The Awakening

On early May 2021, I drove from Houston, TX to Jackson, MS to spend Mother's day weekend with my mom and siblings. My youngest brother lives half way in Baton Rouge, LA. I stopped at his place and spent a day with him and his family before continuing the drive to Jackson. My brother is a Software Engineer graduate from Jackson State University specializing as a Back-End C# developer. Over the years, he has encouraged me to learn code and he has even given me short classes. However, due to work and lack of time, I was unable to follow up with more classes. 

Recently, while visiting, he told me about a friend doing a coding bootcamp. He talked about the time his friend took over several years to try and learn on his own and how he eventually made the decision. He did his research and decided that Coder Foundry was the right choice. He also has been following on YouTube some of the instructors for quite a while. 

His friend was already on week 5 of the BootCamp by the time we had this conversation. The idea of taking coding classes really got my attention. I have been out of work for quite some time and what better moment to do this than right now. I don't think if I would've been working, I could have made the decision to take several months off from work or potentially quit to attend a BootCamp style training class. Usually they are about 8 hours a day and 5 days at week. So what better moment to do this than right now? 

The more and more I thought about it, the more confident I was feeling about doing this. Sometimes it's funny how things in life align around you when you have other things to consider. The day before, when I was driving to Baton Rouge, I was talking over the phone with a friend, I and decided to go on a trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts on July 2021. I bought plane tickets that same day. When I learned about this possibility, without even knowing if I was going to be accepted, I had to decide whether to cancel my plane ticket within 24 hours. They were non-refundable. I really wanted to go with my friends and spend a week in a really nice place we had already rented by the beach, but without hesitating I did cancel the plane ticket and decided to start the process of applying and getting accepted into the Cohort.