Glad Grad!

For 15 intensive weeks, Varya has been leaving the house every weekday at 7am, driving to a Metro park-n-ride lot, riding a bus to the Flatiron School in the center of downtown Houston to attend their software developer bootcamp from 9am-6pm, returning home after 7pm, then reading textbooks and working on labs and projects until bedtime. This past Friday, she graduated as a skilled full stack web site developer, and the joy on her face says it all…

When Varya posed the idea of attending a software bootcamp at the beginning of the summer, even after she explained what it was, my first reaction was “why?”. After all, she’d already earned a PhD in software engineering from the Institute for System Programming in the Russian Academy of Sciences, not to mention BS and MS degrees in software engineering from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the top technical university in Russia, and even an MBA in Finance along the way. In the US, she knocked out a couple Oracle certifications as a Java programmer. But, as she reminded me, all of these degrees and certs seemed to matter less to recruiters and interviewers than the multi-year gap in her employment history after she immigrated to the US. I listened in on a couple calls from job site recruiters who focused on that gap, then falsely promised to send her tests to confirm her software currency, though they never followed through. Frustrated by such treatment, and wanting to broaden her focus from scientific parallel programming in Java to modern web site development, she convinced me that Flatiron was the best path to a new, interesting career in the US.

Not only did Flatiron teach Varya full stack web development skills, but they prepared her for employment by helping her update her LinkedIn and Github sites, technical blog and resume. They’ll spend the next few weeks giving her mock/practice interviews and help and advice applying for jobs. Flatiron claims a 97% success rate finding employment for their grads, so we’re confident that Varya–at the top of her class due to all of her prior software experience–will add to that percentage as an attractive candidate for them to present to employers.

I’m very proud of all the hard work she invested in the last 4 months, so impressed by the cool web site projects she completed, and excited to see where she takes this new endeavor. That excitement is only partially due to the new bike she said we’d buy once her new career is underway! 🙂