Grabbing the Perfect Opportunity with Both Hands

AnnMarie’s first love was not Python or HTML but a very different language: poetry. 

“As a kid, I was a confirmed word nerd, in love with the poems of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. Later, as a teen, I competed in poetry slams. So when I attended CUNY Medgar Evers College in my home borough of Brooklyn, I was a natural English major.

“Before and after graduation, I worked in my university’s Emerging Tech Department on a project to standardize online course offerings using a digital platform. I was fascinated by everything it could do for students, faculty, and administrators. When I asked questions about various features, my supervisor told me, ‘You’re thinking like a Programmer!’”

One day, she saw an article about Revature's partnership with CUNY and its offering of free software development training. The article particularly encouraged women and minorities to apply, and the application deadline was that day.

Realizing Her Potential for a Career in Tech

“I ran a few Google searches. My first question, naturally, was: ‘Is Revature a scam?!’ I quickly learned that it wasn’t, and that hundreds of people had already benefited from the training.”

AnnMarie applied with her resume and was accepted despite not having a computer science degree. Revature put her through an intensive two-week course, and by the end, AnnMarie was holding her own alongside her computer science-trained classmates. 

Proving That Hard Work Pays Off

After the short course, AnnMarie started ten weeks of training in Java as part of a cohort of a dozen students. “Revature ran the training less like a class and more like a real-world business: every morning, we had to get up, commute, and be on-site by 9 a.m., in our business suits and ready to learn. Coding is hard, and we had to be prepared to fail at a task 100 times and keep returning to it until we cracked it. As advertised, the course taught us to solve problems using code, but equally importantly, it taught us the value of discipline and persistence. In other words, it was a crash course in real life.”

Less than four years after AnnMarie finished the Revature training, she was an Assistant Vice President and Software Engineer for Bank of America.

“Revature was my foot in the door, and the experience helped prime me for a career that requires constant learning. I’ve come a long way, and I can’t wait to see what the future has got in store.”