Adopt-a-Coder Possible Application Questions and Testamonials

Possible Application Questions

-Describe your most meaningful achievements and how they relate to your field of study and your future goals.

-Pick an experience from your own life and explain how it has influenced your development.

-Describe something you have done in the past year that has made a difference in your community.

-What would you like to do to change the world for the better?

- We know you are a talented student; what motivates you to be a good learner and to put forth your best effort? 

- What have you learned from someone who is very different from you? 

-If you could talk with any one living (or deceased) person, whom would it be and why?

- Why do you want to work in this industry?

-What is your greatest failure, and what did you learn from it?

-How do you demonstrate passion for technology outside of the classroom?

-Tell us about the toughest technical problem you’ve worked on, how you addressed it, your role (if team-based) in reaching the outcome, and the final solution.

-What do you like about our website and what can we do better? (From Dev Bootcamp Application)

Testamonials

Anna Marie Panlilio:

-For all nine weeks, every weekend I paired with a "squirrel" in some way or another. Meeting the first cohort in Chicago was amazing. They were so tight as a group, just cohesive and having fun. You could see they were just really loving it there and really setting the culture in a great way.

-It didn't take long for me to realize that the goldmine of Dev Bootcamp, or at least one of them, is the people.

-When incoming cohorts come in, we’re asked to offer advice. Mine was that people are the magic sauce. You can learn something from anyone here. Just take advantage of that.





Josh Miramant:
-Even more than just writing code, Dev Bootcamp has really tried to push our mindset into this builder, this contributory mode. It’s been very fulfilling and allows us to actually engage people and approach problems a different way.

-It’s much bigger than just writing code, as exciting as that is. It’s another level of how to approach problems and interact with the world.

-I can approach any problem and know to break it down into parts. They’re all solvable just by applying the right locator or getting the right support. Identifying those things is what’s emerged out of here.

-I think that was extremely different than just saying, “Okay, how long, how much and how employable will I be?” It’s a completely different metric that I can bring into almost every part of my life, no matter what I’m doing. That was a big delta between my thoughts going in and what I discovered the program at DBC is.

What would you tell someone who is considering applying to DBC that they may not think to ask about?

-What you think you’re going to get out of it is trivial compared to what you will get out of it.
I’m approaching so many new things that are exciting, and I feel that I can conquer them with so much more confidence. Through DBC I’ve taken on something that was probably the most difficult, the most exciting, and the most fun thing all at the same time. New challenges feel dwarfed because now I can unpack them- I’m ready for them.
That and I get to do something that I really love. I think that’s probably the best thing I’ve taken away.




Phil Aquilina:

How do you find your life different emotionally speaking?

-Where do I start? I wake up excited to start the day. I'm proud of the work I do, and every time some of my code goes into our app, my heart does a little jump for joy. Sometimes, I go to our site and I think to myself, I'm so lucky to be part of this, working with people that really want to produce something useful to the world. When I come home, I get to build beautiful and meaningful things of my own.





David McDonald:

-There was a moment I’ll never forget.  The song, “We Are Young” by Fun started playing.  Drastically overplayed and Glee-ified, my indie music taste buds at first felt some disdain over the song selection.  Slowly, but surely, the lyrics that had permeated my brain in all the playings of this melody as background music started to eject from my mouth, and the mouths of everyone around me.  Soon, the “boots” were all in a circle, arms wrapped around one another.

Tonight 
We are young 
So let’s set the world on fire 
We can burn brighter 
Than the sun 

-Perhaps, if looked at this scene from the outside, this would be considered a cheesy-movie moment with forced emotion, but for me, at least, I felt shivers up my spine and goosebumps on my skin.  We were making a pledge to each other.  

-I firmly believe that we will all change the world in some way.  We have been trained not to write code, but to “create beautiful things,” to connect interpersonally with others’ humanity, and to walk the world with confidence and humility in whatever we do.

What could be better than that?  

-Shereef said at the beginning and the end of the program, “I hope you realize that learning Ruby was just an excuse to get you here.”  Truer words have never been said.  This man created a space for us to be radically self-expressive and supported in the hopes that we go out in the world and do the same for others; paying it forward.  



Natasha Murashev:

-Ironically, getting into Dev Bootcamp motivated me to give the Ruby on Rails tutorial another try, and once I had a small project in mind to work on, I was able to understand Rails.

-I still remember the moment it all made sense. It felt like I had a new superpower. I knew I could now do anything, and it felt invigorating. Until that point, I was learning to program because I knew I needed it, and I was not willing to quit, but at that moment I finally started to love it.

-I’m currently attending Dev Bootcamp, and absolutely love it. I will write more about my experience in another post, since this one got pretty long.



Tyler Shipe:

-The experience was exhausting and a test of mental endurance. However, I learned more about programming and myself than I ever expected.