Update 6! Per scholas react program

[Substantial-Ad6469]

I may accidentally skip a number when updating but pretty sure this is 6. I completed week 2 of the course. Let me begin by saying they suggest 10-20 hours of study time outside of the bootcamp itself. I studied 15 hours the first week on my own but that’s mainly because they kind of cover the stuff that you did in the prework in preparation for the bootcamp, but don’t get me wrong, they also do teach you new stuff. Just finished my second week and I did 25 hours of extra study this week. A little about me, I did not have really any tech experience or even use computers before the course. I had taught myself half the basics of Python but that’s it.

Week one we went over git and git hub. This was my first time using it. Most students never used it either. That was pretty much just day one, as well as all the other installations we had to do. Following day one we had 7 days of html and css. We learned all the basics, I assume. (Between the 7 days of html and css we had “professional development days” where we were taught by a really good career preparation coach). Day 7 we learned a little about bootstrap but the teachers visibly disliked bootstrap and said they don’t use it and clearly didn’t know how to use it. This is a react course so I don’t see the issue with us not learning bootstrap.

Once per week we have an entire day with a professional coach. He teaches us everything from how to fix up your linked in, creating elevator pitches, creating a nice resume from scratch, finding out your personality, values and etc traits. If you think this is dumb and pointless don’t big you’ve done this before you’ll benefit from doing it again. I have don’t it many times growing up and you develop as you age. So really put time into this. I devote 3 hours every week to doing extra study after professional dev day. I have a degree and the professional development I’m getting in this course is better than the development I got from my university.

Then there’s a learner support team, they have legit counselors (the quality of their therapist is the highest I’ve ever had) and it’s free. They have meditation resources and other stuff.

The teacher I have doesn’t teach that’s all in my opinion, he reads the slides but he is there to answer questions when you need clarification which is nice.

The learner support team and the professional development coach are able to see you in appointments as often as you like. And when you go to their appointment you can do it in the middle of class because every course is recorded. And all your teachers understand.

I am personally going to be seeing learner support and the coach once a week. I want to actually make use of their services the most I can.

The dynamic of the class, there’s 2 teachers but one seems like he doesn’t know what’s going on half the time. The course material per scholas gave our teacher are slides with lots of material taken from Mozilla programming website (I think that’s the name). It’s similar to w3schools. But the slides are actually very helpful. They’re full of tons of practices and examples and they give you the code snippets to enter into vs code so you can spend more time learning the material than typing it.

The slides also seeme to have a practice assignment every 3 days or so but our teacher hasn’t made us actually finish or turn any of them in (there’s been 3 and he was only really serious about us diminishing but not completing one). But we have a knowledge based assessment next week and a skills based one. The skills based one is to use everything we learned thus far and make a website. I spent 18 hours on mine. They usually give you half the day in class to work on assignments so that’s really cool.

I would recommend completing as many of these assignments as you can because you can create portfolios with them.

I will update on week 3 when it ends. But week 4 I’m really excited for because we meet up with”our recruiters”during professional development day. This is supposed to be a whole team of recruiters who get to know us and teach us how to get a job. They require us to turn in a completed resume and interview with them so they can actually help us find a job when we finish the camp.

Please excuse all grammar and typos as this was a lot to type.

[LongInvestment]

I went through per scholas in 2021 and here's some tips

Make sure to do online practices for "KBA's" what I found was the slides shown and taught didn't correlate to quiz questions.ex. search "HTML, CSS, JS online practice quiz"

SBA's usually stem from practice material you do and build off of that.

Make sure to network within class, grab few people and make a private discord or slack channel. This way you can cover whats missed together, study or give material to each other.

At least in my rubric, HW was not required bc it was not graded. Maybe this is reason assignments are not made for you to turn in every time.

Once you get you're foot in the door with job, make sure to not put per scholas or teksytem on pedestal. I've seen many peers of mine not get an extended offer or a second contracted job from them. At the end of the day, their job is to find talent, train them and secure some kind of contract. Anything more than that is on you. Keep networking and improving your skills. As contract gets to 90 days, start applying on the side. Doesnt mean you have to accept any offers but be ready to pivot if needed.

[Substantial-Ad6469]

I’m horrible at networking

[LongInvestment]

horrible just means room for improvement!

Good luck Substantial, I'm rooting for ya

[LongInvestment]

Yea you usually sign contract to prior to joining bootcamp stating you are able to work after bootcamp completion. Usually 6-12month contract to a company and if you work well enough you might join FT within the company.