Yes, Our Bootcamp Is Flexible. Here’s Why That Matters for Students

You find a seat in your math class — calculus, let’s say. You were only out for two days, but when the professor goes to the blackboard and starts in on the lesson, you find yourself wondering, What the heck is even going on? Maybe you go to the professor after the lecture’s over and ask for some help. Maybe you crib notes from one of your classmates. But you can’t escape the knowledge that, in only two days, you fell behind.

In a college situation, catching up might feel more achievable — you’re there to focus on studying, after all. But when you’re balancing work, family obligations, and a bootcamp, this can be more difficult.

And we know that. So we’ve made our bootcamp flexible. Here’s what that means for our students.

Extensions and breaks: because real life happens

We have three mechanisms that ensure we follow through on our promise of flexibility. First, our bootcamp is part-time, meaning you can dive into lessons when your schedule allows. The only things you need to keep an eye on are the project deadlines that come up roughly every two weeks. So while we recommend spending 20 hours a week studying, how and when you allocate these hours is totally up to you.

But if you find yourself needing more time — maybe something’s come up that is demanding your attention or you need one more week to fully absorb the material — you can use the next two mechanisms:

‍Extensions: These are pauses in which you intend to study to catch up on material you might need some extra time with. They can be taken in week-long increments, which can be stacked one after the other.

‍Breaks: These are pauses in which you don’t intend to study. This might be the best option to go for if you need to deal with an unexpected but critical situation. These can last from one week to three months, and they also are taken in one-week chunks.

There are just two things to note. First, there is a limit to how long both of these pauses can last. After all, an indefinite hiatus in your bootcamp studies won’t help you achieve the career pivot you’re aspiring to. Second, and for similar reasons, we discourage long breaks. However, we know that things happen, so these options are available nonetheless.

What this means for the student: better, more robust learning

Flexibility isn’t just a humane approach to learning, though. The adaptable schedule also helps people truly master the material.

This is where being in the wake of a massive disruption actually leads to insight. Thomas Kane, economist and Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, researched learning outcomes after the pandemic and found one thing to be certain:

Teaching and learning is a sequential process and each step in that process takes a certain amount of time, so when we have disrupted it, if you're not providing more time within each year, it's really hard to generate much more learning per year than you were generating before.

The school year has a defined beginning and end. And for learners whose education was interrupted during the pandemic, the proscribed, inflexible timeframe didn’t allow them to fully absorb information.

Yeah, we’re not about that. We’re focused on providing instruction, not fitting a predefined timetable. So, no matter the reason, if you need more time, you can have more time. As Kane found, this is just sound pedagogy.

How this helped our students

While the research backs out philosophy, the anecdotes do as well. Just take Jessica Powers for example. After working herself out of a job as a graphic designer, she shifted to customer service, where she stuck things out even though she was an introvert.

But things became dire when she started losing her hearing. After all, if you’re supposed to interact with customers all day, listening to them is paramount. She needed to make a pivot. After doing some research, she found herself attracted to TripleTen’s Quality Assurance Engineering Bootcamp, partially because it took only five months. “I was in a position that I needed to get out of, so speed was a factor in choosing QA over software engineering,” she said.

But as she was studying, there was a family emergency. She messaged the TripleTen team, took a break, and came back when things settled. “It was a huge relief to put things on pause,” she said. In fact, this flexibility made the educational experience unique.

Learning something new can be stressful, but it was probably one of the least stressful learning experiences I've ever had. Jessica Powers, TripleTen grad

She took advantage of the opportunity to join an externship through TripleTen, and after graduating, she landed a QA job. It’s proven to be the career she’d been looking for: “I actually feel like, for the first time in quite a while, I've found a spot like a puzzle piece that actually fits in the box.”

But like we’ve said, if you need some extra time just to get a handle on the material you’re learning, you can absolutely go for an extension. Such was the case with Dillon Arnold_{Cleared for Career Takeoff: Dillon Arnold’s TripleTen Story}.

He’d just gotten his associate’s degree in finance, but as he was staring down two more years of studying, he found the field uninspiring. ”The lifestyle and the typical accounting life was just really boring,” he said.

But what else would he do? Well, an ad for TripleTen sparked his curiosity, and he started checking the bootcamp out. It seemed like the thing for him. He enrolled.

He was starting without a background in tech, saying, “I came in not even knowing what HTML_{Becoming an HTML/CSS Developer} was.” But he stuck to it, putting in extra practice on personal projects. Still, he was balancing his studies with a full-time job, which meant he felt he needed some extra time to really digest all the new knowledge. So he requested an extension, and it helped him really lock in his new know-how.

I took a break to really go over everything that I just learned in the last sprint and wrote some code. And then I moved on to the next sprint once I felt good. Dillon Arnold, TripleTen grad

Following that, he got involved in the TripleTen community, dedicated himself to a tech job search, and soon enough, he landed a new role as a web software developer.

Discover if TripleTen is right for you

Jessica and Dillon are far from outliers. In fact, 87% of our grads_{Why TripleTen Grads Have an 87% Chance of Getting Hired} land jobs they train for within six months of graduating from their programs.

So now it’s your turn. Discover more about our bootcamp and see what we have to offer — book a call with one of our experts today.