About one hundred students, family members and friends waved and cheered as graduates of the first GW Coding Boot Camp were called one by one to go on stage and receive their certificates. Later on, graduates and their families took pictures in front of the GW CPS banner while holding up their certificates and beaming at the camera.
Forty two of the forty six students who went through the program received their certificates at the graduation ceremony held on July 22. These graduates spent 240 hours in classroom over 24 weeks plus another 480 hours of self-study each, while working and managing family responsibilities.
This was the first coding boot camp for CPS which started in January and ran through July. Since then two additional part-time and one full-time cohorts have been added and two data science boot camps are also on schedule to start in September and October. CPS is partnering with Trilogy Education Services for operating these boot camps and maintains academic and quality control over the curriculum and hiring of instructors. TES has a proven track record in designing and managing a variety of boot camps and has already established similar partnerships with more than 20 universities across the United States.
The ceremony started with students presenting their final projects in groups of two to four, demonstrating the progress they had made in the short span of time since January. The projects consisted mostly of apps (applications) that the students had designed for work related or daily life problems. In one case, you would enter the items you have in your refrigerator and the app would run the ingredients against a database of recipes and would suggest a number of recipes for your lunch or dinner!
Most students had parents, spouses, children and other loved-ones present and everybody partook of the good food and the cake that was especially prepared for the occasion.
Students came from a variety of backgrounds and experiences and women, minorities and immigrants formed more than half of the cohort. Students also had different motives for attending the boot camp. Some were career changers who wanted to become web developers to enter a new field and some were looking to add new skills to advance in their current jobs. One particularly inspiring story was that of Cristopher Ayala (video, 3:47) who was a technician in an oil change shop when he started the boot camp and now is qualified as a full-stack developer.