Episode 51 – How to go from software boot camp student to instructor in no time

Meet our next guest, Adriana Castaneda. Adriana was initially taking a different career path. She was a biology major who had her sights on going into medical research, but something happened that changed her course. Her sister was a DeVry University student and Adriana accompanied her to some tech meetups. It didn’t take long before curiosity got the best of Adriana and she fell head over heels in love with software development. One short year after graduating from her coding boot camp, Adriana began teaching coding to others. Are you ready to hear her story? Give a listen and check it out!

Adriana’s Bio:

Adriana Castaneda is a Python Mentor at ChiPy Chicago, a Computer Science Instructor at The Latin School of Chicago, and a Front End Web Developer Instructor and Software Engineer Instructor at General Assembly. Before this, she was a junior web developer for Dev Bootcamp as well as Health Engine LLC. Before that, Adriana was a TA and Presenter for RailsBridge Conference.

Adriana is a 2015 Dev Bootcamp grad and has a BS in Biology from North Park University in 2014. She was initially planning on going into medical research but changed direction when she fell in love with coding.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Adriana Castaneda. How are you, Adriana?

Adriana: I’m fine. How are you, Arsalan?

Arsalan: I am fantastic. It’s so good to have you. I say that a lot because it’s so good to have all of my guests, but you are wonderful in a different way and the reason is because you did something remarkable in your career. You were going one way and getting a liberal arts education and probably going to go into history or some other type of humanities. Were you trying to get into one of the humanities? Were you trying to do something political? I’m not really sure. But by some accident in history, you found yourself not only in software development but also a software development instructor. That is something I’ve never seen before. Tell us a little more about that.

Adriana: I actually started my career in biology. The idea was to do medical research. During my senior year, my sister was going to high school at DeVry University. While she was going to high school I would have to take her to different meetups. Some of those meet ups were for HTML and CSS classes. That’s where I got started. Before that, the computer was a magical thing that some super geniuses had created, or so I thought. But once I learned how the Internet worked and how to create a small website, that kind of broke down the magic for me and I realized that this was something that people can do.

Adriana: Once I graduated from the University, I went into Dev Bootcamp and I learned backend as well as front and technologies there.

Arsalan: That’s really fascinating. So, you went from being someone who is not really interested in software development and had no idea how to be a software developer, but once you saw it, and you went to these meet ups your interest piqued. Perhaps you thought that it looked like fun and that anybody could do it. Do you think that it’s necessary to go to college for this?

Adriana: That’s actually an interesting topic. I feel like not a lot of people have that kind of perspective on it. Some of my students actually went to a college for this and they took a semester of it. They didn’t really like it. Then, they went to General Assembly, which is a boot camp that I teach at, and they like it because they feel that it teaches them more practical skills in the industry. But, it really depends on the individual. My sister has had the privilege to go to Dev Boot Camp and she’s currently studying at DePaul University getting her degree and software development. From her perspective, she also feels that in the college setting, you get to dive deeper into the theory behind it,