I didn’t go to college because I didn’t see the point. You couldn’t convince 18 years old Rae that there was a better thing to learn than a new language and I didn’t need college to achieve that. And in true developer fashion, once I decided what I actually wanted to learn (around age 23) I found the quickest possible way to hit my goal (I sincerely believe in working smarter not harder) and I applied with General Assembly in DC, interviewed, and made it in.

At the time, they called it a Web Development Immersive, where for 5 days a week from 9AM to 5PM, I showed up to “work” and spent the whole day learning how to code and develop web applications. It was extremely difficult for me. Not because I didn’t understand, but because it was fast paced, just like the tech industry is. Each week we learned a language for 2-3 days and then we never went back to it again, just added more and more languages on. By the time I graduated, I felt like I became a pro at Googling. It was quite the investment and if I had to go back and do it again, I would still choose to take the Immersive over trying to fully teach myself a coding language on my own. But it was hard, just as hard if not harder than what I would’ve learned in college courses.

In college, you have time. You’re given YEARS to master something, not days. It impresses me how much I did in my short time at GA, but that was only the very beginning of the journey that brought me to where I am today in my business.

What steps did you take to master what you do? Was it college or are you self taught? What brought you to the path you chose to take towards learning your craft?