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You sit down in calculus, two days back from missing class. The professor walks to the blackboard and starts in. Two minutes later you're thinking, what is even happening right now? You ask the professor for help after the lecture. You crib notes from a classmate. And you can't shake the feeling: in two days, you fell behind.
In college, catching up at least feels possible — that's what you're there for. When you're balancing a full-time job, a family, and a bootcamp, two missed days hit different.
We know that. So we built our bootcamp around the way real adults actually live. Here's what flexibility means at TripleTen.
TripleTen Extensions and breaks: because real life happens
Three mechanisms keep the promise of flexibility honest.
- The bootcamp is part-time on a flexible schedule. Dive into lessons when your schedule allows. The only fixed dates are project deadlines that come up roughly every two weeks. We recommend 20 hours a week of study time — how and when you spend those hours is 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
Bootcamp flexibility isn't just a human approach to learning, though. The adaptable schedule also helps people truly master the material.
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 set start and end. For students whose education got interrupted during the pandemic, that fixed window didn't leave room to fully absorb the lessons.
We're not running that play. We focus on instruction, not on cramming you into a predefined timeline. If you need more time, you get more time. As Kane found, that's just sound pedagogy.
How the bootcamp flexibility helped our students
The research backs the philosophy. The student stories do too.
Take Jessica Powers. After working herself out of a graphic design role, she shifted to customer service and stuck it out — even as an introvert. Things got serious when she started losing her hearing. If your job is talking to customers all day, listening matters. She needed a pivot.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 aren't outliers. Two out of three of our grads land a tech job within 10 months of graduating. And 80% of our grads don't come from tech — they start from scratch, the same way Jessica and Dillon did.
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.
