What Attending the Flatiron School Online Software Engineering Course Is Really Like
I am so grateful for the experience Flatiron School has given me. I’ve learned so much in the past 5 months, it feels somewhat surreal looking back on all that I’ve done. I’ve gotten so much more out of the Flatiron bootcamp than I thought I would. I learned a lot more about programming in this environment than I did in several years of undergrad.
But it’s not for everyone.
I’m going to detail my experience here for all the potential bootcamp attendees, and hopefully that will help crystallize whether you should or shouldn’t pursue an online bootcamp, particularly at Flatiron.
Who Should (and Shouldn’t) Pursue an Online Bootcamp
I’ve already had a good number of people asking me about my experience in the bootcamp and wanting more info on how to apply. And I’ve told them all the same thing: don’t attend a bootcamp until you’re sure that you enjoy programming. Try it out–there’s a huge number of beginner tutorials and resources all over the internet. Check one out and see if it’s something that appeals to you before making the dive into a bootcamp.
Probably the best resource to check out if you’re interested in pursuing the Flatiron School online bootcamp, is their excellent tutorials and bootcamp prep at learn.co. There are several different tracks available there, from their standard bootcamp prep and data science bootcamp prep, as well as Intro to Ruby and Intro to Javascript.
The style of codealongs, lessons, and completing longer labs is very similar to what you’ll end up doing for good portions of the bootcamp. If you’re a self-starter, that can hold yourself accountable, and you like learning that way and have fun figuring out the puzzles of programming–by all means, apply to bootcamp!
But don’t go in blind. Bootcamps are often a big financial commitment, as well as a big time commitment. If you’re anything like me, it will be hard and there will be moments of doubt. If you go in without a clear expectation of what it is, and whether you truly want to pursue coding as a career, you’re only going to be setting yourself up for failure.
That’s not to say that you’ll be in it alone. Flatiron School has a great support system, between the members of your cohort, your course lead, your educational coach, the Ask A Question feature, the support staff, and everyone else at Flatiron, you won’t lack for help. Even if you fall behind, they have a lot of great options for keeping you on track to finish the bootcamp–including falling back to the next cohort, or switching to part-time or self-paced.
So, what’s it actually like?
The Flatiron experience is built around, first and foremost, your cohort. My cohort was around 30-40 people to begin with, and we were assigned a Course Lead, who was essentially the equivalent to our professor (shout out to the amazing Nancy Noyes!). We also had 2 other cohort leads that were assigned to our group, to help us out with any questions we had, and take some of the load off the course lead. In addition, we were provided with an Educational Coach, who was tasked with helping us with study habits, work/life balance, and generally helping with any of the non-technical aspects of the bootcamp.
We were all assigned either the course lead or one of the cohort leads to meet with for an hour-long one-on-one meeting every single week. We were also given the opportunity to schedule regular one-on-one meetings with the educational coach, who in my experience was very accommodating and willing to meet as often as I needed.
You’ll also be given access to a number of Slack channels where you’ll be able to communicate with other members of your cohort, as well as the Flatiron School at large.
Beyond that, the coursework of Flatiron is structured around the 5 big, week-long projects that you work on throughout the bootcamp. They divide the course neatly into 5 sections, each about a month long. Each month prior to the project, you’ll be largely learning on your own as you delve into the coursework.
Each week, your course lead will post what material you are expected to finish in order to keep on track with your cohort, and they will host 4, 1 hour long “Study Groups” throughout the week that you are highly recommended to attend, where they cover either specific coding labs that you are to be working on, or work through additional material that covers the same or similar topics to what you are doing that week. In addition, they will give you a “pairing partner”, who you are highly recommended to work with on at least 1 lab during the week. They will go over with you on exactly what that looks like, but I definitely recommend taking advantage of getting to know your cohort-mates and getting used to peer programming. It will be a great help in the months to come!
The material itself falls into a few camps: a lesson you can just read through, a video you can watch and oftentimes code along with, a codealong which will require you to follow along with the lesson and put in the same code that they are discussing so you can see how something works, a lab which will require you to come up with your own solutions to the challenges they present in order to pass the tests in the labs, and at the end of sections there will be little quizzes to just give you a check in on how well you’ve absorbed the material.
After completing your coursework for the month, you’ll move onto the project, where the true magic of Flatiron lives. You will be given a series of guidelines for things your project has to include or accomplish, as well as instructions for completing a read me for the project, a video demo of the project, and a blog connected to the project. Usually you’ll be given a checklist to fill out, to make sure you’ve met all the requirements as well. Beyond that, you can do ANYTHING that you want. It is VERY open ended, and there is a huge variety to the kinds of projects people create. Go wild with your imagination, but try and keep the scope of your projects fairly limited, as you’ll be given plenty to accomplish just with the guidelines themselves. If you do have big ideas, try and think of the most basic, core concepts for it, and execute that first–what is called the Minimum Viable Product, or mvp.
After you’ve submitted your project, you’ll schedule an assessment. The assessment is crafted to be very similar to technical interviews you’ll be facing at the end of the program in your job search, so try and take full advantage of them. The assessment will be a one-on-one video conference where you’ll present your project, the assessor will ask you a series of questions about it in order to check your degree of understanding and mastery, and you’ll also be asked to do a short live coding section, where they will give you a problem to solve or feature to add, and you will have to code it out and explain it, right then and there. And at the end, they will tell you if you pass or not–but don’t worry, if you don’t pass, you’ll be able to work on your project, and try again.
And then it’s rinse and repeat, as the bootcamp progresses into more and more complicated and difficult territory.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this blog has given you some insight to the experience of going through a bootcamp and whether it’s the right fit for you. Good luck, and happy coding!