Hiring Day at Fullstack Academy

We’re continually impressed with Fullstack Academy- not only because of their placement rates and intentional curriculum, but also because we’ve personally attended their hiring day twice now, and the final projects speak for themselves.

Unlike the last Fullstack hiring day, there were no presentations by students; instead, each programmer stood at their computers with monitors, as potential employers made their rounds. It mostly resembled a science fair, and gave each employer a chance to have one-on-one time with the students. I must admit, I missed those short product pitches, but the Fullstack team had recorded these and were displaying them throughout the classroom. 

In an industry that is so new, each bootcamp has the opportunity to be as innovative as they want to in their hiring day. Outreach Manager Hannah Jane Buchanan has worked out a system using playing cards to connect students with employers who want to work with them. I brought a friend looking for a developer to work with him on his app, and founder David Yang immediately pointed out several students who would be a good fit.

Andrew Scheuermann, a charismatic student who clearly wants to continue sharpening his front-end development chops, showed us his app Voto, which presents algorithmically sorted, crowd-curated photos and descriptions of the best attractions on earth.

A group of four students showed off their final group project, SnipSnap, which is a search engine for developers to find code examples of JavaScript functions. Students developing projects to teach others how to better learn? Great stuff! One of these students was Jessica Weinberg (one of three women in the graduating class), who showed us her individual project called Find Your Friends, a geolocation based chatting platform for friends that uses the Google Maps API.

An interesting trend I noticed was that Fullstack seemed to have accepted project proposals from outside companies. This is an interesting way for students to get experience with clients before they even graduate. One student built an app specifically for New York incubator DreamIt Ventures to streamline their demo days. Another duo, Andrew Glancy and Edward Izzo, presented their project, a full-stack Javascript storefront complete with exommerce and CMS solutions for a brick-and-mortar poster store in TriBeCa.

The students we talked with were personable and excited to learn- a great pool of applicants for a hiring company!

Want to learn more about Fullstack Academy? Check out their School Page on Course Report or their website here.