hello my name is kate bond 

i started with dev10 probably in the 

last eight months uh 

i'm now working at a company here in 

minnesota 

i'm a recent graduate of college here in 

minneapolis st paul 

i majored in neuroscience with minors in 

biology chemistry and data science and i 

was also pre-med 

when i started college like many people 

i had no idea what i wanted to do i 

really didn't even know what was out 

there but i knew that when i was younger 

i really liked the sciences so i thought 

maybe pre-med would be a great track to 

go down 

so i started out took all those 

introduction classes 

i ended up sticking 

with pre-med but i was a neuroscience 

major 

took a lot of 

psychology biology chemistry 

those were definitely the faint focuses 

of my college career but my junior year 

i did take an introduction 

comp sci class 

i kind of took it as more like a 

like a joke i was like oh 

um like calm side could be fun but you 

know like not in my 

like wheel house like not something that 

is like especially interesting to me and 

then i took it and i absolutely fell in 

love 

i was like how do i get more of this 

what can i do 

so i ended up taking that data science 

minor and taking as many classes as i 

could in the last two years of my 

college career but in no way could i 

switch what i was doing i went to a 

liberal arts school but there was no 

diverting the path at that point so 

i kind of was like i don't really know 

how i'm going to get into this but this 

is something i'm really interested in 

something i really want to do 

so by the end of my senior year 

i was looking at jobs thinking about 

different career paths i didn't really 

know what i wanted to do still was 

really interested in computer science 

but i did have a different major 

uh different expertise and then i 

stumbled across dev 10 

which 

at the time i was so excited about i 

thought that it was perfect fit it would 

take 

me um 

and introduce me into the career 

introduced me into the field 

things i could do 

so i did end up applying and obviously 

it ended up working out 

but it was 

such a blessing to find something that 

would introduce me into the career while 

still paying me um and getting me a job 

right off the bat after boot camp was 

amazing 

so i ended up starting with dev 10 two 

days after i graduated from college 

which was 

quite a change um 

training i would say is basically 

college on steroids or 

something like that um definitely not a 

nine to five job takes up weekends 

nights but it's definitely worth it it 

was three months 

not that much of your life 

you sit down you grind it out 

but they teach you so much in those 

three months and 

i would just say the instructors were 

amazing i never would have thought that 

they would get people so dedicated and 

ready to help 

i remember 

about four weeks in 

um we have assignments every weekend and 

they were due on monday mornings and i 

was working pretty late on a sunday 

night and my code just wouldn't work i 

had tried so much i've been working on 

it for hours and i couldn't get past 

this point and so kind of out of 

desperation i pinged one of our 

instructors 

and he 

pinged me right back which i was not 

expecting and he was like yeah i can 

help you um let's hop on a call and no 

way was i expecting that in my opinion i 

was like could you please help me 

tomorrow like i'd really love to go over 

this more whenever your free time but he 

was like nope right now like let's let's 

hop on a call so it's probably like 10 

p.m at night 

we were on a call for probably like two 

and a half hours 

uh when we finally 

understood it it was kind of like a 

hallelujah moment but 

there's no way that i 

well maybe there was a way but it was 

going to take me a while to get past 

that point and like him being so willing 

to jump on that call with me was just 

like a be of 

above and beyond 

like something i would never have 

expected and really shows like how 

dedicated those instructors are 

to helping to teaching they want you to 

succeed and you really feel that 

some of them were boot camp people 

themselves so they know that this 

process works um 

it was just so great to like have people 

that wanted you to succeed so much 

i now work for a retail company in 

minnesota um and i work as a software 

engineer tester 

which isn't exactly what our training 

was 

preparing us for um it was more coding 

based and what i'm doing now is more 

testing based but definitely does rely 

on code and so you need to have a full 

understanding 

uh one of the most important things i 

think that the training taught me 

wasn't necessarily coding it wasn't the 

specifics of languages wasn't anything 

like that 

it's actually just how to push yourself 

to think to want to learn more 

the training process is really rigorous 

and it's very short time so you are 

learning a lot on your own and the 

instructors are there to guide you but 

it is kind of a self-taught process you 

will learn as much as you want to 

and 

going into my first few months for my 

company i really did feel that i knew 

how to push myself to ask the right 

questions 

to learn things on my own and then know 

when i was stuck which was something the 

training definitely taught me 

so it was nice to have that foundation 

of how to think in the coding aspect or 

like how to think in this industry 

because it is a lot different 

to know 

when something doesn't make sense and 

want something you can probably figure 

it out on your own but 

i think that while the training coding 

wise or language-wise was an exact fit 

to what i'm doing right now i think the 

training was incredibly important 

and 

um it's just been a really great like 

learning experience for me especially 

right out of college i really 

appreciated the dev 10 program a lot.