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rossonevan
rossonevan

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My Bootcamp Experience

For the last 4 months, I have been attending the Flatiron bootcamp in the Software Engineering course. With just one more week to go, I thought I'd write down my experience throughout the course.

When I first started the bootcamp, I was feeling super nervous and overwhelmed with the amount of information we would be learning in such a short amount of time. There were four phases, each phase was 3 weeks of:

  • learning something new the first week
  • taking a coding challenge on this new information the second week
  • creating an application using this information for the third week.

The fifth and final phase was creating an application on your own, utilizing all the skills learned throughout the program.

For someone who only had a little experience in coding, the first couple weeks of learning vanilla JavaScript was the toughest hurdle. There was so much information to understand and implement, easily overwhelming me to reconsider doing this course. But with enough perseverance and help from my peers, I managed to pull through and pass the phase.

As the phases went on, I started to become more comfortable with the scheduling and structure of the bootcamp and less overwhelmed. Even though we were still learning new skills for each phase, I felt I was getting better at learning new skills in the short amount of time and implementing them into my applications. Each code challenge was starting to become easier and easier as I started to understand the material better.

As I was in my first phase, I remember seeing students' applications for their last phase and could never see myself ever accomplishing what they have. But now that I am in my last phase, I can confidently say that I have proven myself wrong. I have acquired the skills those students learned as they went through this program and hopefully will inspire other students with what I have achieved through my own project.

But the most important part of the bootcamp is the amazing people I have met that have helped me get through the toughest of times. All of us were going through the same struggles and were always there for one another. I never felt like I was alone and for that I am truly thankful for.

All in all, I am grateful that I considered this bootcamp and never gave up, even though there were times I felt like I couldn't get through it. The skills I have picked up will stick with me for the rest of my life and I couldn't recommend going through this program enough!

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