If you have been following me, you know that I have been finishing coding challenges and interviewing with App Academy for the past few weeks. It has been a fun, fairly long process during which I have learned a lot about programming in Ruby. Here is a brief overview of the the timelines involved in the process, for those of you who are still thinking of applying.
- Sent in application on May 26th, 2013
- Received first coding challenge on May 27th
- Prepared for the challenge in a day and took the coding challenge on May 29th
- Received the second coding challenge on May 30th (wow, that was fast, you guys!!)
- It took me a while to prep for the second coding challenge because there was a lot of material to go through and a ton of example problems to solve. I took my second coding challenge on June 3rd.
- Received an interview invite on June 4th (seriously, it’s like they don’t want to give me any time to breathe :P)
- My interview kept getting postponed, but I finally talked to Peter Lin (one of the TAs) on June 13th. It was an interesting interview. Peter was gracious and laughed at some of my very bad (nervous) jokes. Bless his heart. He also threw a very interesting problem at me (it involved cats. I was a a crazy cat lady for a few minutes while solving the problem!). I must say that I was a bit stumped with the problem, not because it was hard, but because I was so psyched for the interview that my brain just stopped working completely and I made a complete fool of myself. But thankfully I was able to recover a bit during the process and provide him with a fairly decent solution, which worked, but was probably very crude. Post interview, I worked on the problem for a little while longer and sent him an email with my completed solution + some insight I gathered while solving the problem. I think this was a good move on my part because it shows that I am very serious about this opportunity and will work very hard to get in.
- On June 14th, I received an invite for a second interview. This time with Kush Patel, one of the co-founders of App Academy. This is good, right? If the co-founder wants to talk to me, I must’ve done something right! Oh, the wishful thinking.
- Had my final interview today, June 17th. Again, interesting interview, interesting coding problem. This time I actually solved the problem while talking to Kush, which was awesome because I didn’t think I would be able to do that. But I’m stumped that they asked me no questions about my background or why I think I am a good fit for the class. I didn’t even get a chance to speak to Kush and ask him some questions I had. That is a major boo. Get to know me, I’m more than the code I write!
So, that’s my App Academy application journey so far. Now to just keep my fingers crossed and hope & pray that I’m accepted into the program. Send some good vibes my way, good people. And feel free to ask me questions about the process!
Edit - application was rejected on June 17th. Read about how much of a sad panda I am, here.