We require teachers to have a minimum of 3-5 years of professional experience before they can teach at Origin. We do encourage current and past students to solidify what they have learned in the classroom by teaching at our meet-ups.

We currently don’t offer a night class option. Our core mission is to place our students in jobs once the class is over. The class is much too intense to have it a few hours a week during the night. It would take a year to get in the equivalent hours of coding that you would receive in our 12 week class. It’s possible that we’ll offer it in the future, however, at this time, we have a good thing going for both students and employers. We encourage you to go to Meetup.com and attend the many meet-ups in the area to learn as much as you can in the evening (and harass our CEO Jeff Winkler about how you wish we had a night class - maybe we’ll change our mind!)

For the same reasons that we do not offer night classes, we do not offer an online option. In addition, employers are looking for several soft skills with applicants, we want to ensure they feel comfortable that soft skills are being learned. We vouch for our hard working students with employers and they know they can trust us when we tell them the student has get soft skills as well as technical skills.

You absolutely can teach yourself how to code, go to meet ups, get a mentor and learn how to code for free. With any bootcamp, you are paying for the accelerated learning that comes from having an instructor teach you on a daily basis as well as holding you accountable as your mentor by ensuring that you are coding 10-12 hours a day. On average, it would take you between 12-18 months to learn how to code on your own, whereas our class is only 12 weeks. We don’t want you to think that Origin is your only option, it’s becoming common knowledge that boot camps are one of the fastest ways to achieve your goal of entering into the software industry.

No. Currently, we accept one out of every ten applicants. Our criteria is largely based on your passion for software and your ability to prove that this is a career you’re passionate about pursuing.

After applying through our website, we will schedule an in-person interview with you. Our advisory board will then review your resume along with other applicants every week and will inform you whether we have ‘accepted’, ‘not accepted at this time’, or ‘conditionally accepted’ your application. Occasionally, we see how serious you are about changing careers, but feel you did not do enough prior research or prework. In that case, we will ask you to complete a quantifiable amount of prework to be accepted into a class of your choice.

There isn’t one! We have had UFC fighters, insurance salesman, recent college graduates that can’t find work, veterans, designers, actuaries, and sales people go through our class. One thing our students have in common is that they are starting a second career. All that matters is that they show up ready to be "comfortable being uncomfortable".

Unfortunately, we feel you will not succeed in the class if you work a part time job and attempt the class at the same time. You must have the ability and schedule to focus solely on the class for the full 12 week duration. This is in contrast to taking a full-time class at a University where you must work part time to be able to afford tuition - our class is condensed to the point that you can create a new career for yourself in a shorter period of time.

You shouldn’t take our class if your goal after the class is to make as much money as possible. While it is true that compensation for developers is very reasonable, it’s typically only true after several years of experience working in the software industry. Software development isn’t easy, and that’s why they are paid well. We prefer to accept graduates that are passionate about building software and understand that they are making a long term investment in themselves and their career despite the class lasting only 12 weeks.

Absolutely! Feel free to ask your parents/spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend to sit in with you during the interview or when you come listen to one of our guest speakers. You are going to need their support emotionally to succeed in completing the class, so we encourage you to bring them in.

Yes, you can find them on LinkedIn or at any of our meetup events. We all hang out quite often, check out Meetup.com and find the next Origin Code Academy’s meet ups, show up to any of them to meet some Origin students.

No and no. Employers have stopped focusing on college degrees and started focusing on the ability of the candidate to solve the problems that they are trying to solve. Come and listen to one of our weekly guest speakers in the classroom as they answer questions that the students have about candidates with college degrees.

If your goal is to work in the Bay area, you need to go to code school in the Bay Area. Our curriculum is specifically tailored toward the technologies that employers are hiring for in Southern California, and specifically San Diego. Our grads have gotten hired from LA down to San Diego. It’s possible to get a job anywhere after our course, but take your goal seriously, and if you want to work in a city as a developer, then that is the city you should be attending the best code school in when you start. Our advice is - if you are looking to work in a specific city, find a boot camp that tailors their curriculum to that specific city.

We do not currently offer scholarships for Origin Code Academy.

We do not currently accept the GI Bill. Military students are among the easiest to get placed due to their work ethic, plus there are a lot of military business owners in San Diego that only want to hire Vets. We are in the process of accepting the GI Bill, we anticipate that we’ll be able to accept it in late 2017.

We partner with several third party companies to ensure we have all our bases covered, so if you’d like recommendation based on your credit situation, we can give those. Contact us and we’ll assist you through the process on an individual basis.

If at any point during the first two weeks of the class you decide that it's not for you, we will refund 100% of your money. After the first two weeks, we will only charge for the percentage of the class that has been completed. As a point of reference, everyone that has quit decided to quit in the first two weeks.

We care less about how much you know before the class and more about how much you care and how hard you work. Two-thirds of our classes are people with no tech background of any kind, however, all of them started doing online tutorials and going to meet-ups before they applied to check out what the software industry was all about. We encourage you to do the same, if we can see you are passionate about it and you can SHOW us, not tell us how passionate you are, that’s the best case scenario.

For certain types of coding jobs, a lot of math can be required. To do well in the class, it isn’t a necessity to be a math whiz, but down the line in your career there are certain tasks where it would greatly help when you’re working on more complex projects.

Of course, but remember to get plenty of sleep and exercise so that your brain is operating at its peak. Every student has their own key and key card to get into the classroom whenever they would like to code.

We communicate with local parking providers close to our class, for example in our Downtown San Diego class, our students park in a garage one block away, which costs $150/mo for 8:00am to 6:00pm, and $170 for 24hr access. As with any downtown area, parking is the worst. However, everything about downtown is ideal, including public transit. Many of our students in downtown San Diego take the Coaster down to class.

The average age of our students is 25-35 and range from 19-55. We choose to partner only with Equal Opportunity employers, so we haven’t had instances of companies hiring older or younger students faster or slower - the reality is that if you can get the job done, they will hire you.

Our average class size is 16. We typically have 18-20 students to begin with, with around 2-4 dropping out within the first 2 weeks.

According to Indeed.com, the average salary for a Junior .NET Developer in San Diego is $59,000/yr. We have had instances of students finding higher salaries, but we'd rather you not focus on salary for your first junior developer role and encourage you to focus on whether you’ll have a mentor to assist you the first 12-18 months in the real world. This is your career, so it’s best if you focus on learning your craft than going for what is definitely not easy money. Our students make anywhere from $10/hr to $110k/yr after graduation.

We cannot offer a firm guarantee that you will get a job after the course. With that said - the whole reason we started this school is to get people jobs. Our founders had a bad experience at another coding bootcamp where nobody got jobs after graduating and made it their mission to stay at 90%+ placement rate for students. We highly encourage you to talk to previous students to ask about their experience. There is not a code school in America that cares more about getting you hired than us. We will go door to door with your resume if we have to, the only thing that can go wrong is a lack of effort on the students part.. but you wouldn’t have read this far into the FAQ’s if that person was you, so really - you have nothing to worry about.

We are a big family here at Origin. While it’s not official because the instructors will be teaching the next cohort, it’s pretty common to have past students hang out at each others houses to study for jobs and run meet-ups for others interested in coding. Check out our meet-up schedule at Meetup.com, we’re probably having a meet-up this week or next run by our students. We love the community we are building - once you enter Origin, you'll have friends and mentors for life.