Changing cohorts was not an easy decision. I had met up with a couple people from the November 2016 SF cohort and clicked with all of them. I was excited to work with all of them and crank through the boot camp together. However, a couple circumstances outside of my control, as well as a couple other factors that seemed to just make sense, drove me to make the decision to postpone my start date at App Academy by two months.

The first of these circumstances, and what really initiated the possibility of postponing my start date was living accommodations that fell through. App Academy had recommended a dorm/hostel-like service as living accommodations. The one I was interested in looked great, and had an established reputation with multiple locations. However, these other locations were significantly further away from App Academy than the SoMA location. There was a catch however, the SoMA location was still in development, but was taking reservations in advance. They estimated that they would finished 3 weeks before the November cohort would start, but even at two weeks out, they weren’t ready to open. This fact made me uneasy about starting at App Academy, and I ended up cancelling my reservation to that tech house to search for another one (They never ended up finishing that site, but moved to a different building instead in SoMA. I heard this was due to restricting permits by the city of San Francisco).

Once I cancelled my reservation, I had a problem. I had no where to stay, and with less than two weeks to find a place, the pressure was mounting. Alongside all that, I still had to move out of my current place of residence, and drop off a majority of my belongings at my parent’s place until the boot camp was over. By this point, the stress was pretty real. And to top that all off, and yes, living accommodations weren’t even the crux of my problems, I was no where near close to finishing the prep work.

Worse yet, I didn’t have a clear understanding of majority of the prep work concepts, which was a huge downer for me. If you recall from what I mentioned in my a/A application process article, I want to build a firm foundation in programming knowledge, and be a phenomenal and influential developer. I can’t do that with a sub-par understanding of basic coding concepts. How did I get into this position you may ask?

It’s simple really. I was accepted into my cohort relatively late, and had 3 weeks to do 4 weeks’ worth of prep work. Now mind you, this would have been easily possible if I just wanted to get the work done. Refer to the solutions a couple times for any problems I didn’t know how to do, keep practicing until I could do the problems with my eyes closed and I was good to go. But doing it this way, didn’t deepen my understanding as it would have if I constantly asked “Why?” whenever I hit a bump in the road. And asking “Why?” is much more important than asking “How?”

I have mixed feelings about the switch, but overall I do believe that I made the best choice for my future. Although I would have liked to start earlier, and finish earlier, it’s infinitely better for me to have a higher chance of finishing the program. I made a whole bunch of friends from study groups in the November cohort, and I for sure would have loved to work with them, but I’ve made some new friends in the January cohort and look forward to working with them as well. And the best part? I definitely feel a lot more prepared when it comes to the material on the prep assignments. I also have more time to cover and have some exposure to concepts in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, rather than JUST the Ruby language. I believe that having some sort of exposure to these concepts will lessen the surprise factor when learning them in the program, though if only initially.