Week 1 at gSchool: Pre-work

Cameron Buckingham is a student at gSchool, a 6-month coding school in Colorado. He blogs each week about his experience at gSchool!

Remember, the Course Report community is eligible for a $500 scholarship to gSchool!

After several months of anticipation and angst, gSchool Denver has finally started. After coming from a marketing background, I was a little nervous about shifting gears and embarking on this new journey. But after my first week all my worries and concerns were lifted away. A large reason for this is the knowledge that our instructors bring to the class and the level of evolvement they expect from their students that goes beyond the classroom. gSchool employs instructor with practical knowledge and experience of the highest caliber. I must say that I am astonished by how much knowledge I leave the classroom with everyday. Before even starting school we were required to do some pre-work which included typing exercises, reading some entry-level materials, watching tutorials of command line manipulation and basic programming exercises. These assignments were very helpful and aiding in my understanding of programming. If it weren't for those exercises, I would have come into this with so many more questions and less confidence.

The pre-work was crucial because it familiarized us with the basic tools that we would be using throughout the class. Our first week at school included quite a handful of experiences. We learned about using the Command line, Git, GitHub, and touched on Ruby some text editor exercises. We also got accustomed to some internal tracking tools that would aid our instructor in seeing our progress, and ultimately help us monitor our own progress and successes in class. My favorite thing about this program so far is that is is very personalized. The class sizes are small and all the other students are happy to help their peers once they finish their coursework. gSchool Boulder classmates also dropped into our class to help us complete some exercises. The instructors are eager to get our feedback as well. We rounded out the week with One-on-One's and a retrospective exercises that called for the students to speak on what complemented or brought down our coursework apprehension. This was very powerful for promoting our group's cohesion and gave us more command on our learning experience.

Great first week so far! Only 23 more to go!

Cam