Dear Bootcamp

Creative portion sent to bootcamps during application process. Inspired by [Bloggytoons](http://bloggytoons.com/dear-flatiron/)

Transcript

1. I L I K E T O D A B B L E I N S T U F F. T O P U T I T S I M P LY. D E A R B O O T C A M P… to prove this, we’ll have to go back in time (naturally…) T O N O T E : - virtual mii version of myself is not to scale. - my favorite color is in fact red contrary to popular belief (I wear blue a lot) B U T I D O N ’ T C # ” I was inspired by this cool chick! note: there are links in slides (bolded)
2. so back in the day… (2006-2011) • I wanted to be a vet (elementary school). • But then I decided I wanted to be a biologist instead (middle school). • But then I felt bioinformatics was more interesting than just biology alone (high school). … • And that would be that. Did I mention I’ve kinda been an Apple fanatic since my freshman year of high school?? Cause that’s kinda important. 2007 iPhone arrives 2010 iPad arrives Apple Watch… not iWatch inception!
3. or so I thought… As much as as much as I loved biology (and I still do), I couldn’t actually see myself getting a bachelor’s degree in biology. To me, a bachelor’s in biology would equate to 4 years of drudgery in busy work where I would be competing with a whole bunch of aspiring med school students. Also, I was starting to resent school in general (see next) even though I was doing pretty well for most academic standards. PA S S .
4. M Y S TA N C E O N F O R M A L E D U C AT I O N Ever since high school, I’ve been kind of a rebel when it comes to formal education. … I just don’t feel the current model is as effective as it could be or as it was so I treated school as an unfortunate necessity that I’d try to finish ASAP by trying to fast forward through it (The anti-visual extremely wordy boring PowerPoint lectures I had to always sit through didn’t help the situation). I was more into teaching myself what I wanted to know. And ultimately, that’s my approach to everything now. also, crap, student debt! MUST AVOID. I set my own standards and aspired to exceed them myself.
5. SO THEN I FIGURED, WELL, WHY DON’T I JUST MAJOR IN COMPUTER SCIENCE? -me my junior year of high school (turned out to be a major turning point in my life…)
6. ME PROJECT DATE CLIENT 2011-PRESENT SO I DECIDED TO LEARN ABOUT {CODE} THROUGH CODECADEMY, CODE SCHOOL, CODE COMBAT (TYPICAL) C O D E S C H O O L C O D E C A D E M Y A N D M A N Y M O R E AW E S O M E W E B S I T E S …
7. I R E A L I Z E D A F T E R R O U G H LY A Y E A R O F V E N T U R I N G I N T O T H E L A N D O F L I S P ( T H AT ’ S A J O K E ) O N M Y O W N T H AT ❤️ { C O D E } I L I K E D F E E L I N G L I K E T H I S K I N D O F A D I G I TA L W I Z A R D T H AT C O U L D L I T E R A L LY C R E AT E S O M E T H I N G O U T O F T H I N A I R ( O R W I T H A G O O D T E X T E D I T O R ) . S O C S I N G E N E R A L T U R N E D I N T O S O M E T H I N G I WA N T E D T O D O F O R T H E L O N G - T E R M , N O T J U S T T H I S S T E P P I N G S T O N E Y E R A W I Z A R D
8. BUT LEARNING TO CODE BY YOURSELF CAN BE LONELY (AND REALLY INEFFICIENT) I wanted a place that would teach me faster than I could teach myself. And school wasn't the option. In comes bootcamps!
9. M Y E X P E R I E N C E W I T H C O D I N G B O O T C A M P S _ P T 1 my actual facial expression when my dad introduced me to the idea of bootcamps Y O W Z E R S S ! It’s August 2012. My dad reads this article in the New York Times (or HuffPost? I forget.) about coding bootcamps (App Academy and Dev Bootcamp) and he talked about how they might useful for me since I had already decided at that point I would majoring in Computer Science. I decide I’m not good enough at programming to attend a bootcamp yet. It’s October 2013. After feeling more confident about my abilities with coding and getting tired of being lonely in the learning process, I decide to finally go for it in the winter of 2013 and apply to several coding bootcamps for the summer of 2014. In the end, it didn’t work out because I ended up having to take yet another college course for me to graduate a year earlier, but I learned a lot in the process! S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 , H E R E I C O M E ? …
10. M Y E X P E R I E N C E W I T H C O D I N G B O O T C A M P S _ P T 2 It’s October 2014. I’m going for it again, and this time, no excuses. I decided to narrow my search down to make sure the bootcamp had the following: Excellent Reviews - had to go through Yelp, Quora, CourseReport, SwitchUp, etc. (might be convenient if there’s one website for everything ) Excellent Hiring Rate - I may not be looking for a job now, but I will in the near future and I want to be prepared! Full-stack and JavaScript focused (I never liked the idea of learning Ruby). By the end of the bootcamp, I’d have the capability to win Hackathons using the technologies I’ve learned.