Georgia Tech Boot Camps

I do not have much experience with cyber security, but I have learned a lot in this boot camp. The lectures were very motivating and easy to understand. What I enjoyed most were the activities and hands on assignments since they were a challenge and helped me learn a lot. The bootcamp has prepped me up to take the Sec+ exam and help me look for a better job through their career services. I would definitely recommend this bootcamp if you are looking for a career change or trying to get into cyber security. 

I attended the part-time, six-month UX/UI Bootcamp through Georgia Tech and was a part of a cohort of 30 people from a wide variety of backgrounds - all are lovely people and we have not only networked but also kept each other sane at times. This Bootcamp was split into three parts: the first, User Experience; the second, User Interface; and the third, Frontend Development (i.e. coding). While it felt at times like we were thrown into the deep end of a pool (as the learning curve is very steep at the beginning of a new section), we all grew exponentially as UX Designers. If I had any complaints, they would probably be about how project weeks are structured; usually, the instructor for the course talks through a PowerPoint before either activities or group projects begin for the day. With projects, however, it was beyond valuable for myself and my team to know what we were expected to have done before the next class in order to not fall behind. With that in mind, the Georgia Tech UX/UI Bootcamp was a fantastic experience, one that will be challenging, but ultimately rewarding as long as you put in what you expect to get out of it.

I came to Georgia Tech with very little background in CS. I found myself struggling through MOOC programs online and finally decided to take a chance, hoping that in-person instruction might offer deeper foundations and greater motivation. Our cohort began in August 2018, and now, facing the last day of the course looking back, I cannot believe how much we've achieved as a class. 

The classroom was made up of CS and biomedical graduates, designers retooling their skills, IT staff, employer-sponsored tech workers, and an array of people like myself who were revisioning their career, keen to become employer-competitive again. I made some amazing friends, who are people I never would have met without this experience, people who impress and surprise me with their curiosity and striking innovation.

My instructional team was truly exceptional in every way. CJ and Hannah are incredibly competent technical workers who stress best practices in group workflow environments and promote highly organized, modular code. CJ's interview prep periods before class were full of smart tricks and clues to help us understand the technical coding interview process and present ourselves in the most authentic, personable and honest way. Hannah is a master at pacing the classroom lecture environment by anticipating confusing material and troubleshooting common errors to make sure we don't fall behind when iterative material stops making sense or we mistakenly drop a step. I always felt we were being supported, seen, and listened to when we were struggling with concepts. If we were falling behind and failing to understand the material, Tatiana would run breakout sessions and remediation to help us stay on track. On top of this, CJ, Hannah, and Tatiana created a playful side project in which classmates formed teams and completed career oriented coding challenges to earn points for their team. Quarterly, we celebrated the victories in the form of the Harry Potter House Cup, complete with thematic prizes and coding workshops (programming bots, hacking/cyber security tutorials, and interactive trivia games to learn our tools/languages). We developed more robust portfolios through the games, pull requests, and blog posts we earned for our teams, motivating everyone to do more and giving us a really great way to bond with our classmates. Towards the end of our course, we even took a dive into CS fundamentals (data structures and algorithmns-specifically hashmaps, binary trees, Big O notation), which was so helpful in foundational learning. 

The course material was difficult for a true beginner, I can't deny that. In the beginning, we completed projects week by week, attempting to learn pure Javascript via jQuery, CSS and HTML. Every project slowed to a crawl and took many hours. This is when I was most vulnerable to quitting. Be prepared to spend copious amounts of time to see small changes and then break them over and over. You will spend a lot of time learning how to find your own answers, perfecting the art of the search, and forgetting what you taught yourself. These circular paths become familiar and eventually you can welcome the struggle of breakage, ultimately learning the nuances and behaviors of object-oriented languages. I learned to know/trust myself better through learning to code, learning how I would have approached a problem and evolving to grow beyond that approach. If you are really dedicated to learning a new skill and changing the way you think, I would wholeheartedly recommend this course. It is a big step, but one worth taking.