My Experience as a Full-time Web Development TA

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My name is Amanda and I am a TA and student experience coordinator for the Web Development Immersive Course at BrainStation. My job is to help teach and assist the lead educator, while keeping up the energy and excitement of the students during the length of the course. Teaching had never been something I thought I would be doing, but with my motto being to stay challenged at all times, I think it’s a well suited career path to take.

For programming, I have put skill progression into three main steps. First being to grasp the fundamentals and understand your own code, second is to understand and be able to manipulate other people’s code, and third is to teach someone else how to understand code. Though these are only three steps, they are definitely big leaps in my mind and are a new set of challenges for every new programming language.

We are now in week nine and I am truly amazed by the delivery of the content. We’ve gone from the confusion of markup language and stylesheets, to the ever so intimidating introduction of JavaScript. Now they are connecting back-end to front-end and deploying servers, continuing to tackle everything that had them anxious just a couple weeks ago. Some of the students have even reached step three of skill progression and are sharing their knowledge as they research and learn new things.

I’m looking at the class right now, and their heads are all buried in their laptops working on their final projects. I know right now they’re writing stories in JavaScript, while using frameworks and their own CSS to responsively draw their artistic visions on the web. They have a week and a half of crunch time to have a fully functioning application that will be one of many to put in their portfolio. They look stressed… and they are, as any web developer would be. The music choices on the Sonos have gone from pumped up songs to relaxing melodies to complete silence. I would be worried, but every once in awhile you can hear someone call out “yes!”, or I see a smile that resembles the cheshire cat, knowing that they are all driving themselves insane with the passion they have to succeed.

When I first came to BrainStation, I was intrigued by the idea of a bootcamp and skeptical of how much the students would grasp in the end. This course has exceeded my expectations and I am extremely proud to be a part of such a great movement in digital schooling. The course is intense, educational and a replication of working in the industry all at the same time. Within such a short time, I have seen progression I could only wish to have had in my schooling.

Amanda is taking BrainStation’s Intro to iOS Development for 10 weeks!