of the 6 months of the bootcamp), I did the following:

• Studying coding for at least 3 hours per day.
• Finishing all of the homework assignments, plus challenges.
• Solving algorithms on Sundays collaboratively with classmates.

Although so much new material was thrown at us and the class didn't spend much time on any one topic, I never felt lost/overwhelmed. I have to say, however, that if I were to have continued teaching throughout the bootcamp, it would have been a massive struggle as I would have had to deal with the start of a new school year while going through the hardest material the course had to offer (React/the MERN stack group project). Another reason I adapted well to the material was because I started to like learning new things about web development and working on little projects in general. The process of learning is tedious, and can be boring, but finally seeing a project come to fruition and gaining an understanding of what was once unintelligible makes it all worthwhile.

Conclusion

All in all, it turned out to be a worthwhile experience as it led me to a new passion and the start of a new career. I ended up accepting an offer from one of the first jobs that I applied to, so I was lucky that I didn't have to deal with a prolonged job search. Contrary to the negative review above, I didn't know anyone at work prior to applying. The only help I got was from my instructor telling the whole class that a junior developer position was open and that we should apply. So I did, and I'd like to think my hard work finally paid off!