After completing the back-end curriculum, I applied to one dream job, and I got it!

Launch School has been critical for me while I made a huge career transition going into 2021. Last year, I was unhappy as a not-so-technical Technical Support Engineer at a startup after a long and challenging self-taught coding journey. Still, I would look at job interviews elsewhere and feel stuck due to huge gaps in my knowledge, lack of confidence when coding live, and general insecurity about what I knew vs. what I didn't know. Since I did come in with experience, Launch School has solved all of those problems for me and helped me make a pivot into my goal career, all in about half a year of full-time studies.

I want to highlight what made this program so fantastic for me: 1) The community – practicing with students who wish to practice the material until they've mastered it is HUGE. They aren't saying, "Okay, we finished this, let's move on." – they want to dissect code and understand all of the nitty-gritty details. 2) Having assessments. You can't move forward until you've truly mastered the earlier pieces. That might sound frustrating, but I'll tell you what's way worse: when you are trying to debug something in your code because you went lightning speed and used a library without knowing the fundamentals first. Learn your fundamentals and humble yourself to re-learn how to learn, and the new mastery approach will be so rewarding.

After completing the back-end curriculum, I applied to one dream job, and I got it! I'm now in an SE program at Snowflake, and I'm so excited to be in the exact career that I wanted.