My experience with Bloc (6 months so far) has been very encouraging. Part of the struggle was getting back into the student mindset, and I haven’t officially been a student for over ten years. Another part of the struggle is that I’ve been trying to study coding (HTML, CSS, Javascript) off and on for several years and I never felt like I made much progress with the free courses I found online. And yet another part of the struggle was juggling part time coding with full time work.

I’ve spent most of my 20s tinkering around with apps and checking out cool websites, and now that I’m learning how to become a developer, I’m really excited to build these myself. My first goal is to become a full-stack developer and build some cool web apps. After that, I want to learn about how to build iOS and Android mobile apps, and how to build Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality projects. I’m not sure which one I’ll want to jump into after I finish my software engineering track at Bloc, but I’m super excited to be starting my journey into this digital world.

I grew up in the Silicon Valley to engineer parents, and engineering was heavily pushed on me as a career path. However, I was more drawn to film and television and decided to pursue my undergrad studies to the arts field. Little did I know that I would later move to Los Angeles and be offered many digital jobs because I knew my way around a computer so well. Before I knew it, I was project managing apps and websites for big Hollywood brands, and I realized if I had some development skills, I could be making a lot more money as a web or app developer on the same projects. And so, in my early 30s, I’ve decided to go back to school (part time) and learn to code. After a lot of research in late 2015, I decided to study with Bloc because it is a remote program and would allow me to study part time while keeping a part time/full time job. I started in April 2016, and hope to graduate from the Software Engineering Track in 2017 or 2018.