Coding All-in-One For Dummies. Nikhil Abraham

jobs, so apply early and for more than one internship position. If you don’t receive an internship, try again for a full-time position. Companies have large hiring needs, and one purpose for hiring summer interns is to ensure that the interns have a great time at the company so when they return to campus they tell other students, who then feel more comfortable applying.

HOW BOB REN LEARNED TO CODE

      Between classes, clubs, hackathons, and internships, the possibilities seem endless for students in college or graduate school to learn how to code. Here is how Bob Ren, a college senior, stitched together his learning experiences while in school.

      Bob attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After his first two years, he decided to take a break from school and gain some real-world experience at a technology company. He applied to and joined the fellowship program at Codecademy, a startup in New York. As a Codecademy fellow, Bob worked at the startup for one year as a full-time employee, was paid $80,000, and contributed to product development as an engineer. While at Codecademy, Bob contributed to a number of projects and wrote code to redesign the main website, add language support for Spanish and French, and develop an open-source platform called EventHub, which allows companies to understand various actions that visitors perform on a website.

      While at Codecademy, Bob also kept busy outside work. A few months into his fellowship, he attended the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon, and created a common application for startups based on issues he faced applying for jobs at startups. Like the common application for college, the app was designed so students could enter their information once and apply to multiple startups at the same time. TechCrunch, the startup blog and event organizer, wrote about the project at www.techcrunch.com/2013/04/28/startup_common_application_hackathon.

      After the Disrupt Hackathon, Bob continued coding and built the following, either by himself or with a team before eventually joining Facebook as a software engineer:

      • LivingLanguage: A Chrome extension that translates random words on any web page into a foreign language you want to learn. The app won first place at the Facebook Summer Hackathon in 2013.