Fed up with her old coding bootcamp Lambda School, Whitney switched to Sabio and changed her life
Whitney was looking to take her life and career in a different direction and after some research, she knew tech was the place for her. Like many others, she had heard of coding bootcamps and their seemingly overnight success so she took a leap. Living in the Chicago area, she started Lambda School. However, she quickly learned all was not looking as promised.
“I was in the middle of the whole course,” Whitney started, “but a lot of big changes happened within it and I grew increasingly uneasy about how what I was being taught was going to do to actually get me a job. I felt like after a year and a half I didn’t know anything.”
Undeterred, Whitney took to online, “I actually got on Twitter and saw that a lot of people were going through the same thing and felt the same way. I didn’t even know that Lambda School l was under fire by many students. I was paying for this ‘education’ with all this going on and it wasn’t adding up. Luckily, I came across a tweet from Gregorio Rojas (Sabio’s Co-Founder and CTO,) I think it was a quote that said something like It’s okay to be wrong, just don’t stay that way. At the time I was so frazzled because I didn’t know what I was going to do, I thought maybe I’d have to go the self-taught route. He said something like Make Sabio an early Christmas gift. I thought, I’m going to take this as a sign. I went to the website, read some reviews, the testimonials, the blogs, went to an info session and I was sold on Sabio.”
The key thing to Whitney was how different Sabio is from her old school, “At Lambda there were maybe over a hundred students per cohort and one instructor. Then they took away the team leads and just wanted the instructors to help over a hundred students. It was so rough. When I was doing Pre-Work at Sabio, Gregorio was on top of it. He would message me and ask how I was doing, make sure I was doing okay. I realized I definitely made the right decision.”
It may be surprising, but Whitney said she actually had fun doing the PreWork, “I even told Gregorio this is probably the most fun I’ve had coding in months! I was able to actually retain the information and just being able to have that safety net of help made a world of difference. I really appreciate that because there was barely any of it at Lambda School. It’s more of a collaborative experience. The whole thing overall was challenging, but in a good way. As soon as I hit a rough patch I could ask the other students and instructors for help. Even the formatting was better than what I had before because it gradually got harder and harder.”
“I read that Sabio isn’t like a classroom but more of a gateway to what the real working world is like, and it’s true. I feel like this is going to make my transition very smooth.”
“I got my first degree in marketing,” Whitney continued, “and I wasn’t really happy. I couldn’t find a good position in the field. My grandmother kept encouraging me to try out tech so I took a chance. When I initially took a pre-course with a previous bootcamp, I fell in love with the problem solving involved in coding.”
“Actually building things and seeing it come into fruition felt pretty awesome. Now that I started Sabio, having a future in this field actually feels tangible.”
For those curious about going into tech, Whitney says, “Research, research, research. That’s what I did after I learned the hard way. Research until you can’t anymore. Read the tweets, blogs, talk to some of the students. They get it. Their experience and what they were going through, that’s the only way to get a realistic look into what goes on within a coding program.”
“The fact that this Sabio PreWork is free is amazing,” Whitney raved, “there is so much information packed into it. I’m going to tell all my friends about it. Sabio’s PreWork and entire experience thus far doesn’t even compare to Lambda. I felt like Lambda’s course work was too easy and then I found out that they even took a lot of their curriculum from other places. Sabio’s was so much more challenging in a good way. I’m going through the whole course and scheduled to be done the first week of April. Then, I’m going to be fully qualified to get a job in tech. I can’t wait.”
Take the Next Step With Sabio
Read more success stories on Sabio’s blog where hundreds of developers from all walks of life shared their journey toward launching an accomplished tech career with Sabio’s help. Who knows, their stories might just resonate with you and motivate you to take the first step toward becoming a software developer.
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Written by Sassy Mohen