I came to LEARN to disrupt my mid-career boredom. There were a few bootcamp-style options, but I was drawn to LEARN for several reasons: the unique internship aspect of the program; a commitment to diversity I saw in their staff, alumni, and community involvement; their place at the center of an active tech community; and the fact that, because they are local, they would be in touch with the needs of San Diego employers. I’m over 40 and approach all new situations with skepticism. I started LEARN waiting to find out that it was all a sham, that I’d been taken for a ride, or that the level of learning was nothing I couldn’t find in a few YouTube videos and I am SO happy to say I was wrong. All of what drew me to LEARN in the first place proved to be true. The educators are so passionate about the success of each student, as is the management – they have a reputation to uphold in this community, and that start with putting well-prepared program grads into the workforce. Beyond the tech curriculum and the amazing educators, two extremely valuable pieces of this program are the Career Services and the Internship. Students have real interviews with real companies, no smoke and mirrors. And the professional development portion of the curriculum combined with ongoing career services advice is WAY more than I ever got from NYU.

If you’re looking for a challenge and you want your career to be a creative outlet, this bootcamp is a good jumpstart into the inventive world of computer programming. LEARN academy will introduce you to the popular technologies used by many companies (Git, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, SQL, RSpec, Ruby, and Rails) and give you the space to create webpages and web applications with motivated peers. A big plus with LEARN is that they’re well connected in the programming industry so you’re exposed to meeting a lot of developers from around the world. Also, you’re given real world coding experience by being placing into an internship at the end of the program. I was apart of LEARN academy’s third cohort. As many of my classmates and instructors would say, we looked forward to (almost) every day ????

I attended LEARN academy from July 2016 to November 2016. I looked into the various bootcamps here in San Diego and the internship that is part of the curriculum set LEARN apart from other bootcamps. I can’t say enough about how awesome my experience was. It was very challenging, but at the same time it was manageable.