Careers in Code Student Success Stories: Sara Dow

Hack Upstate
2 min readDec 23, 2021

Careers in Code Student Success Stories is a series focused on our coding bootcamp graduates. We’re following their progress in the six months after graduation to learn about projects they’re working on, job placements, and other exciting updates. Our first cohort graduated in August 2019.

Sara Dow was a baker before she joined cohort 2 of Careers in Code. However, this was a job she took after her previous employer closed their business. She hoped she could use the Careers in Code bootcamp to get out of the food service industry.

Sara came to Careers in Code with a strong desire to learn and grow. She felt as though she was stuck in stagnation in the food industry, and she was ready to learn a new skill set that she could apply to a career that excited her.

At the time of beginning Careers in Code she was taking a class online via Udemy. Being that these changes came about during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sara wasn’t quite sure what the future held for her.

Now Sara works for Kirkwork in Syracuse, NY. She is a Junior Software Developer currently working on two separate android apps that exist in the alarm monitoring space. Additionally, Sara is working on building her knowledge of Java.

Upcoming projects for Sara include React web applications and React Native mobile applications. She has a bright future in the software development field.

Sara says that Careers in Code was an incredible opportunity to learn from a collective of professionals who are very experienced in the field of coding and development. She feels that, because of her time in the program, her confidence in development has increased considerably.

She is sure that she will use the projects she built during Careers in Code as well as the class videos because of how instrumental they were in her learning process. Sara said she is grateful for the experiences that she had during the Careers in Code program, and looks up to the instructors that she encountered there.

She was inspired by her instructors to follow her career as a developer and hopes to teach up-and-coming developers like herself one day.

Sara looks forward to watching how Careers in Code continues to expand and is excited to see more and more cohorts of excited developers gain access to an important industry. Congratulations on your new position and best of luck, Sara!

--

--