General Assembly Software Engineering Immersive Program 2019 Review

I know there are a lot of people out there considering a coding bootcamp like I once was. I think it is very helpful to get to know what a bootcamp looks like from people who have been. I read countless blogs, and watched tons of YouTube videos on people’s bootcamp experiences. I did two posts a week on this blog about what I was going through week by week. I would highly recommend checking those out if you want a more in depth view at what my General Assembly bootcamp experience looked like while I was in the trenches.

If this is your first reading experience of what a bootcamp is like then I suggest you continue your research beyond this as well. I think the best decisions come when people are as well informed as they possibly can be. Don’t forget to check out Course Report to see thousands of bootcamp reviews.

My Background

I will give you a little overview of what my background is, and why I chose to go to a bootcamp, specifically General Assembly. I was a barber in Oklahoma City finishing up my associates before I decided on a coding bootcamp. Two semesters before I finished up, I took an Intro To Programming class. I saw the word pseudocode in the course description so I thought I needed to start learning/understanding coding on my own before the class started. I had Codecademy recommended to me by a lot of people, and that is where I got my start. I started going to Techlahoma Meetup events in OKC to start networking & have a chance to learn from other people instead of just the self-taught learning I was doing at home. I got an A in the class & I really enjoyed learning even if it was learning theory instead of straight coding.

I was planning a move to Denver in the summer of 2019, so I decided to check out the bootcamp options available in Denver. General Assembly was one of many, but the course length, price, and coursework stuck out to me. They even had a scholarship for people that identify as female to help bring more diversity into tech. It’s hard to turn down a 1k scholarship. The scholarship brought my total price down to $12,950. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend that much money on something that I could teach myself using the internet. The tipping point for me was researching General Assembly as a company & where I could find their grads at. I decided that it was worth the almost 13k to have access to General Assembly’s network of people. I broke it down to be about $33 per hour spent learning in the 12 week program. I paid a heck of a lot more for every hour of learning during my college education, so I felt like it pretty fairly priced. General Assembly also offered Outcomes support for those who graduate.

Outcomes support isn’t job placement necessarily, but it is job placement help. Outcomes can’t make you fill out applications, do your homework, or make you be an incredible interviewer; however, it can help give you tools to do the job search, be a better interviewer, and be a better job seeker in general. As long as you are doing what you’re supposed to do to stay on track with the job search then Outcomes support is available to you until you get your first job. Enough about me & why I chose GA, let’s get to the good stuff!

My General Assembly Experience

If you want more of a play-by-play of my experience, then I do recommend reading through my posts from each week of the course. As you know, I did my bootcamp research so I knew it was going to be really fast-paced. I still did not understand quite how fast-paced until I went through the program myself. I assumed I would have at least one day on the weekend to Lyft drive. This happened only a couple weekends out of my time in bootcamp. I was doing homework & studying for anywhere between 10-20 hours a weekend. I had homework most evenings as well during the bootcamp. When they tell you to “say goodbye to freetime” they really mean it.

General Assembly says that it is a beginner bootcamp, and I don’t disagree with this; however, if you have never tried coding by yourself then I would at least try to get the basics of HTML & CSS down before attending. In my program we pretty much jumped straight into JavaScript. Some of my cohort had done some tutorials and played around with some form of coding before the bootcamp. It was very obvious who had not, and they struggled a little bit more during the course. We started with a group of 19 people & had 15 people graduate. There were two of us that had jobs before graduating, and there were 3-4 more consistently doing interviews during the last few weeks of the course.

We had 4 projects that we created during our time at bootcamp. Project one was a game that we created by ourselves with plain JavaScript/jQuery. My project 1.Project two was a group project where we used Node.js/Express/MongoDB & Mongoose. Link to project 2. Project three was a group project where we used React/Flask/SQL to create a separate back-end that communicates with our front-end. Link to project 3. Project four was a use whatever languages/tools/frameworks that you want to create your own capstone. My capstone. We had deadlines where we would present our projects to the class. I really enjoyed seeing everyone’s ideas & creativity during presentations. Sidenote: These are hosted mainly on Heroku, which is awesome! It is free though, so you may have to wait a few seconds for the applications to wake up.

Our coursework followed the flow of our projects. We learned what we needed for each project in the 2-3 weeks preceding the project. I really enjoyed the fast pace of the course even though there are definitely things I need to take a deeper dive with. A bootcamp can help give you a good foundation, but it really is impossible to learn everything you need to know in just three months. This is not unlike any of my previous school experiences though. I have always learned way more from being on the job rather than being in school. Working in a tech field is quite different than other fields due to it’s fast paced nature. You have to continually learn and keep up with the new things in the tech world. If you are looking for a field where you go to school one time and get a job where you can coast on your knowledge, then this isn’t the field for you. The salaries might look good, but if you don’t enjoy learning then this isn’t the field for you. I’m excited to be in a field where I am basically in school every day learning new things on the job.

We were in a global course which meant all of our classes were taught over Zoom with an instructor in Chicago. Jim Haff was our global instructor. There were three cohorts that attended this class. We used Slack during the class to ask questions. It was not made abundantly clear that this was the format of the class, and I know some of my cohort struggled with the global classes. There are different learning styles, and if this doesn’t suit yours then I would make sure you are doing a class that is truly taught in person. There are pros & cons to whichever class you pick, but just make sure you know what you are getting into. I enjoyed having a really knowledgeable instructor that had been with GA for three years. I felt more comfortable learning from someone with a little bit of tenure. He also wrote all the lesson plans himself which was neat because he actually understood the material he was teaching.

During our time in bootcamp we also had Outcomes classes each week for about 2 hours. Our Outcomes coach was Kimberly English. We were really lucky to have such an amazing Outcomes coach. I know this is definitely an area where you would want someone who understands the job scene in your area, and who understands how to best coach you on being a job-seeker. Outcomes as a whole was awesome, but it was definitely hard to want to take a break from learning the new concepts to go to Outcomes class. Again, there are pros & cons to having Outcomes during the course as well as after versus just doing Outcomes afterwards. The fact that 2 people had jobs upon graduation and a quarter of the class was regularly interviewing by graduation should point to the fact that Outcomes during the week helped us all out. In our Outcomes class we learned about: personal branding, LinkedIn, interviewing strategies, technical interviews/whiteboarding, resume writing, networking, and quite a bit about how to switch careers. None of us had a background in tech which made Outcomes that much more important.

We had a couple hiccups due to switching local teachers about 3/4 of the way through the course. General Assembly is big on feedback, and when they realized there were some problems they did their best to fix them/compensate for them. We also had a TA that got a job about halfway through the course, but GA got another TA in immediately so that we could still have extra help outside of class. There was a TA available at GA from 5:00pm to 7:00pm to help with homework/lesson material review. Our class started at 9:00am and went to 5:00pm. We had lunch from 12:30-1:45 which most of us ended up working on our homework during. I think lunch could have been shorter to allow for more instructional time, but it wasn’t something that I would say was a con necessarily. I have no qualms about my experience with GA as I got what I wanted out of my experience.

So at this point you’re wondering if the money was worth it. I think that is an individual choice that has to be made. The money was worth it for me because I got a job, and I learned so much information in such a short amount of time that I wouldn’t have been able to on my own. I made some good friends at GA which I wasn’t expecting. We had a very non-traditional style cohort due to being very collaborative. We would also do happy hour on Friday where we grabbed drinks together. The Denver GA classes are held inside of a coworking space which was a really cool experience. It had all the perks of a coworking space you could want which made the cost of tuition seem a little better. I’d be happy to talk with you if you have any specific questions about coding bootcamp. You can drop me a comment or hit me up on LinkedIn. I can’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, but I can definitely be a resource for you.

Week 12, Capstone Finished

I know I’ve slacked the last couple of weeks on my two posts a week, but it was capstone time! Any time spent on my computer was time spent working on that. I’m super happy to announce that I’m officially graduated and my capstone was finalized yesterday! Capstone was the first full-stack application that I had to do by myself. I realized some pros & cons to working alone that I hadn’t noticed before capstone.

A con of working alone is your idea generation. It is always easier to put your heads together to come up with an awesome idea. A pro of working alone is that there are no GitHub issues. I’m sure you could find a way to have GitHub issues if you really tried. A con of working alone is that you don’t have a partner that you can quickly ask a question to. There was definitely a lot more Googling of simple things that I knew, but that I needed a refresher on syntax or something. A pro of working by yourself is the ability to do time-management more effectively. For example: I knew my time span, I knew everything that needed to get done in the time span, and I didn’t have to worry about someone else’s time management.

I’m really excited to continue to learn and grow as a developer. Creating new projects is the best way to learn in my opinion. It’s crazy to look back at what I didn’t know 3 months ago, and what I know now. It’s also pretty eye opening to realize all of the things I still don’t know. The last 3 months have been jam packed with learning, and I’m not sure how I could have fit any more in; however, I’m elated to know there is still so much more out there. That is the reason I got into this field in the first place.

My Capstone

I had a few different ideas for my capstone project, but the one I ended up going with is a date idea generator & date idea tracker. It is always hard for me to think of new & exciting date idea. I know this is also the case for a lot of other people. It’s not that we don’t want to do a new date idea, but sometimes it can be difficult to generate a new date idea. My application allows people to get random date ideas, and sign up for an account to create & keep track of new date ideas.

I really wanted to try to deploy this using AWS since that is what I’ll be working with in a few weeks. I have a free-tier account that I started researching how to deploy React apps on. There are some intricate networking ideas that I need to become more familiar with. Last Wednesday I still didn’t have any code written, nor did I really understand how to deploy with AWS so I switched my game plan. At this point I had from Wednesday to the following Thursday to get a full-stack application working with full CRUD. I decided to ditch AWS in an effort to get the project going.

I built a full stack application with React on the front-end and Flask for the back-end with a SQL database. I chose to do this because I felt I understood writing routes in Flask better than in Node.js/Express. I also really liked how easy it was to related models with SQL vs MongoDB. React makes getting a front-end talking to a back-end, and getting styling/layout done a breeze.

I ended up deploying with Heroku at the end that way I could get my app deployed with the least amount of issues. You can see Find-A-Date here. You can find the front-end repo here. You can find the back-end repo here.

Capstone Views

Home Page

After you click Find A Date Idea button

When you click Users dropdown

Login/Register Page

After you login & click My Dates button

After you login & click My Dates & Find A Date Idea button

I really enjoyed working on this application. I also made it mobile friendly so that a user can easily view & use it on their phones. I think the hardest part of the capstone that was non-technical was knowing that I already had a job so my capstone didn’t matter quite as much as other classmates’ capstones. It was a little harder to find motivation for the project, but I wanted to finish strong & I feel like I did.

I’m really happy that I chose to stay & finish the course instead of go straight to work as well. A few of my classmates questioned why I was still attending a bootcamp if I already got a job. I thought this was a fair question since you can get a partial refund for the course if you leave early. I’m acutely aware of everything that I do not know yet about the tech world & web development, so I felt like it would be in my best interest to get all of the education I could before starting my job. I know a certificate is just a sheet of paper at the end of the day, but I’m proud of myself for staying & continuing to work for my sheet of paper by hitting all of the requirements & finishing up the class.

Week 10.5, End of Week & End of Project 3

It’s been a crazy week and a half. I’m sorry I missed ya last week. We were doing project three & we hit quite a few bumps in the road. Any amount of time spent on the computer the last week has been spent on the project, so I didn’t have time to write.

I say it’s week 10.5 because this is the week of Thanksgiving & we only had two days of class this week. The second day was spent doing class from home due to a blizzard that dumped 8-12 inches across the Denver metro. It’s nice being in a field where you can still be productive from home.

Let’s get to the good stuff! I’m super proud of our project 3 which is hosted on Heroku here. We had a partner that dropped in about 3/4 of the way through the project, so we had to really come together as a team to knock it out. My partner’s name is Orrin & he is a fantastic dude! I introduced him to the word “mansplainer” as I thanked him for not being one. He killed it on our backend which was done in Flask/Peewee/SQL. I can’t wait to see what his capstone is going to look like. The guy is a backend whiz! Our GitHub repo for backend can be found here.

This was my first time working with React & I loved it! I wrote the React app as well as designed & styled the React app. You can find the repo here. I really enjoyed learning Semantic React for this project. I also learned that working with React can make for trickier media queries, but not impossible ones. I can’t wait to use React in my capstone project. I’m thinking about going with the same stack as this one, but maybe checking out SQLAlchemy instead of Peewee.

Overall, I feel happy with the results from project 3. Our application has an admin functionality that allows a logged in admin to perform CRUD operations on the shelter animals. A regular user can view all the different shelters & all the different pets without needing to login, but can not perform the rest of the CRUD actions. Our biggest setback was deployment, but we have managed through that with the help of our instructor.

For our version 2.0, we would love to include the Petfinder API to preseed our database with real-world shelter info. We would also like to add in the Google Maps API for our shelters list page to see where the shelters are located.

Animal Allies Views:

Animal Allies homepage:

When a user clicks the “Shelters” button in the nav area:

When a user who is not logged in clicks the “Show Me More” button:

When an admin clicks the admin button in the nav bar:

The logged in admin view after clicking show me more includes “Add An Animal” button, “Edit Animal” button, and “Adopt Animal” button:

When an admin clicks the “Edit Animal” button:

When an admin clicks the “Add An Animal” button:

Week 9, Day 5

It’s getting to that point in the “semester” where everyone is wearing down. We start project 3 next week, and it will be another assigned group project. They gave people a day to come up with a project idea & present it if they wanted to apply to do an individual project. We are all interested to see how it plays out.

This week we learned how to consume our own Flask API through our React app. We learned how to use and setup Flask. We’ve already done routes with Express/Node.Js, so it is easier to do our routes with Flask. After we got our routes setup with Flask, we connected React to them.

We had a crash-course in SQL on Tuesday. Our backend will be connected to a SQL database for project 3. We’ve been using SQLite for our homework, but project 3 will be postgres! Picturing your database in related tables is easier than the documents from MongoDb for me. I’m excited to see what my team comes up with for the project.

I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with React than I was last week. It is all seeming to click into place. There are still challenges, and there always will be which is exciting. I’m really trying to soak up every bit of knowledge that I can while I’m here. If anything, I feel like I have a beautiful teaser of the web development world after being here. Yes it’s a little exhausting to be learning bootcamp style, but I’m even more excited every day to continue learning outside of bootcamp.

On the learning note, I think I’m going to do the Harvard CS50 Intro to CS course as soon as I finish my capstone. I love learning, and this bootcamp has allowed me to get a job paying enough that I can consider pursuing a CS degree to add to my associates. We will see how this plays out, but the Harvard course should be a pretty sweet way to get acquainted with this possible next step.

Imposter Syndrome is a real thing. I’m curious if I’ll ever learn enough to not feel it anymore. You have to start somewhere, and I’m really happy with what I’ve accomplished so far. It’s always humbling to learn something new because you continually realize just how much you don’t know. It’s a telling sign of maturing into an adult (which I also think is a long never-ending process) to be able to admit & realize that you really don’t know much about the world. The best you can do is to be aware of it & continue learning.

I’ll check back in next week!

Week 9, Day 1

We are out school today for Veteran’s Day. I’m treating today more like a school day than an off day though. I was coding by 8:45, and it was extremely nice to sleep till 8:20ish. I’ve been keeping the laundry going in between activities. I got my homework done, and I started watching some React tutorials. I plan to go over some Python tutorials before the end of the day as well.

It’s important to stay focused. I definitely don’t want to return to school tomorrow a little foggy from a three day weekend. One thing I like about working from home is that there are less outside distractions. I can put my head down & get to work for a couple hours to really kick things into gear. This helps me feel comfortable taking a 15 minute break to browse through Zillow/Apartments.com for the upcoming move before jumping back on the horse.

Side Note:

When I have extra time, in between studying for class & getting things ready for the move, I’ve been using Linux Academy to work through an AWS course. I really want to be familiar with the basics before jumping into my position in January. My boyfriend has been helping me prepare just as he did for the interview. I’m really blessed to have someone who can help me prepare and provide support for things I enjoy doing work-wise.

Back to the good stuff:

This week we will be learning about SQL and Flask. These are our final steps before working on project three next week! I can’t believe project three is already here! The day to day has seemed extremely long for this class, but as a whole the class is really flying by. I’m excited to dive deep into SQL for project three as I have a teensy bit of prior experience with it.

I can’t wait to check in & let you guys know how it’s going on Friday!

UX Design Mini-Bootcamp

I decided to step out of my comfort zone to go to to a user experience design bootcamp. It was held at General Assembly and taught by Amara Huslander who is a UX Designer, Amazon.com The class was a 6 hour intro to UX and UI. I learned a lot about the processes used in UX/UI.

We had an intro to design thinking where we took a well known brand and thought about the ideas/concepts that represent the brand. We then filtered through those ideas to come up with four main design pillars that our company would be focused on. We looked over examples of a fake website/mobile app to see if they aligned with our design pillars, and to see how user friendly they were.

We then went over the principles of user research. It was fun to put this into practice by interviewing others in the class about their vacation experiences. We finished our interviews and then distilled our findings by noting what people are trying to do/what is motivating them/and defining the solution. We created personas based on the people we interviewed that contained data such as demographics, behaviors/habits, stories/scenarios, frustrations, needs, problems, and goals based off of their vacation experiences.

User research allows UX designers to reduce risk by validating needs of consumers beforehand to increase the chance of success of the product. It makes sure that you’re solving problems that actually exist. UX designers are better equipped to design for others when they understand their behaviors, needs, and motivations. This was my favorite part of the class. Personas help you to know who you are designing for.

After lunch we discussed UI & UI design principles. The five main design principles are clarity and simplicity, flexibility, familiarity, efficiency, and consistency and structure. There were a lot of sub bullets under each of these design principles that helped you define & understand how to use them. If you’d like to get more in depth info, then feel free to comment or connect on LinkedIn. We moved into design essentials that are crucial for user interfaces.

We created user flows for a product that helps with our vacation problem from before lunch. This was another fun hands on activity to help understand what designers do. After our user flows, we started prototyping on paper by drawing the different screens for our product. We used MarvelApp to prototype with our drawings.

There are a lot of things that go into UX design that I didn’t know about (and still are), but I feel like I have a very good general understanding of UX now. I thought it was very interesting from a dev background. I would highly suggest devs taking time to do a UX class just to understand how to better communicate with their UX/UI team members. I would definitely say a Saturday well-spent!

Props to my classmate Mallory who is more designed focus. She decided to come to this class & invited me along.

Week 8, Day 5

Well ladies and gentlemen…what a week. That is all my class had to say after this week. It wasn’t a bad week, but it was a rather long & exhausting week. React takes time for it to click. The time for each person varies, so it was quite the week of trying to make it click. I definitely feel a lot better about it than I did on Monday.

I’m excited to explore the opportunities that React allows in project three. It is still up in the air as to whether it is a group project or possible solo-option project. We’ll be using React, Python, and SQL in project three, but other than that I am unsure of the details.

Python is sweet. I’m glad I learned JavaScript first because it helps you to understand the basics of Python; however, Python seems so extremely easy as a language compared to JavaScript. I think it will be an excellent tool to add to the toolkit.

As with anything, a bootcamp is what you make of it. I think it is important to really understand the structure of a bootcamp to see if it fits your learning style. I saw some negative bootcamp reviews which made me a little wary in the beginning, but I think some of those people were just really not prepared. A bootcamp is not going to teach you everything, and only spending time at school learning is not going to teach you everything. You as the bootcamper have to make a decision that you are all in. I cannot stress this enough.

I also have to stress that people come into bootcamps with different levels of experience. It is so crucial to understand where you are at; what your goals are; make a plan to reach those goals; and focus on how you are improving. It is all about where you are, not where others are. If you get into a bootcamp with no experience at all, then I think admissions has failed you. I think each person should learn basic concepts on their own to decide if they even like what they are signing up for. It is a huge commitment of time and money.

My advice to anyone considering a bootcamp would be to really try being self-taught first. Learn everything that you do not know, and gain an appreciation for it. If you still want to do a bootcamp after time spent learning on your own then do your research and pick the right program for YOU!

As always, if you have any questions about bootcamps/my experience then you can comment below or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Week 8, Day 1

We’re two thirds of the way done with class! I can’t believe it. This week we are learning React in the mornings and Python in the afternoons.

I studied this weekend for about 6 hours to go over some basic React concepts and Python concepts. I felt pretty lost after the first lesson in React. Functional programming definitely requires a different mindset than OOP. As of right now, I have to say I like OOP better. I’m open to change though because I do like the way the components work with React. Bonus: React docs are amazing & easy to read through.

Python is much easier syntax wise than JS. We’ve just run through the basics so far, but I’m excited to dive deeper with the language. I think it’ll be a great second language to add with JS.

I’m still enjoying my experience with General Assembly here in Denver. I can’t speak to every location, but the way it’s working here works for me. You really need to be able to dedicate the full 12 weeks to a bootcamp for it to work. I don’t think Monday-Friday 9-5 is going to cut it. Every day we are here I learn more & more about what I do not know. I’m just so happy to be in the industry, and I can’t wait to learn from all of the people that have so much more experience than I do.

Week 7, Day 5

Week 7 was full of some surprises. We had two snow days where we worked from home which made for an interesting dynamic to the group project. We finished up our group projects and presented them today.

Remote work is why some people choose to get into this field. It was really cool to see what remote work life is like during the snow days. I think it would be fun to work from home a day or two a week, but full-time remote would be hard for me. I think it is easier to collaborate on a project when you are in the same space.

This brings me to how we connected as a group during the snow days. My group would do a group Zoom around 9am to get on the same page for the day. If two people needed to work on something together then we would stay on Zoom together to work things out. We made sure to stay on top of communicating when we had to push our changes to GitHub. GitHub is a beast, but I loved working with it as a team. It was so much cooler to see what was going on when there were multiple people pushing their code.

We built a project called Get Together. It is deployed on Heroku here. The GitHub repository can be found here. Get Together is a social meetup and group planning app created with the MEN stack. Phase 1 is really fun, and we loved being able to meet the deadline of getting it up & running in a week. Get Together has user authentication that allows the logged in user to see his/her groups that they create. In phase 1, you can give all of the individuals in the group a group log-in to work with, but in phase 2 the idea is that anyone inside of a group can add a new member. Phase 2 will allow users to see any group they have created or been made a member of instead of having to use group logins.

A user can see their groups that they have created. There is a recipes page, a lists page, and a photos page that is related to each group. You can only see information related to the group that you have clicked on which is some amazing backend functionality. We have 5 related models between the users, groups, recipes, lists, and photos. MongoDB is a non-relational database, so it was very important to understand how you were creating the relationships between the models.

I felt like our styling was simple, efficient, and clean. I loved the color scheme that the guys settled on. We used CSS Grid to set up our pages. Instead of using multiple CSS files to style each page, we took advantage of using classes in one CSS file to style the ejs pages similarly. We used ejs files to allow us to use JavaScript inside of our HTML. We used Express to communicate between our backend and frontend which provided better insights for how the two work together.

I really enjoyed working with my teammates on this project. Each person was able to have their niche, but we also worked together on each part of the app. If you’re reading this for advice on how to handle a bootcamp, then I want to tell you to make it easier on yourselves and your teammates by really studying and understanding the material. Compare yourself to where you were yesterday, and not to the others in your class.

AWS Job Offer

I’m excited to announce that I have decided to take a position with AWS for their Cloud Support Associate role. I will be moving to Portland after I finish my General Assembly bootcamp in December.

This is beyond my wildest expectations to have accepted an offer going into my 7th week of bootcamp. I’m looking forward to becoming a member of the AWS team in January. What a fantastic way to start 2020! I couldn’t be happier than to be with a team of such intelligent people who are just as excited to continue learning as me. AWS provides so many awesome services to learn about!

The news is still very fresh, and I have a lot of emotions about the whole thing. I’ve wanted to live in Colorado since I was 8 years old, and I was able to live here for 6 months! It’s funny how life works out. I can knock Colorado off of the bucket list but I would love to back at some point. I have really enjoyed my time here. I’ve met so many amazing people in the months that I’ve lived here. For now, it is on to the next adventure in Portland!

I’ve spent about a week total in Portland in my life so far. I have loved every minute of my visits thus far, and I’m excited to make it my new home. I’m excited to have a consultant provided to help with relocation process. I also have a couple friends that moved to Portland a little over a year ago who are stoked to help get me set up.

I’m thankful for the opportunity to start on a new & unexpected journey along my career switch adventure. I think that you get back what you put in to life. You might not get what you expect, but if you continue to work hard then an opportunity will come along.

Thank you to my family and friends for being so supportive of me. I wouldn’t be where I’m at without you. My cohort is also owed many thanks because they believed in me. My group project teammates believed in me enough to say “we’ve got this, go to the interview!” The class as a whole believed in me enough to be honest and say “get your butt on that plane to Portland, or you’ll regret it!”

A special thank you to my boyfriend who helped me prep for the interview, and for being open to moving to Portland with me! I’m excited to see where our next adventure takes us!