the-aaron-burmeister

[the-aaron-burmeister]

Flatiron Denver - Where I came from, Why I Came Here, and What I Think About It

Where I Came From

Who are you, anyways, Aaron Burmeister? Before coming to join Flatiron in Denver, I led a pretty unfulfilling professional life in Ellsworth, Maine. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Biochemistry/Biophysics, I returned to my old stomping grounds with 2 goals in mind: A) Get a job at the local laboratory, The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, utilizing my shiny new degree and B) pay off my student loans. And I managed to do both of those over the next 5 years. I managed to get a job working at the Transgenic Genotyping Services group at the laboratory. They are in charge of validating a lot of the mice produced by the lab for use in research laboratories around the world. We make sure those mice have the mutations we are trying to cure. After several years, however, it became increasingly apparent that there wasn’t much vertical movement to be made - many of the better paying positions required Master’s or, more often, Doctoral degrees. However, I stayed in order to pay off my student loans because the money was good and I could live on my parents property for minimal cost. In addition, I started working on a Master’s in Bioinformatics at UMaine (as well as working my job). 

In early 2019, my girlfriend got accepted to a PhD program in Lincoln, Nebraska, and wanted to move in with me. Seeing as I had just paid off my debt, I agreed. At this point I had become somewhat disillusioned with biology. My career path would have required me to get a doctoral degree and work as a post-doc - something which I had no particular interest in. However, something I did have interest in was programming. Courses taken in the past and present drove me more and more into coding. I’ve always enjoyed using computers. Thus I started looking into ways to become a programmer without necessarily heading back to a 4-year college.

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Why I Came Here

I asked my cousin, who at the time was in charge of hiring new programmers and software developers for startups in NYC, for advice on which bootcamps seemed to actually deliver capable candidates. She sent me a list of a few: App Academy, Flatiron, and I can’t remember the rest. I looked up all the schools and had a few criteria for deciding: A) I value my work-life balance. I heard and read about people who went to AppAcademy work 100+ hour weeks. I thought that was insane. I’d rather take a longer boot camp that gave me time to recharge. B) I was interested in programs that offered an Income Sharing Agreement because I was running low on funds. I also felt like schools that offered these might be a bit more invested in helping me to get a job afterwards. C) I was interested in a campus relatively close to Lincoln, NE. Flatiron was the only one on the list that had one in Denver. 

These were my primary motivators to apply to Flatiron, and only Flatiron. I had no idea what the culture would be like, the instructors, or anything like that, but I did know that I wanted to learn how to be a good programmer and I would give it my all. Little did I know.

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What I Think About It

Now I am here, in Denver, having just finished my 3rd week at Flatiron. Here’s what I think and why:

The Culture - The culture has been kind of hard to describe, honestly. It almost feels a little surreal sometimes. It’s like a bunch of millennials got together and said “What if we took all the bad stuff out of school? What if we took all the bad stuff out of culture?”. Everybody seems to genuinely care about each other here, respect each other, and foster a learning environment. We aren’t just lectured at, but interacted with. Students are encouraged to teach other students, instructors come by just to say hi and see what you are working on. It’s honestly like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. And I’ve got to say - it feels amazingly refreshing. It makes wonder why the entire world isn’t like this. It just makes so much sense. We are encouraged to share our feelings with each other WITHOUT inviting comments from others. We’re encouraged to take risks, and fail sometimes. It’s okay to fail. Nobody is perfect.

The Curriculum - I can only speak to the first 3 weeks here, but we’ve basically covered the basics of Ruby programming during this time. Week 1 of the mod we have classes to help us to understand what we’re doing. The best part is, if you are having trouble with a particular concept, you can request a lesson on it. The staff will either host one that same day, or the next. What if you’re the only one? You can get a one-on-one session with an instructor. Week 2 is the week of the Coding Challenge. During this week we take a test of Flatiron’s design to test our knowledge gathered during the previous week. The best part is, you can take it up to 4 times. You can go in, realize you need to brush up on a particular concept, study that night, come in the next day, and totally nail the challenge. It takes the edge off compared to an exam in school, where you only have one shot (not to mention a lot of times tests can vary wildly in style between professors). Week 3 is Project week. This is the week where you either work by yourself (in the latter half of the boot camp) or you work with a partner to bring a project of your own design to fruition. I’ll give a little detail on my first project week below. At the end of the week, you present your projects in front of the entire boot camp. That’s it. There are no visible grades to stress over. Once again, very refreshing.

The Instructors - This is the highlight that I was not expecting when I came here. All the instructors care about you. They walk by, engage you in conversation, help you to improve your projects, and want you to succeed. It is obvious by how they speak that they care about the students and that they treat it more than just a job. They are all very friendly and approachable to boot. The respect they give us reflects the values of Flatiron. Nobody is haughty or in an ivory tower. Many of them were in past cohorts not a year before. What results is a very friendly, welcoming atmosphere. I can’t say enough good things about the instructors here.

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Mod 1 Project Week

I just wanted to touch on this briefly. This was perhaps the best group project I’ve ever experienced, and I think that the culture of Flatiron helped to facilitate that. We had a three person group, and despite the increased logistics that demands, our project went as smooth as butter. Our communication was excellent (we all agreed on rules for the group as far as staying late, how to communicate with each other). I think we all felt like we made a significant impact on the final project. One member had to leave partway through the week - we still managed to cobble together a Zoom meeting to make a required video and give the travelling member parts to work on. Another member was having trouble understanding the code we had written so far, so the other two took several hours to stop all work on the project and make sure the third understood why we coded what we did. And it was well worth it.

I just wanted to highlight this experience because it is fairly unique (at least for me). Usually groups have one person who coasts, one who does all the work, etc. I thought it was fairly notable that our group was not like that.

At any rate I’ve rambled enough for one blog post. Future posts I make will be more technical in nature - perhaps performing a deep dive into a subject or discussing some code from a project. Thanks for reading!