I first heard about Code Institute in July 2019 when I attended an Open Evening event in Cork city (Ireland), while I was working as a Postdoctoral Researcher. After being working in academia for many years, with doctoral and postdoctoral experience in Physics, I was looking for a career change to the tech industry. I was considering various options such as Data Science and Software Engineering. Nevertheless, any of them required me to upskill in order to learn technologies relevant to industry. Having a full time and quite demanding job as a Researcher set strong constrains in my transition. From the very first moment I was very impressed by the Code Institute Full Stack Software Development diploma, its fantastic testimonials from successful students and overall the time flexibility that it provides. One year after attending the Open Evening in Cork I made the decision to apply for the program, and everything started with the 5-days Coding Challenge. In the meantime I reached out to former and current students in the course, and every single feedback I got was extremely positive and encouraging. After completing the 5-days Coding Challenge I was contacted by an Education Adviser, and during a phone call I expressed my interest and we discussed about my career development plans. I was advised that Code Institute diploma would also equip me with technologies relevant to the Data Science field too, i.e. excellent and extensive Python foundations and relational/no-relational databases for the backend development. Finally, I joined Code Institute diploma in August 2020, and my initial idea was to finish it in no more that 9 months. My experience with Code Institute was fantastic since the first day I logged into the Learning Management System (LMS): comprehensive onboarding from Student Care and Slack Community access. As I was progressing in the course its complexity was growing too, but I enjoyed every challenge as the learning model is based on building on previous progress. Every time I got stuck I found help in the Slack Community and/or Tutoring support, I was never alone!. During my first month in the course I was assigned a mentor, a senior developer in industry, with whom I had quite fruitful discussions on the projects I was working on, and I was always encouraged to do my best and to go beyond expectations. After submitting my second Milestone Project, I booked a 1:1 career consultation. During that meeting I received career support and preparation in the form of CV review and self-marketing and networking skills (LinkedIn tailoring). As I was coming from a quite different industry my CV required considerable fine tuning. The career executive feedback was marvellous!. Immediately after the meeting, I took into consideration every piece of advise I got: LinkedIn tailoring, CV refactoring and Cover Letter preparation. Ir was just amazing how everything started to work for me: responses being received, interview offers, etc. The career support team was always willing to help and they provided me useful tips for every interview stage, and more importantly constantly giving me encouraging messages. After 4 months of my first contact with career support at Code Institute I submitted my fourth and last Milestone Project, and one week after that I got an offer as a Data Scientist (after 4 round interviews) from an amazing company I wanted to join even before I started my journey with Code Institute. Now, I am prepared for landing my first job in tech. I have no enough words to express my satisfaction and gratitude for the mountains of support I got the different Code Institute pillars: tutoring, slack community, mentoring, student care and career support. All together facilitated my transition from academia to industry. I would 100% recommend the Code Institute Full-Stack Software development diploma to anyone who is looking for a career change. All your efforts pay off. | 