What It Meant to Go to a Women’s Dev Bootcamp
Up until April of this year, I was a card-carrying member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, pursuing The Dream out in nitty, gritty New York City. Except it wasn’t the dream I thought it would be. Getting to actually act only happened once or twice a year. And even though I was regularly working on sets as a background actor or a stand-in to pay rent, my actual life really consisted of… well, an insane amount of Candy Crush. I killed so much time on Candy Crush that I actually started playing it to kill time while bingeing on Netflix. And then one morning in April, I woke up, realized I was almost 30, and was absolutely miserable in my daily life. Chasing The Dream was sucking the life out of all the other dreams I had for myself. And I decided to stop. I decided I’d rather be actually happy, than spend my life pretending that the life of an actor made me happy. And through a rapid-fire series of ‘ah-ha’ moments while lying in bed and procrastinating the rest of my day, I decided I wanted to try to learn to code. I tried my hand at a free online JavaScript course, and was immediately hooked. It felt better than Candy Crush. I finally found something that I already liked to do all day anyway… that could pay my rent AND take me out to brunch.
I had no idea where to go from there, so I reached out to an acquaintance of mine from my community theater days who was already an actress-turned-engineer to ask if she wouldn’t mind giving me some advice and a sense of direction. She enthusiastically greeted me into the engineering community and happily shared her thoughts, ideas, insights, and links. **shameless plug alert** Her name is Chloe Condon, she has an amazing blog, and she’s coming to a tech convention near you. **end plug** Chloe pointed me toward the Grace Hopper Program here in NYC, which I later found out is one of only three coding bootcamps for only women-and-non-binary-persons. I immediately stalked the school’s website, and couldn’t believe such a place existed… not in the real world. That was it: Grace Hopper or bust. I spent the rest of the summer preparing to interview for the program… and after a roller coaster of emotions, I was accepted into their last cohort of the year.
My first day in the program, I felt excited, scared, curious, hungry… basically every emotion in my complex rolodex of feelings. Even a little angry… I had woken up to three massive welts (presumably from insect bites) on my forehead that made me look like some extra from Star Trek Discovery. With a little styling magic (Youtube tutorial pending), I put my best face forward, excited to meet all the women who would be taking this journey with me. They. Were. Amazing. How had I never, in my entire experience, been in a room with so many diverse, brilliant women? They came from all over the country (and even outside the country), from all walks of life, all to do the same thing I wanted to do: change the direction of their lives and take control of their futures. And what I quickly came to realize, was that they were all just as excited, scared, curious, and hungry as I was. And, with the encouragement of our instructors and fellows, began to share these feelings with each other and realize that none of our feelings were singular. And this sense of community became important because…
BOOTCAMP IS INTENSE.
I’ve read countless dev bootcamp articles that describe the experience as having a firehose of information aimed directly at your face. They aren’t exaggerating. I might also suggest the metaphor that being in a dev bootcamp is like standing in one of those money tunnels where there are thousands of dollars (i.e. bits of information… pun intended) flying around you, and you just grab at as many pieces of money that your eyes can register, hoping it’s enough to get you to the next round of Price Is Right.
But our instructors and staff know that this is the case, and bombard us with opportunities to check in, express our confusion, and seek deeper instruction. We joked that we felt almost an annoying level of support. Whenever someone would start to doubt whether they would be able to make it as an engineer, we would remind each other that the school wouldn’t invest in us if they weren’t sure we could do this (literally, the school is invested in us. Fun fact: one of the unique aspects of the Grace Hopper Program is that tuition is deferred until students are hired at a job in the industry… that is how sure they are of each person that they admit into the program).
We were also told from the start, “Tears will happen, and that’s totally okay and welcome, and that’s why there are tissues on the desks. Also, cold season is coming, so there’s hand sanitizer everywhere”. It was like they made this school for me. I found myself in a community that did not shame me into suppressing my experience, and acknowledged that crying is a natural, healthy way to relieve pent up stress. I am proud to say that I only publicly cried once, during the program. It was during final test of our junior phase, after I spent the entire week building my first site without any training wheels, compartmentalizing the many stressors of existing while female in New York, and simultaneously searching for my lost cat every night (my roommate had carelessly let him out the previous weekend while I was away — I’m not at all bitter).
I’m afraid I might have worried my peers, because I was determined to finish the test, and just accepted that I couldn’t stop the waterfall running down my face and let it happen while I quietly continued to code. No one made me feel judged for crying, or acted like that signified any unfitness for the job. Because there was an unspoken understanding. Perhaps that’s what I loved most about being in a program for just women and non-binary people: we shared an understanding.
As women, we have conditioned ourselves to set high personal standards in order to survive and maintain respect from our male-oriented society.
This created a paradoxical air of collaborative competitiveness that forged every one of my classmates into even better engineers. One of our fellows messaged us after a classmate proposed a competition amongst our class projects, telling us that wasn’t really in the spirit of the school, and ended with the saying, “A rising tide floats all ships”, which roughly translates to, “Helping your classmates reach a higher standard makes everyone, including yourself, better.” Yes, we can push ourselves to be better with competition, but by pushing ourselves to help each other become better, the quality of everyone’s work increases. We were reminded time and time again that in working with and helping others, we never run out of new things to learn. To put it into pop culture terms, you know how in The Great British Baking Show, when contestants are finished early, they go around and help out the contestants that are still struggling? It makes the entire show better. Concepts get finished, problems receive a creative solution, and the judges have a much nicer (and complete) array of baked goods to adjudicate. It makes me hit “Next Episode” every time.
Bottom Line: We need more women in STEM fields. Empower each other to succeed, and all of our professional lives improve. It also feels really good.
I know some women who aren’t comfortable being around so many other women, for fear of cattiness, drama, or cliques, and it makes me a little sad. It would be a lie that some of that stuff didn’t happen. But I’m also certain it happened just as much in the coed programs. We’re humans, we make mistakes, we disagree, and we get personally invested in our work. As yet another testament to the program, we received counseling on how to professionally resolve conflicts within a team project. And through this all, I can say that I saw this group of women, as a whole, rise up together, encourage each other, and validate each individual’s unique strengths as they were brought to the table. Undergoing this intense experience, together, in the safety of the nurturing, environment created by the school, instilled a confidence in my abilities that I might not have maintained in other circumstances. This is not to say that we were coddled- I emphasize for the hundredth time how intense and demanding this program is, and how high we set the bar for ourselves- but rather to say that this program created a space for us to be as bold and genuine as possible so that we could graduate the best engineers possible.
I am incredibly proud of the quality of female and non-binary engineers that were just released into the software industry. Every company lucky enough to hire one of my classmates is in for a treat. I cannot wait to see what they have in store from the world, and I am unbelievably proud to be amongst their ranks. So here’s to the September 2017 cohort of the Grace Hopper Program. We’re coming, World. The future is female.
