Case Western Reserve University Boot Camps

The CWRU Coding Boot Camp was an overall great experience. As a mid-life career change, I had decided to go into IT and entered the Boot Camp with very little coding experience,  but after 6 months of hard work, a lot of fun and meeting some great people, I came out a competent web developer and am in the process of establishing a tech startup  based around our final Boot Camp group project. 

I felt the Boot Camp curriculum and teaching was very structured and focused, taking us from web basics in HTML and CSS, quickly through to Javascript and JQuery, then databases (SQL and MongoDB) and on to server-side programming with Express and Node. For me, the icing on the cake was learning React, which quickly became my preferred language. At each stage, knowledge was consolidated with homework exercises and group projects, the final project pulling together everything we had learned, and working in a small team, to create a real-world application from scratch.

That is not to underestimate that it is really hard work, the pace was often very quick with lots of ground covered quickly in class and many of the class activities and homework sessions were challenging. You have to put the time in outside of class, and I found myself studying and coding at least 20 hours a week at home in addition to the face to face sessions just to keep up, often a lot more to really be on top of things. Having said that, the support from the instructors and from our student support manager was faultless and they were always available for help via Slack, for extra tuition before and after class or just a pep talk when it all felt like too much!

I picked a 6 month Boot Camp over shorter ones as the face to face sessions in the evening and Saturday mornings were more convenient to fit around work and other commitments but looking back, one of the great advantages of the longer Boot Camp was more time to work on the group projects, which for me was really the best part. Initially, I was a bit skeptical that I would finish the Boot Camp with a portfolio of projects good enough to show potential employers, but if you put in the work and embrace teamworking with fellow students, this is both very achievable and rewarding. I also took advantage of and benefitted greatly from the Career Service which led a clear and structured program to re-orient students to the tech space and what they needed to do to be ready to apply for jobs and stand out to employers. 

In summary, the CWRU Coding Boot Camp was a good, well-structured course with instructors and staff who, I felt, were truly invested in student's success. Prospective applicants should be aware though - and I'm sure like all the Boot Camps - that they will need to put in a lot of hard work and many hours outside of the class sessions to really get the most from the course.