Here's the way most days will work.
- Day begins at 6:30pm.
- You will have a 30 minute lecture on various topics, often covering the most common bugs from the day before.
- After lecture we will do a ~20 minute warm-up. You will code and discuss topics in small groups.
- Afterwards, you will work on our lesson plans on your own computer. These lesson plans mainly consist of exercises and problems sets. The exercises start out easy, but will ramp up quickly. You will work at your own pace.
- If you finish every part of our curriculum, you will work through a series of more challenging problem sets.
- Depending on which group you are assigned to, the order of evengs my vary.
- Class ends at 9:30pm.
- Class runs Monday through Thursday.
- Outside of JumpStart, we still expect you to be working on these projects when you have the time.
On the final day of each week, we will give you an assessment. The assessment will take place at the end of the day and will last for one hour. The assessment will be a power-test—that is, we're going to give you more problems than you can probably solve in an hour, and it's up to you which ones you work on and how many you solve.
We'll give you more information about it going forward, but rest assured that we know what's on the assessment, and will be tailoring the curriculum to give you everything you need to do well.
Just keep coming in, make sure you get plenty of sleep, and you should be fully prepared by the second assessment. We don't expect most people to pass the first assessment, but it should give you a taste of where we want you to be by the second assessment.
- Try to google it first.
- Ask the person next to you to see if they've had the same question
- Ask a TA for help. They will tell you to google it first, so make sure you've done step 1.
A good rule of thumb is: if you're stuck for more than five minutes and the top three google answers don't make sense to you, call for a TA.
As you do the exercises, type everything out as you go along. Don't read text and assume you know it. This usually means that, at some point, you're running ruby my_file.rb and understanding what's going on in the file.
Everyone who clears our bar gets in. This means you should be helping your fellow JumpStarters. You are not competing with them. There is no limit to the number of people we take.
You're all at different levels and will work at different paces. Don't worry if someone moves faster than you or solves problems faster than you. What's important is that you continually build a foundation of what you know. We expect people to be at different places by the middle of the curriculum.
If you DON'T pass the assessments, you can still get into our program! We don't expect everyone to pass the assessments. The worst thing you can do is overstress about the assessments--you can still interview with us later, and you've gotten a bunch of extra practice that you wouldn't have had otherwise by doing JumpStart.
As you work, try the exercises before you consult the readings. Look at the readings once you find an unfamiliar concept or you get stuck.
Feel free to start going through the curriculum on your own. The better prepared you are, the better.
Done reading this page? Please fill out this form and to confirm that you've done all of the pre-curriculum work.