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by secretlyclever
3262 days ago
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I was a part of Matt's first cohort at Dev Bootcamp and he saw us all the way through the program. I remember telling him afterwards that he was the best teacher I have had and I think everyone else in my cohort felt at least similar if not exactly the same. It was teachers like him that made Dev Bootcamp an awesome experience for many. He developed extra lectures beyond the curriculum on stuff like SQL injection and really thought out how to present them effectively, sought out things that we were struggling with like at one point I think it was scoping in Javascript when we had primarily been dealing with Ruby, or this one time where he was really excited to show us something he repeatedly said would "blow our minds.” I think it was predicate methods and how you could compose them to make new ones. I remember thinking at the time something like “That’s it? Or am I missing something…” Still, it was the effort and caring that stood out. I also remember him staying late with us to refactor a Javascript challenge that was already meeting specs to be object oriented, even though it wasn’t part of the challenge. I think it was experiences like that that make so many DBC grads so fond of it and why so many graduates still come back to pair with current students. Yet it wasn’t all good. I saw a cohort after us, if I recall correctly have around half of the students help back and have too many students and not enough teachers. Still, I think they tried to do the right thing most of the time. Why else would you allow students to repeat portions of the course and take up to 6 weeks longer instead of just churning through students as fast as possible or make a special effort to try to make the program more accessible underrepresented persons? Personally, I was miffed by some stuff like finding out during the course that average salaries were lower and average time to employment longer than listed on the website and not seeing an urgency to update those numbers publicly. Or hearing about a plan to try to collect money from potential employers upon hiring a grad when the job search already wasn’t easy and they had already collected thousands from each student in tuition. Like student needed another barrier to being hired. I felt bad for people coming after me having to compete both with more Dev Bootcamp grads as more campuses popped up on top of all the new competing bootcamps, but I really hope most people made it work. DBC did always say that it wasn’t graduating there that’d get you a job, but what you make of that experience and how far you continue after, but still I always wished they were more forthright with their statistics and outcomes. I don’t know where I’m going with any of this. Guess I'm saying it was a special place, but also a mixed bag in my experience. |
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