Bootcamp or no bootcamp?

I’m starting this blog as a record of how I decided whether a bootcamp was right for me and how I’m doing on my full-stack web development journey.
I handed in my first resignation letter three months before I ultimately left my job in the field of Nuclear Engineering, a degree that, three years before, I had poured months and months of mental thought and late nights and collaborative homework sessions into completing. Before I became a Nuclear Engineer, I started out university at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute pursuing a Computer Science degree and, like many women who go into a field where there are so few of us sitting in the crowded lecture hall, I started to get imposter syndrome about what I was doing there and how much I knew even though I had a good grasp on the material that my classes were covering. I had met so many of my friends who remain to this day my good friends in my CSCI-1100 Introduction to Computer Science course and my Game Design courses at Rensselaer my first year and heard so many stories of how they started coding when they were around five or so that I felt I had no way to catch up. I didn’t voice these concerns and instead played around with the idea that maybe Computer Science wasn’t for me, maybe Engineering was. I ended up going into Undeclared Engineering my second semester, and, because the university requires you to declare before your second year, declared myself a Mechanical Engineering major, and then finally decided on Nuclear Engineering at the end of my second year. My friend group still remained majority Computer Science majors and I’d learn about all of these fascinating concepts that they were working on while I was working on learning fascinating concepts of my own in another completely different major.
Rensselaer is an environment that attracts so many entrepreneurs-to-be and people unafraid to fail. It’s an environment where you’ll find someone in your friend group designing and building a CNC Milling Machine their first semester of college just for fun. I’m grateful that I discovered friends like these who introduced me to my first go at making something beyond what my classes required of me. There’s a brilliant group at Rensselaer called Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS) that allows students to pitch ideas for open source software or hardware projects that they can pursue for a semester or longer. This gives them experience in not only pitching their ideas, but executing them on deadlines that they set for themselves and presenting their progress to an entire group of experienced programmers and students on a consistent basis. I was part of this group for two semesters in my first two years of college. My friend and I co-developed a code that would be able to be used with his CNC Milling Machine. We gave presentations every month on our application. We committed our code to Google Code before GitHub became an open source Empire and now it is still archived out there. What I remember the most about my experience in RCOS was giving presentations to a bunch of programmers who I thought were probably way more experienced than me and I remember my friend saying something along the lines of: “You should speak up and have confidence in what you’re saying. You know what you’re talking about and what you’re doing.” That has stuck with me to this day. And it’s been echoed in my mind whenever I’ve had to advocate for myself for anything and when I’ve had to give presentations in front of rooms full of people and maybe even when I’ve done improv on stage in front of rooms full of people.
Advocating for myself and being able to acknowledge that I’d like to try another career and actually doing so are immensely powerful actions I took to get myself out of my imposter syndrome and into a direction I wanted to head in for awhile, although I am glad for the opportunities I was able to get in Nuclear Engineering for the amount of time I was in that industry.
So here I am, at Week 8 of Launch Academy’s Ignition Course, a prep stage before arriving to Launch Academy’s 10 week immersive On-Campus Apprenticeship. I’ve learned concepts I hadn’t been familiar with before such as Test Driven Development (TDD) and am learning much more about concepts I was familiar with already such as Object-oriented Programming (OOP). They’ve introduced me and my fellow students to Regular Expressions (regex), something I hadn’t heard of before and I’m eager to learn a lot more.
I guess I haven’t explained how I chose Launch Academy or how I decided bootcamp was right for me though. Out of any of the bootcamps out there, I knew that I wanted one that would be an immersive on-campus experience and Launch Academy was right around where I lived. I also knew I wanted it to be a full-stack software development program, not just a front-end one, so again Launch Academy fit the bill. There were also many positive reviews of Launch on the internet, but, beyond that, it just felt right after interviewing for it and asking many a question about the program and getting follow-up answers that were able to satisfy my curiosity about it. I knew I’d be able to ask difficult questions that I could get the answers to from the instructors there once I got to the on-campus portion. The off-campus online prep portion has brought together a bright community of people that brings me back to my experience of collaborating at Rensselaer. I can tell that my classmates in this program are as eager to learn and create as I am. This is probably the best aspect of Launch, the fellow students you meet and code with and get frustrated about syntax errors with along the way. It all boils down to that aspect of community and collaboration. This is why I chose to attend an immersive on-campus bootcamp and I’m writing about it to see how much I grow and to provide prospective students with an idea of what they’ll be able to learn and accomplish at Launch.
