Denver’s gSchool: 6 months and 60 hours per week turns you into a web developer making $60K

gschool
Bart Lorang

Author: Bart Lorang

@bartlorang

As any software company knows, good software engineers are hard to find.

More often than not, graduates receiving Computer Science degrees are not very good software engineers.

It’s sad, but true.

I can personally attest to this phenomenon as I received my CS degree in the year 2000 and many of my classmates simply weren’t very good – they had done some classroom exercises, learned some theory, and maybe completed a few projects, but they really didn’t have that innate command of software development practices.

Lots of people apply to FullContact with CS degrees that can barely write code.

Part of the problem is the curriculum (often years outdated) and another part of the problem is that not enough time is focused on hacking and building stuff.

I was able to refine my craft because I was working 60+ hours a week as a professional software engineer during high school and college – not because of anything I learned during school.

So, when Jim Deters told me of his plans for the gSchool, I was super excited. The gSchool focuses on hacking, building stuff and is staffed by a team of world class instructors. It’s everything a ‘software engineering’ degree should be – but universities simply haven’t gotten around to creating.

The gSchool premise is simple:

  • Become a professional web developer in 6 months through an intensive 60 hour a week program.
  • Get a job paying at least $60K per year – guaranteed.
  • Tuition:  $20,000 – which includes the requisite Apple laptop and admittance into the awesome program, held at Galvanize in Denver, Colorado.
  • Scholarships and Payment options:  several $5K scholarships from partner companies will be made available to select students. The gSchool has also set up a payment system allowing students to spread most of the cost over the next five years with a monthly payment of just $199. Combine the two and you’re left with an up-front fee of $5K.

You don’t need to be an expert to apply.  If you’re a novice that’s totally fine.

Applications end very soon – December 3rd, 2012 — so you should head over to gSchool.it and apply right away!

 

  • http://twitter.com/j3 Jeff Casimir

    Thanks for the writeup, Bart. We’re starting to review applications today and will be doing interviews later this week. I can’t wait to show you results in a few months!

    • http://fullcontact.com/ Bart Lorang

      looking forward to it, Jeff!

    • http://twitter.com/RudyOnRails Kevin Musiorski

      Is the deadline at midnight tonight? or tomorrow?

      • http://twitter.com/j3 Jeff Casimir

        11:59PM Denver time on Monday 12/3

  • http://twitter.com/nuttycom Kris Nuttycombe

    As someone who came to software engineering entirely as a hacker (my university degree is in geology) I can attest that a CS degree isn’t necessary to become skilled. However, I also feel like I gained a tremedous amount from going back and actually doing formal CS coursework after I’d been working for a few years. I do hope that this school will cover real CS topics as part of its curriculum – complexity analysis and algorithm design are essential – and I also hope that it teaches something about software architecture, which neither traditional CS programs nor coming to writing software as a hacker really do well; neither gives you any idea of how to actually design *systems* as opposed to just web services or small bits of functionality.