Well, I got a paid internship( a bit long)

Hey everybody, as you can tell by the title, I got an offer for a paid internship in web dev! My apologies for the sloppy writing - I’ve got a lot to learn before I start this internship and I am going to write this quickly so I can get back to work.

A little background about me: I am a mid 20’s college dropout who has spent the past 7/8 years working low paying, unfulfilling, unengaging jobs. At a certain point I knewI simply cannot live the rest of my life working like this, and decided I was going to try and learn to code. Before I learned about FCC, I decided to teach myself Python (which I really enjoyed - I will be returning to Python after I’m settled in at this internship), but after a bit of research, I decided to try out web dev, and stumbled across FCC. After I signed up, I got straight to work and spent as much time as I possibly could working though the curriculum. I’ll estimate that I spent about 20 hours a week coding for ~6 months. Okay, on to the good part.

I have a friend that had told me the company he works for was looking for a few interns and that I should apply.

Fast forward a week or two, and I am sitting in an office where the walls are made of white board and I am speaking with the lead developer.

Interview was pretty short and straight forward, lasted about an hour, and he asked me questions about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some I knew, some I did not. He knows I am new to web dev and was very understanding if I didn’t know something - he even taught me a few things too. After that, we went on to the algorithm challenge, which was incredibly simple. Took me about 30 seconds and 4-5 lines of code. Turns out the part I was most worried about was the easiest part. After that I showed him some of the projects I was working on.

Honestly I didn’t think I did too well in the interview. The interviewer definitely found some holes in my knowledge, especially in CSS, and we had to skip an entire portion of the interview because I was not at all familiar with the subject matter (he was asking me questions about cookies and databases). I thought for sure I wasn’t going to get an email back because of this, and I walked out feeling defeated… but sure enough, I just got an email saying that not only was I accepted, they are also going to pay me!

Now I feel I should mention that I know a lot of the people who work at the company, and I would regularly see the interviewer as I am friends with his co-worker. Sure, you can make the argument that I only got the offer BECAUSE I know a lot of people in the office, but I think this is a classic example of “Its not what you know, its who you know”. Networking is just as important as your skillset, and my experience is proof of that.

Not only do I have a gig, the company I currently work for asked me to redo their website the very same day I got the offer! 6 months of running through FCC challenges and working on my own personal projects are finally starting to pay off. While I did not actually finish all of FCC’s curriculum(in fact, I only completed 500-600 challenges and only 3 projects - but I have a ton of other things I’ve built outside of FCC), FCC has been a MASSIVE help and opened my eyes to the world of web dev. FCC - thank you.

Happy holidays everybody :slight_smile:

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Nice, congrates :slight_smile:

Awesome congratulations!!! I’ve heard it a lot (in general, not just here) of devs saying they were sure they bombed an interview because there were gaps in their knowledge, only to end up getting an offer. I think the bigger picture isnt so much that you know everything, but that you demonstrate the ability to learn… You clearly showed that you have what it takes, something to be super proud of!

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Congrats! What kind of personal projects were you working on outside of FCC?

Congrats! Getting paid internship is a great first step. You’ll learn a lot and not be worried about eating! (that can be a thing unfortunately).

And who you know helps so much because they can vouch for you as well.

A lot of different kinds of things! I took a few udemy courses on top of using FCC, and discovered all the awesome things you can do with code. I made things like snake, brick breaker, a weather app, John Conways Game of Life, sorting algorithm visualizations, a maze generator, and even a NASA API that tells you what asteroid is closest to Earth, along with information about that asteroid(how big, how far away, etc). I start in two weeks, and I’ll be making react components, so now my focus is on becoming as proficient as I can in React before I start.

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Congrats to you!

I am also in my mid, almost late, twenties and the last few years working low wages jobs. IM-DONE-WITH-THAT. Currently working on the very first five projects and looking forward to be in a similar position to you soon.

Best of luck.

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That’s great! Congratulations. I’m happy for you. Also, I love your username.

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kudos pal ! hope you get more of success on this…

Congrats man…happy for you

wooh…It’s really good for you and congrats mate.