Near the end

Dec 12th, 2017

     About a year ago I started this blog to track my progress, and looking back at how far I've come, its has been quite the journey for me from Dec 2016 - Dec 2017. 1 year has just past by and everything has just happened so quickly!. It feels like just yesterday I got accepted into Lambda School, at that moment I started seeing stars. The feeling that I finally found the school for me was extraordinary and exhilarating, I was so eager to start working and learn about the thing I love the most, software!.

   Around the moment of August and the day I was first accepted I was already working on the pre-course work. My parents were disappointed that I had dropped out of college and disagreed with my thoughts that the traditional system is starting to become outdated, and my thoughts on traditional system have not changed since then. The moment I got kicked out of college I had just discovered what I wanted to study all along and that was computer science. Messing around with computers and playing around with html/css at such a young age should've been clear from the start, so I was on the lookout for a web development bootcamp that was my main goal for the year.

   CodingDojo, Hack Reactor, Devmountain!, there were so many schools opening at once that my head couldn't make up its mind of where I wanted to apply, but the bad thing was most of these schools came out to be 10,000+!. The tuition was just waaaaay out of my price range that I was thinking of pulling out a loan. As I was looking for solutions for loans, I came across another program called, Makeschool. Makeschool, at the time I had no money to cover tuition so this school was obviously the best decision to go with. I filled out the application as heart-filled as I can just so I can get the interview and I got it!. I spent so many hours working on swift/xcode to just better prepare myself for the school and interview.

  The day of the interview, I was ecstatic but at the same time nervous. There was also some bad timing for me as well for the interview, it was 30 minutes before the interview and I had just lost internet connection at my apartment for my bill not being paid for the past couple of days, what great timing!. So the best decision I had to come up with was to obviously head to a coffee shop and have my interview there, I pulled up, went inside of the business room of coffee bean and thus commenced my interview with Ashu the cofounder of Makeschool. I felt confident but at the same time nervous. I can tell Ashu meant serious business when have the interview and I felt a lot of tension down my spines. I stiffened up so much I just went ahead into my background without even an introduction of myself. While telling him my history of programming, he questioned me on some things in computer science, I put some thought into my answers but Ashu could already tell that my computer science experience wasn't enough to become a part of Makeschool.

 After My denial of Makeschool, I started to lose hope. I got kicked out of college, I couldn't pay for a coding bootcamp, and I got denied by my school of choice. It was the middle of the year, summer vacation has just reached and I felt as if I had accomplished nothing in my life. So at the time I was ready to commit to something my father did in his younger years, enlist in the Military. I was getting close to this decision until that sparkling, life saving moment hit me. Aimlessly scrolling through facebook, I found an ad on facebook about another computer science program called Lambda School, questions started arising, and I questioned myself "is this a scam?". I clicked on the link and thats pretty much how my journey kicked off. From learning and struggling through Data Structures to presenting my first brown bag, I am more than proud to be a part of the Lambda School family and I never felt so good about the progress I have made throughout the year.

   As Lambda School comes to the closure for cs2, there were so many things that I had to overcome just to get where I am today. I can tell you some moments were easy and there were some moments that I had to overcome, but I can tell you that every moment that I have spent here at Lambda School definitely feels like a home to me. Being around so many gifted people and such caring instructors made me feel right at ease, and it just feels like it was yesterday where I submitted my application not knowing how special it would become. I see so much potential and so much  growth for this school and I would love to help out this education model as much as I can to prove to people that an expensive piece of paper does not define success. Eric Blancas of CS2, with only 9 of us left.