4 Inspirational Coding Bootcamp Stories from the Grace Hopper Program

Last January, The Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy launched its first cohort with the goal of improving the gender gap in tech engineering roles. Next week, our sixth cohort will graduate and begin looking for enviable jobs in the tech industry. The following four student journeys are exciting but not exceptional of our graduates. As a result of our curriculum, instruction, and career-success module, we've watched stories like these unfold many times over.

Anna Garcia:

Anna has her Masters in Music and played trumpet professionally for several years after college. An entrepreneur at heart, she also started her own company, learned a lot about digital marketing and web design, and fell in love with learning to code for this project. Three days before graduating The Grace Hopper Program, Anna conducted a speed-interview with American Express at our "Hiring Day" event. Impressed by her projects and resume, they invited her to subsequent on-site interviews and hired her shortly after!

Ashley Riccardi:

Ashley attended our second Grace Hopper cohort and, after a competitive application process, was selected to stay an additional 3 months as part of the Teaching Fellowship program. She entered the program with web development experience -- having worked for a design firm right after college (Classics major with a minor in CS at Wellesley). Following her time at Grace Hopper, Ashley interviewed at the New York Times and now works as a Web Engineer on the "Games" team. You can view her final project from Grace Hopper here.

Johanna Perez:

After a few years working in the medical field as a patient facilitator, Johanna began taking part-time coding courses with the end goal of becoming a professional developer. With her eye set on admission to The Grace Hopper program, Johanna took the Bootcamp Prep course offered by Fullstack Academy to become more comfortable with coding challenges and technical interviews prior to applying. All the motivated work eventually paid off… After Bootcamp Prep she attended Grace Hopper and she's currently working as a contract developer at Google!

Tiffany Liu:

Tiffany got her first taste of coding as a Life Science Informatics major in college, learning lower level programming languages like C++ and Java. After college, she worked for a bit in a technical job and volunteered as an instructor for Girls Who Code, helping high school girls gain confidence and skills in STEM fields. She wanted to become a skilled full-stack developer, so applied to Grace Hopper and attended as a student in September 2016. Shortly after graduating, Tiffany accepted an amazing offer from the engineering team at Bloomberg!

For all the success our graduates have experienced, they all started at the same point… Learning the fundamentals of coding and preparing for the Grace Hopper admissions process! I hope you found their stories inspiration, and be sure to read more on Grace Hopper's admissions process if you're interested in applying.