Description

DevMountain is a three-month web development boot camp in Lehi, UT. During my last year at Yale, I began mentoring students remotely and eventually taught a cohort in-person in Utah before beginning my first job as a full stack software engineer.

As a mentor at DevMountain, I had the opportunity to help new and experienced programmers learn the PERN stack (PostgreSQL, Express, React, Node). I created the curriculum for various workshops on topics as diverse as Google’s Material UI, the bash shell, and SASS/SCSS.

The Problem

Learning web development can be intimidating at first. It’s common for beginner programmers to fall into a trap of repeating similar tutorials in various languages over and over without challenging themselves. Often times, building a project is the best way to learn how to code, especially one that presents an appropriately difficult challenge.

For early and mid-career students, attending a boot camp is a significant sacrifice of both time and money. In order to make sure those students accomplished their goals, I spent a lot of additional time outside of our daily lectures creating custom review sessions and hosting meetups.

Planning

To make the best curriculum possible, I collaborated with other instructors, mentors, and students. I advised students during 1:1’s and conducted my own review sessions outside the already demanding course schedule. One of my workshops on the command line was adopted as part of the official curriculum for the boot camp. Students loved it because it made them comfortable in an new, unfamiliar coding environment.

In this role, I learned how to take constructive feedback during my planning cycles and allow space for newcomers to programming to explore the enjoyment that comes with building something new. Developing new curriculum and planning reviews sessions were my favorite aspects of the job.

Outcomes

I ended up mentoring dozens of students during the course of my time working with DevMountain. Those who graduated have moved on to fulfilling careers in tech as software engineers, designers, and product managers.

I really value my time as a mentor as it taught me how to guide someone who is tackling a difficult technical problem in a way that enables them to come up with a solution themselves. I learned how to teach and offer advice that can lead someone to their own, particular answer to a broad problem. In addition to these things, becoming a teacher for a year and a half made me a better student.