One week down and 23 to go for gSchool’s first class of students. These 24 beginners are in for the long haul – and will be putting in about 60 hours a week at the web development training program for the next six months. But this large workload promises high rewards: not only will graduates become expert developers, but they are guaranteed a starting salary of $60,000.
gSchool, a partnership between web development training program Jumpstart Lab and Denver startup community Galvanize, is leading the way to creating and retaining programming talent within Galvanize and the Denver and Boulder area at large.[ibimage==20852==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
To get the scoop on week one at gSchool, I chatted with Chris Onan, a founder and managing director at Galvanize, and Jeff Casimir, gSchool’s program director and lead instructor:
So what is the idea behind gSchool?
Chris: gSchool is our effort to help the community. And by that, we mean the microcommunity at Galvanize and the broader community being Denver and Boulder. We have 56 companies that live and work at Galvanize every day and one of the key things holding them back from making progress is access to tech talent. So gSchool was really a vision of ours that started in April/May to have an education platform that is providing our community with some skills.
After coming up with the idea for gSchool, how did you put it into action?
Chris: We traveled the country and talked to a lot of the software development curriculum folks. We met Jeff from Jumpstart Lab in Washington, DC, and got really excited about working with him. He was teaching people how to be software developers for LivingSocial and it just happened to turn out that Jeff wanted to move to Denver. He’s our lead instructor here, but he also brought Frank Webber who moved to Denver from Seattle. The third instructor is Katrina Owen who is moving from Norway. We have a fourth instructor who travels here part-time: his name is Steve Klabnick. He lives in LA. So we’re really drawing a lot of tech talent from all over.
How has the Denver community responded to gSchool?
Chris: The tech community here has been wildly supportive. It’s really exciting. We’ve had companies like Simplified, SendGrid, iTriage, Pivotal writing checks to make this more affordable for students. It’s not like they’re sponsoring one person; they’re sponsoring the program because they think it’s a good thing. Plus, they want first crack at hiring the graduates! We have not done this on our own; the community here has really rallied around us.
Have there been any bumps along the way so far?
Chris: Over time, we’d love to find ways to help the students out to finance their education with bank loans because those aren’t available to us right now. So we’re providing different repayment options to students.
Jeff: Something that was more stressful than we expected was that a lot of candidates that we really liked didn’t actually have plans for how they were going to pay the cost of living while they’re in the program. So we’re like “Hey, yeah, you’re in. Let’s do this and we’ve got this payment plan to push the cost off.” But they didn’t have savings or family support to allow them to live for the six months. That’s probably our biggest lesson learned so far. For our next class, we’re definitely trying to come up with creative solutions.
The toughest part for me is that I have a diversity agenda. My teaching career was all in high-needs schools and, in the programming world, I’m very interested in trying to diversify our community. What hurt was that the students who were accepted that didn’t have those savings were disproportionately women and disproportionately people of color. So with our original group, I was ecstatic about the diversity of it. But then that eroded away as we actually got people signed up.
What make gSchool different from other programs that teach these skills?
Jeff: The biggest thing is just raw hours of experience; we have the most advanced teaching staff of anyone who is in this space by a pretty significant margin. I’ve been teaching now since 2003 and been focusing on Jumpstart Lab since 2009. Most other people who are in this boot camp, short-term, programming/teaching stuff, have been teaching for maybe a year and don’t really have any pedagogical backgrounds. I started with Teach for America in 2003. I taught middle school and high school and was vice principal of a middle school, so I know what I’m doing when it comes to the education side. That’s really the big differentiator where most training programs are run by programmers learning to teach.
No one besides me has a traditional classroom teaching background, but they’ve all done some sort of mentoring or teaching. My number two instructor was teaching at the University of Washington. Our third instructor, who’s arriving next week, was a team lead in charge of mentoring young developers in a programming context. I rely very much on them to bring more of the real-world programming experience and I bring the education experience.
What is the outlook for gSchool’s students, in the next six months and beyond?
Jeff: We’ve ballparked that, over six months, students are going to put in around 1,300 hours of work. Some might push it up to 1,500 and some might push it down to 1,200. We really have to ramp them up, we don’t try to smash them right away when they don’t have the understanding and the stamina for it. So now we’re building their stamina for the work and the hours.
Chris: We have students not just from Denver, but from Ireland, Mexico, one is a U.S. Marine vet who came straight from Afghanistan. We’ve got students from New York, Boston, Baltimore, D.C., Seattle, San Fran; they’re from all over. I don’t know if we’ll keep all of them here after the graduate, but we’re sure hoping to keep as many as possible. The students love going to school 20 feet from the companies that want to hire them.
