| | Anonymous | Definitely the biggest pro about Fullstack Academy is its flexibility. They offer flex programs, immersive programs, and a remote version. Throughout all these programs, they use the same curriculum and the same standards for admission. They even offer a deferred tuition option for women enrolled in the Grace Hopper program.
They also offer a lot of flexibility in terms of how to grow as a developer. For my cohort, they allowed us to explore project ideas on our own because the biggest skill they wanted us to hone was using each other as a team to make the best decisions from start to finish. There was also no restriction on what type of project we could build. And we received A LOT of support from every instructor. Kate and Ashi were there to back our team up with answers to our technical questions no matter what we decided for our project. And even when the first half of the program ended, Karen and Dan, our junior instructors who prepared so well for the project phase were there available to cheer us on and only an elevator away for further advice.
A bit of nitpick from me would be that the job support on the technical side wasn't the best right after I came out of Grace Hopper. Mostly because I had no idea how to prepare for technical interviews...and honestly, this was my first official job hunt ever. Luckily, after 6 months of searching, Ceren started this Mentor-Mentee program and I was seriously lucky to have Wenson Tsai as my mentor (a volunteer mentor too, bless those Fullstack alumni's souls who volunteered). Coming from a physics background with only 3-4 semesters of CS-related classes and no formal job experience in tech (or any formal job really), I was not up to date with the jargon in the tech field and Wenson helped me present myself as a confident developer. He pointed out weaknesses to me in System Design and helped me work on my communicating my projects better. One of the useful things he pointed out to me is that I should use declarative language when solving problems during JS technical interviews . Fullstack also assigned me another career counselor to help me on the behavioral side. That person was Natalie Giuliano. I had no idea what a job hunt was supposed to be like, and I had a lot of phone interviews already before she was assigned as my counselor. So she made sure to help me practice answering those hard behavioral questions and helped me come up with better answers. She also helped me with a lot of job hunt etiquette that I didn't even know.
So after two more months of Wenson and Natalie's help, I did finally accomplish my goal to start making an impact as a formal Software Engineer. And I can't wait to see learn more from my current teammates and other developers in the community :) |
