Updated Oct 5th 2015 to add fifth cohort / cohort[4] application window details:
Quick facts:
- The application window will be open
from Wednesday, October 7
until Monday, October 26 at 5pm PST. - The fifth cohort will start Monday, January 25, 2016.
Resources:
- Watch the info session from the fourth cohort here.
- Ada Developer Academy's official frequently asked questions.
- Liz Rush's (a student from the first cohort) tips for applying to Ada Developers Academy.
- So you've applied to Ada before..?
- Why do you think you got in this time?
- What was the application process like?
- What was the application?
- How did you prepare for it?
- Can we see your second video that you worked so hard on?
- What was the interview like?
- Will the application process or interview process be the same for upcoming cohorts?
- How did you feel when you got in?
- Was it worth it?
- What's this Ada Cohort[2] vs. Ada's third Cohort stuff about?
- In closing
I don't remember! :(
I'm pretty sure that at some point one or more of my friends approached me and said, "Hey, Jeri, this school looks like it's up your alley! You'd better apply!" But for the life of me, I can't seem to remember who pointed me there and who therefore deserves a huge hug and series of super sincere thank yous (and maybe chocolate?) in return for sending me Ada's way.
But I do remember that it was before the second cohort's application process, because I applied back in 2014.
Well, I didn't get in the first time! I poured a lot of energy into my technical assessments the last time around but wrote & edited the video last-minute. It was terrible, sort of all over the place. And it had a bunch of rude jokes and comments that seemed clever to me at the time -- at 4am, twelve hours into a marathon of video-editing and getting tired of watching the same thing again and again.
I worked a lot harder on the video. Also, I'd spent the time between getting rejected from Cohort[1] and applying to Cohort[2] working on code in my free time. My friends were extremely supportive of my learning efforts & I discovered quickly which ones were great at answering the questions I thought I was asking. They continued to be amazingly supportive and helpful during the application process as well. Once I started asking for help, I was blown away by how invested my friends were in my success.
Um. Terrible and wonderful and horrible and amazing -- sometimes all at the same time, sometimes swinging back and forth in rapid succession. I felt like someone was constantly pelting me with water balloons they'd mistakenly filled with emotions instead of water.
There was an announcement to the Ada Developers Academy mailing list on February 2nd about applications for the third cohort opening on February 9th. The deadline for turning in applications would be February 23rd -- two weeks later. We would hear back about interviews by early- to mid-March, and then by the end of the month we would hear back about final admissions decisions.
I had so much nervous energy the whole time. I poured it all into my application.
The application had three main parts both times I applied:
- A 3-5 minute YouTube introduction video that also answered 4-5 provided questions.
- Other introductory / about me materials, like submissions of a resume as a Markdown file on GitHub Gist.
- If you're not familiar with it, Markdown is a language (like BBCode) that takes plain text and makes it more presentable without having to learn a full language like HTML first. Markdown's advantage is that it doesn't fill its source files with a bunch of weird language tags. Instead, they're still quite readable as text files!
- When I applied to Cohort[2], they added two recommendation letters to this step.
- Completion of some technical assessments.
- When I applied to Cohort[1], the technical assessments were:
- A couple logic games with short answer questions, and
- Several short answer questions about some provided documentation.
- When I applied to Cohort[2], the technical assessment was:
- A large spreadsheet file and several short answer questions about the data contained within it.
- When I applied to Cohort[1], the technical assessments were:
Because I was mostly concerned about the video aspect, I spent the week from February 2nd to February 9th consuming video applications for other schools. In particular, I found Tufts to have a ton of open and inspiring content, which I devoured and inhaled in every spare moment of free time. My roommates were sick of college application videos by the end the first hour, but they begrudgingly tolerated my recurring evening theft of the PlayStation & TV as I watched YouTube video after YouTube video.
Once the application details were released on the 9th, I started writing a script for the video. I sent it to a few friends who worked in tech or who were articulate speakers or who worked as copyeditors / in writing and asked for as much red ink as possible. I borrowed a really nice camera from another friend and bought a few friends dinner in exchange for help filming and driving around to get to places where I wanted to film. I went to the Living Computer Museum and kept asking people who worked there for permissions to shoot a short clip until one of them finally caved. >_>
When I finally got around to editing the video, my computer crashed. I tried to restart it. I tried unplugging it from the wall before starting it again. Nope. Still 100% unresponsive. I had bricked my computer. My majestic roommates came through for me again, this time offering up a desktop computer as far away from the PlayStation as possible. Coincidence? Okay, probably. I copied and pasted my video and audio recordings again and again until I finally arrived at a somewhat reasonable end product. Which I then ran over to the PlayStation to watch. I'm pretty sure I didn't elbow my roommates out of the way, but it was close.
For the assessment, I spent a few hours playing around with the data. Initially, I used Google Drive. After crashing my browser a couple times, I switched over to Excel for some more resource-intensive operations. I made some really cool charts and wrote up all my answers in a gist.
When I went to submit my application, I found out that a gist was not required and that I was supposed to paste my answers into these tiny text boxes that looked like they had room for 75 characters. Not even a whole tweet! Um. I pasted the URL to my gist and separate URLs for the charts in all of the text boxes. >_>
Most of my classmates' videos were just them talking in front of a camera -- in some cases, the video was a single take. In this Autostraddle article by my classmate Loraine Kanervisto, she links to Liz Rush's application video. Liz graduated from the first cohort, and she also wrote this amazing post with tips about the application.
But, yes, you can totally see my video as well.
Terrifying! I had two different interviews back-to-back: a panel with general job-interview-y questions and a separate technical interviewer with a single interviewer.
My panel had three people, and it sort of felt like they were playing good cop, bad cop, chaotic neutral cop. They asked a bunch of questions that felt really hard at the time, and I came out of it feeling like I'd bombed the whole thing. I went into the technical interview feeling pretty dumb and broken. But I got into Ada's third cohort, anyway! Don't stress too much about how you feel the day of -- during the panel or technical portion. If you're offered an interview, don't forget that Ada already thinks you're awesome.
My technical interview started with a short debrief of the panel interview, and then we moved onto the technical portion: answering a series of questions by searching for things on the web. In some cases, the next question was influenced by the answer of the previous question, which I found very interesting and fun. When we ran out of time, I felt more annoyed that my time playing the game was over than worried or upset that I hadn't answered all the questions. To the point where I almost asked to keep the list of questions so I could finish on my own at home.
I suspect it won't be entirely the same. The second cohort's application period was four weeks long, while my cohort's was only two -- but both times it was required to have a resume posted as a markdown file to GitHub Gists. My cohort has different teachers from the last, and Ada is currently looking to hire at least one more teacher. The sponsoring companies for the next cohort will also probably be a bit different than the companies for mine. The steering committee, I believe, is mostly the same people, so their influence on the process is probably pretty similar to previous rounds. Also worth considering is the slew of amazing volunteers who help with the interviews themselves. And there may be other concerns and people that I have not realized influence the process.
For my part, I had heard that LSAT Logic Games were used for technical assessments during the application process or technical interviews in the past, but my cohort instead had a large spreadsheet file and then literally searching for information online. However, since I only knew about the LSAT Logic Games, I devoured as many LSAT prep materials as I could find in the days leading up to my interview. Did they help? Yes: I had fun, and I got to exercise my logic muscles, which are pretty integral to programming and solving problems.
Like it was happening to someone else. Through Twitter, several of my future classmates and I were able to contact each other before class started. We arranged several meetups prior to the class, and after each one I attended the whole world still felt surreal to me. I'm not sure I truly believed it was really happening to me until I came into class the second or third week and realized I really wasn't going back to my old job and I really had a place at Ada. The first two months in the classroom have been great, and I'm looking forward to the next five.
Yes! My classmates rock. The instructors are also amazing (and hilarious in all the right ways). The rest of the leadership team, the magical volunteers who TA for us, the ladies from previous cohorts, and all the people who I've met at Moz, who's currently hosting my cohort-- they're all awesome. There are so many people invested in this program.
It's based on array syntax!
An array is a data type that holds a series of comma-separated values. It's kind of like how a row in a spreadsheet might be stored in a .csv file! When you store things in an array, their locations are called indexes. Array indexes are like page or chapter numbers in a table of contents: they tell you where to look for the content (in this case, the array item) you want.
Indexes start counting from zero, so the first item in a list is index 0. You can access items at a location in an array with square brackets like this: your_array_name[0] or, in my case, cohort[2].
cohort = [first, second, third, fourth]cohort[0]isfirstcohort[1]issecondcohort[2]isthird<-- that's where I am!cohort[3]isfourthcohort[4]isfifth<-- applications are about to open for this cohort!
If you have any other questions, feel free to tweet me!
--@DrVonnJerryXLII, last updated Stardate 2015/10/5
My interview online is tomorrow and I'm wondering what I should be wearing or should I have a headset?