| | Casey Whittaker | I went in to Launch Academy a little hesitant. I didn't think a short 18 weeks would give me enough time to learn what I needed to land a web developer role. Turns out I was pretty wrong.
The first few months of ignition totally helped me get over those fears. I learned at a very rapid pace, and I quickly understood that Launch Academy's style of teaching is very similar to how an actual developer job would be. I learned the basics of ruby, javascript, HTML, CSS, and principles of object oriented programming in the first 8 weeks. Those initial weeks really fostered a strong foundation for what I would need to know for the much more intense on campus portion. It is worth noting that ignition is tough, but some people were able to hold down part time jobs as they completed that experience. Ignition is also a great experience for total beginners, and it will provide a super strong foundation for what you'll need to know for the on campus experience.
The on campus experience is much, much tougher than ignition and quite different. I would say the on campus portion was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. If you are considering Launch Academy, just know that the amount of work is no joke - you may even wish to consider somewhere else if you aren't going to dedicate at least 60-70 hours of work per week for 10 weeks straight. With that said, the instructors were almost always available to assist in our learning experience even when they technically weren't on the clock. And my cohort was a fantastic group of people, so I really, really enjoyed going in to the space every single day. I didn't miss a single day.
When on campus, you'll learn a lot more practical skills, like moreso the relationships between the things you learned in ignition and various frameworks that people use to make working with those languages more streamlined. You'll also learn how databases work, specifically how information is stored in and access from them, and how they communicate with a Rails backend and React front end. You'll of course learn React.js, Ruby on Rails, and how you can build a full stack application by the final two weeks of your cohort.
If all of this sounds promising and realistic to you, I say go for it! Attending Launch Academy has been one of the greatest descisions I've ever made and would do it 1000 times over.
Just a few weeks after graduation, I am happy to have landed a role at a small company in Boston with good pay, good benefits, and a similar code stack to what I learned at Launch. I couldn't have done it without the amazing team at Launch Academy and my fellow launchers!
Special shoutouts to Dan, Nick, Pat, Cassie, Brianna, AmyLynn, Alex, and Corinne for making it all possible!! |
