Once I realized that computer science was for me, I checked out what options I would have in terms of a career. And man were there a bunch. I typed in “computer science” on Indeed and jobs popped up that I had never seen or heard of! The job postings I saw were for full-stack developer, software engineer, UX designer, cloud engineer, data scientist, mobile app developer, and the list went on. After enough scrolling through the job titles, it was time to dig a little deeper and see what these postings were looking for in an applicant. For the most part, they were looking for applicants with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science or some related field, which was no surprise. But every now and then, I would see in the descriptions “Bachelor’s in computer science or boot-camp graduate”. I was shocked that this thing called a “boot-camp” was seen as equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree by some employers. But what is a boot-camp?
After searching the web, I found several of these coding boot-camps. Apparently they teach people to become software developers but at a much faster rate than college. Some were even as fast as 8 weeks! I thought this was too good to be true! And it turns out, it depends on the boot-camp. Not all are built the same. I began noticing that some show their job placement rates while some don’t. Those that did show them, had fairly high placement rates but were also the ones with higher tuition. In the end, I couldn’t justify the high tuition for only a few weeks of instruction. Especially that I had just barely discovered computer science, what if I ended up not liking it after half way through the program! So my decision to pursue a second degree was so I could take my time learning the material and finding what part of computer science I enjoy the most.
