E Laroche

Review of Hack Reactor

The environment at MakerSquare is one of enthusias...

The environment at MakerSquare is one of enthusiastic learning. It was a joy to be around intelligent, knowledge-seeking individuals, who were united under the common cause of career change and coding. Pair programming was encouraged and students enthusiastically tutored each other throughout lessons under the watchful guidance of some dedicated instructors. This course is completely immersive, 9-6pm, M-F, and also requires outside study as well as two weekend-long hackathons. You must be prepared for this kind of commitment coming into MakerSquare. You will learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, and Rails, as well as version control, GitHub, relational databases, and so much more.

The Instructors are incredibly passionate about their school and their curriculum, and are often willing to go above and beyond normal expectations to see their students (past, present, and future) succeed. They have created a wonderful learning environment into a much needed field.

90% of your peers will be wonderful, caring persons with a liking for teamwork. As in any school, some personalities will slip under the radar that have no regard for professionalism. Largely, they are in the minority.

The Hackathons were the most useful weekends I spent at MakerSquare. They are what solidified my understanding of rails and how a professional dev team will operate.

The quality of life at MakerSquare is a whirlwind of learning. Be prepared to start dreaming in erb.

The career services offered by MakerSquare were 10 times more valuable to me than my alumni services offered by SHSU. Jessica is a great coach on everything from resumes to interviews to how to gracefully accept (or decline) an offer. She is impressive in her resolve and makes herself readily available through, email, phone, and office visits.

The tuition was very pricey, but the payoff has been more than worth it. I had more interviews after MakerSquare than I had received in the last two years of job hunting. I also have 100% career satisfaction. No regrets from this gal! If I had to do it all again I would in a heartbeat. Currently, I am employed by a local dev team as a Web Developer and I am learning PHP and Drupal.