Flatiron School

Hello! I am a graduate and I am also currently employed as an Instructor at the Flatiron School as well, so I am one of several that has experienced Flatiron School from both a student perspective and an instructor perspective.

Why Flatiron School?
I applied... Read More to several programming boot-camps in the summer of 2013, and was accepted into several. However, the decision to go to Flatiron School was largely because of the philosophy of Flatiron School ("if you're driven and imaginative enough, then learning how to code is not ultimately the objective, but rather opening yourself up to a world of new possibilities through code"). Other bootcamps focus on using assessments to qualify whether or not you're good enough to succeed in their programs, whereas Flatiron seeks to surround forward-thinking and driven individuals with like-minded peers in a diverse environment. This was what set Flatiron School apart from its competitors for me.

Programming
Yes, the objective of Flatiron School is to teach its students how to code, and how to code well. But that's not what makes Flatiron School succeed. It's the ability of the admissions team and its teachers to provide a rich, diverse community in which students push each other to succeed through collaboration and support. As a result of this, students learn programming by communicating with each other while working on projects, and ultimately creating a rich ecosystem of knowledge that iteratively builds upon itself, week after week throughout the semester.

New York Tech Community
Flatiron School has benefitted a lot by simply being part of the New York tech community, and has given back to the community as well. That's the primary ethos of Flatiron School. Its defining quality is community, and it hosts meetups and events every week, such as NYC on Rails, iOS Devs Meetup, Manhattan.js, and Flatiron Presents (student presentations). The diversity of its graduates that go forth into the New York tech community is something that sets Flatiron School apart from its peers; at least 40% of accepted students are female.

In Closing...
Flatiron School has been one of the best investments I have ever made. I say this not from a financial perspective, but rather from a career and motivational perspective. In my previous jobs prior to attending Flatiron School, my imagination and motivational drive was starting to wane, and I started to see things in a greyish hue. As the weeks progressed during my time at Flatiron School, my burgeoning skill-set started to show me what was possible. Coding is not a means to an end in itself, but rather it's the gateway that makes everything else attainable. Being able to build a software tool or product or whatever you may call it allows you come extremely close to having a profound effect on the things you care about. Making life more colorful and vibrant again. After all, isn't that the point of education? It is meant to bridge the gap between your dreams and reality. I didn't find that in high school or college. I found that at Flatiron. And as a teacher, that's what I strive to impart to our students every day.

I could probably write a dissertation on how much I loved my time at Flatiron School, but I will try to keep this short-ish.

The practical stuff: They take you from 0 (and I really mean no coding experience whatsoever) to equipped to land your first Junior... Read More Developer position in three months. They have excellent post-grad job placement support in that they both prepare you a great deal for the interview process and have a large network of hiring partners within the New York area.

To back that up - I am a music school grad with no experience writing code outside of basic HTML. The program was incredibly challenging and I struggled through most of it, but came out the other side confident in my ability to get a job and continue the learning process. I took a 6 month (paid) apprenticeship that has since turned into a full-time job. I've almost doubled my salary in less than a year. To put that in different terms, my return on investment was a little more than three times the tuition for Flatiron School in seven months.

The other stuff: I've always been a good student and I've always hated school. Sitting in Avi's class was the first time that I found myself enjoying lectures. He has an ability to read his students -- he seemed to know when to push forward and when to back up a bit so that we weren't lost despite the complexity of the topics. We spent more than half the program learning pure Ruby and overarching programming concepts that help me a great deal in my day-to-day. The TAs are passionate about teaching and form real relationships with the students. Everyone there is invested in the growth and future of each student.

Flatiron is not just a programming bootcamp, it's a community, and an immensely supportive one at that. My time there was life-changing.