Got my bachelors at 29, took 2.5 years. Got an MA and an MBA later, each of which took two years.

Studied science communication, English, and business.

The masters were hard because I had a family. One of the toughest moments was during the MBA when my four-year-old daughter came to my study at 11pm with a blanket and pillow and fell asleep under my desk because she missed me.

What I would have done differently is gotten my act together earlier in life so I would have done it all well before forcing a family to suffer through it.

I turned 50 this year. I went back to school 2 years ago to earn my Ed. Specialist degree, which falls between a Masters and a Doctorate. I already had an MBA earned 15 years ago, so going back to school for a degree in the education field was a challenge. Having finished the Ed.S. program in May, I've decided to continue on for my doctorate. If all things go as planned, I should be getting my Ed.D. from University of Michigan in 3 years.

The biggest struggle was recognizing that I cannot be perfect in everything. I had to accept that if I was going to train and study, one of the two was going to have to slip. I would recommend staying on the workout plan, as balancing work/life/school/family is stressful, but accept you are not likely to improve your times. I also struggled with being the old dude in the class.

What would I have done differently? I would have started this journey sooner.

Your advice whilst always helpful in this instance would be a non starter as my wife would have a view, and i am not sure she would be happy with your approach

Undergrad was Eng?

And get another 800gs?

Go to Santa Barbara City College.

You won’t give two shits about what your wife thinks.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

I have read varying reports on the future of RoR

Do you think the bootcamp prepared you to learn other language's?

What do you think the prospects are for it

Congrats on finishing

I dont think i'll go there for exactly that reason........

What was your highest level of math before you went back

Good idea.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Yup. Ten years previous.

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king of the road says you move too slow
KING OF THE ROAD SAYS YOU MOVE TOO SLOW

Just high school math. But my parents and teachers had me enrolled in the "enriched" math classes (or whatever they were called) as they felt I needed the extra challenge.

So you had done calculus before?

When I was 9 yrs old I also remember my father going to Purdue to do a master's degree in industrial management when he was 35. It was normally a two year degree but he was in some accelerated program that did it in about twelve months or so. At the time he was in the RCAF and was getting his regular air force officer pay so we didn't have to live like paupers but I do remember not seeing him all that much in that period since he was always studying. Must be a lot tougher when you have a family, especially if you don't have a regular salary coming in.

It's been over 30 years, but no, I don't believe I had done calculus before post secondary (as I didn't complete high school). But I didn't find it overwhelming, just took me more time to get up to speed initially than I had anticipated. After some hard work and late nights, I eventually finished near the top of my class and actually did some peer tutoring in my 1st and 2nd year.

The biggest advantage I found being a mature student (I use that term loosely) was the drive I had to succeed as well as the ability to put in a solid 8+ hours a day (much more rewarding than work and I could study when and where I wanted).

It's a convoluted story, but I have a B.Eng but don't have a high school diploma.

Would you mind writing up your experience with the boot camp? I'm currently working on my CCNA and am interesting in a coding boot camp as well.

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LLLEEEEEEEEEEEERRRROOOYYY JEEENNNNNKKKIIINNNNNS!!!

+1

Three times. I was a slacker out of High School, I took a couple of college classes here and there. I joined the Navy at 24, three years later I started a BS in Health Care Administration it took me three years to complete. Four years later I started a Masters of Science in Administration but the Navy cut back on their Tuition Assistance Program and I could'nt afford to continue. I got layed off the day before my 50th Birthday DoD cut the funding to the project I was working on, 75% of my team got layed off. I started a MBA in Project Management two months later completed it in twenty six months.

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All I Wanted Was A Pepsi, Just One Pepsi

Team Zoot, Team Zoot Mid-Atlantic

I'm 48 and currently enrolled in a CCNA program at my local CC.

Time management. I'm working full time, married and have 4 kids. I typically drop one kid off at day care on the way to work and pick up 3 of them from school/day care on the way home. Oldest kid has football 3 nights a week(6-8 pm) and games on Saturday. I have class 2 nights a week 6-9:30. The classes are also 8 week sessions, so they move 2x as fast as a regular class, but I can take 2 classes a semester while only enrolled in 1 class at a time. I'm on my 3rd regular semester(5th actual class). I'll be moving into the CCNP program right after(another 4 classes).

I wouldn't do anything differently from what I'm doing now.

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LLLEEEEEEEEEEEERRRROOOYYY JEEENNNNNKKKIIINNNNNS!!!

My experience with bootcamp was quite positive, though my graduation from it is very recent (last Friday), so I can't speak to the success of it in terms of getting a job as a result.

The name of the Bootcamp is Dev Bootcamp, and from all accounts I have heard, it is the "original" coding bootcamp. It has locations in San Francisco (where I attended), San Diego, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and New York City. The program is designed to take a person with literally no coding experience (they admit students who had been sous chefs, hair stylists, teachers, you name it) and groom them to be full-stack web developers or software engineers within a span of 18 weeks. The first nine weeks you spend remotely at home, working on the challenges and pairing sessions part-time, and then afterwards you spend on-site at whichever campus is closest to you. At the on-site portion, you really cannot work at all because you are too busy.

The first nine weeks (called Phase 0, which they call it that because it correlates to the index of the first item in an array) you learn about: working on the command line of your computer terminal, learning Git/GitHub and workflow processes, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Sinatra, jQuery, SQL (the last six, very superficially), database schema design, and then the last 3 weeks are a strong introduction to the Ruby language.

The on-site nine weeks are divided into three three-week phases. Phase 1 is mostly Ruby algorithms and learning about inheritance, composition, and encapsulation. Phase 2 is what most people feel is the hardest. You learn about the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm for creating web applications and you build many CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications involving databases, and you use Sinatra as the web framework. It's a great gateway before learning Rails. We also learned about AJAX and jQuery. Phase 3 is when you first start learning about Rails, and also React and React Native for the front-end aspects of web development. The last 8 days of Phase 3 is when we worked on final group projects.

I thought the program was fun but challenging. I really liked everyone who was in my multiple cohorts. The reason I was in multiple cohorts was the fact that I repeated Phase 1 and Phase 2 (they give you that option, and it does not cost extra), but quite honestly I had a hard time keeping up with the pace of the learning and that is why I repeated, and I realized that it was always easier the second time around.

Just in our third week on-site, after we had taken the final assessment for Phase 1, we learned through an email that night that Dev Bootcamp was closing operations and its last day would be December 8th. The parent company, Kaplan, had acquired Dev Bootcamp a couple of years before and they ultimately decided that they were not able to make it a viable business model, so they have to shut down the school. It was sad to hear the news because we all started to wonder what that would mean to the relevance of our having it on our resume.

I'm not totally sure about the long-term prospects of usage of Ruby on Rails, but I know that there are still plenty of Ruby jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area/Sacramento region, but from what I have heard, Ruby's heyday was a few years ago. Ultimately, the instructors told us that they key takeaway from our experience is not really learning Ruby/Rails, but the ability to learn how to learn (i.e. the ability to learn new technologies quickly), as people have graduated from Dev Bootcamp and got hired on as Python developers without ever having written a line of Python, and this adaptability extends to other technologies as well.

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Kicking butt and writing down people's names since 2001

Well done

From everything i have read these are tough challenges requiring significant commitment

Good luck with the job search

As i understand it - and i don't really understand much of it - these boot camps teach you to code for a type of language e.g. ruby to python works. Ruby to C types does not

Is that true?

Went back for MBA at 35
Took 13 months - it was an accelerated program (you had to be a business undergrad and sponsored by your company)
Didn't really struggle, more like juggled career, wife, 2 kids - it actually was the most productive time of my life
Differently? Probably not do it, while its nice to say I have an "MBA"; it hasn't made me one more dollar, so poor ROI.

I think it depends on where you do it and at what stage of your career.

I did my post grad in manufacturing and it was a game changed but there is nothing i could do which would have the same effect on salary as that did.

I do think it migbt be worth it to change sectors though

I think that an MBA at Harvard or something similar would open up a network that I wouldn't have had access too, I got mine at Univ of Houston (good school but not top notch). However, its funny at my company our executive team and VP level is made up from Harvard grads, Notre Dame grads, Georgetown Grads, Columbia grads UVA grads and me (Middle Tennessee State University undergrad and UH MBA). One of these is not like the other, I think they overpaid, :)!

My last job, my wife negotiated our joint salary, we had a business and someone wanted both of us, so we had to shut it down, so she took what we wanted gross and gave me 120% and she took 80% of what we both wanted and then she had two kids and 90 days off for each, so we only lost 10% of her salary for the year she had kids and were up every other year

Will never get a deal like that again

They definitely overpaid

The question is whats next