I started Lambda School on September 3rd, 2019. I heard about it through a friend of my wife's at work. He had been in the full stack web development program and a couple of months at that point and only had high regards for their program. I had been interested in switching to a career in software engineering but didn't really know where to start. I am very much a do it yourself kind of person but after 6 months of dabbling in learning software languages and not feeling like I had learned anything substantial I decided I should find an organized program that can give me the guidance needed to learn such a technical and valuable skill.

Lambda School is one of the first educational platforms to be set up the way that they are. I had been interested in a few other coding bootcamp curriculums but I remember seeing their student success rate at around 80% and thought that seemed very promising. Their biggest pro in my opinion is their Income Share Agreement. The Lambda School website describes it as the following...

"The Lambda School Income Share Agreement (ISA) is a form of deferred tuition under which you agree to pay 17% of your post-Lambda School salary for 24 months, but only once you're making more than $50,000 per year (or the equivalent of $4,166.67 per month). The ISA is capped at $30,000, so you'll never pay more than that for any reason. And if you don't get hired? You never pay."

Having read that, my first thought was "Wow, a school that doesn't get paid until I get hired. I'm in!". To this day I believe that every educational system should make the switch to this. It not only keeps the school and instructors accountable for keeping the curriculum up to date and accurate but also helps the student by not having to take out a disturbing amount of student loans that accrue a ridiculous amount of interest.

The other thing that I loved about Lambda School was the community they have built for their students. We used slack mostly for communication and there would always be people offering help, asking questions, having zoom calls, or just supporting each other by chatting about their personal stories and experiences. I still talk to some people from Lambda School and we keep up with each other to see how our careers are going and what we have been working on. They also had two class scheduling options which were awesome because it let the students who were able to treat Lambda as a full time job and attend 40 hours a week or attend classes on a part time basis that were from 6pm to 9pm 4 nights a week with a flexible weekend day as well. I had to work full time during this like a lot of other people but most nights I looked forward to learning more about software and getting to further expand on my knowledge of what we were learning. The accountability factor of having a community and team leads to report to twice a week made me really stay on top of things and gave me the motivation I needed in order to keep consistent with the curriculum.

A couple of cons I can think of with Lambda School have to do with lack of consistency in certain aspects. It was a slower moving bootcamp than most others which I greatly appreciated but it was still moving fast enough sometimes to where there would be too many changes at once. Sometimes our team leads would be switched out too often and it was hard to keep account of the different leadership personalities and how this team lead does things differently than the newest one and so on. There were also times where I could tell they were still ironing out some kinks in the curriculum because they would randomly change things on us which made it confusing to know what we are learning next and what we should currently be doing. I think this will be solved with more experience and time as a school though.

Just after I finished Lambda School I heard that they had made some changes. I have talked to a few people that are still in the program and they are not too happy with the changes. One difference is that they switched to using Canvas instead of their previous self built LMS (which I loved). They also don't have team leads any more. They now have a mentorship program in which every student at Lambda School is a mentor (after completion of the first few units) and a mentee. This doesn't seem like such a bad idea but I've heard that it's been much harder to keep students accountable with this new set up. Lastly, a big con that I thought was so cool and important to have a unit on was Computer Science. They completely removed the computer science unit which was learning python, data structures, and algorithms. I'm really not sure why they took this out of their curriculum completely. Yes, it was the hardest part of Lambda and I wanted to pull my hair out at times when trying to learn it but I'm glad I had to suffer through it.

All of that being said I have mostly great things to say about Lambda School and I'm proud to say that I got my education from them. Before I started my journey in Software I was jumping around in different careers from manual labor jobs to being a barista not knowing what I wanted to do for a long term career. I'm so glad that I get to call myself a Software Engineer now and continually push myself everyday to be the best engineer that I can.

If you have any questions about my experience at Lambda School or just want to see what I'm up to now please feel free to send me an email from the contact form.

Thanks, Jensen Koch