Sparks of passion for coding and entrepreneurship led two recent students to the GW Coding Boot Camp. They quickly bonded as team members for a class project and following graduation they continued to use their newly acquired skills to work together on an entrepreneurial dream.
Cris Ayala quickly became hooked on coding when he took his first Java class in high school. He came to the boot camp last year looking for a challenging, fast-paced environment to learn more of the technical skills he needed to transform his career path from car technician to web developer.
“The program is great, I loved it. It's tough, but it’s good,” he said. “I learned coding, made connections and received career services. It definitely changed my life.”
[video:https://vimeo.com/231414408 width:560 height:315 align:center lightbox_title:Cris Ayala]
Like Cris, many students come to the boot camp to enter a new field, while others are looking to add new skills to advance in their current jobs. While in the program he said he met lots of “cool people,” like his classmate Christopher Stuckey, who came to the program in pursuit of entrepreneurial success.
Stuckey came to the program to learn new technical skills and combine them with his passion for everything marine and his entrepreneurial spirit. A naval architect by training, Stuckey already had an in-depth expertise in the form and function of ships. He decided to grow his fledgling marine equipment business by learning to design and build a better website.
He said he was motivated to attend the boot camp after feeling like a failure with his startup business. By becoming a full stack developer, he would have more control over the survival and growth of his business going forward.
“I think that's an interesting story that two students met in the boot camp and are working on a website for their own company,” said Kevin Zakorchemny, Student Success Manager, GW Coding Boot Camp, Trilogy Education Services, who partners with the University to run the program.
After Cris and Stuckey met in class they became project team members. Their final project used Stuckey’s business website as a test case for their assignment. What started as a class project has turned into a joint effort for business growth.
While growing/maintaining the skills they learned at the GW Bootcamp they integrated the concepts they were learning with real-world business needs. While he initially envisioned his company as a marine ecommerce store (like Amazon for everything marine), the focus has changed to helping people find the information and products they want in the marine world (think Craigslist meets BizOpps).
The recent graduates learned the skills they needed to make this a reality and look forward to releasing the prototype of the project soon!
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