Making the decision to attend a coding bootcamp requires weighing many factors. There’s the expense, the program’s location, the subjects they teach, the kinds of students they attract, what they job-placement rates are, and innumerable other things.
But it’s important not to overlook the housing situation. Where are you going to lay your head at night while you have recurring dreams about formatting your code? This can have a non-trivial impact on your bootcamp experience. I don’t think anyone expects to live in luxury while they learn data science, but crummy surroundings or an apartment with no air conditioning can get in the way of your focusing on what’s important.
Here we’re going to discuss the problem of housing, starting with which bootcamps offer their own solutions.
Are There Bootcamps That Provide Housing?
Obviously, from a student’s perspective, the ideal solution would be for the bootcamps themselves to take care of this, either by including accommodations in tuition or working something reasonable out with a third-party.
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And some bootcamps do this very thing. So, which coding bootcamps offer housing? Here’s the list of bootcamps that offer some form of housing:
- App Academy
- Camp Code Away
- Codemasters Academy
- Coder Camps
- CodeCraft School of Technology
- Coding House
- DevMountain
- GoCode
- Software Guild
It’s worth exploring a few of these to get a feel for what ‘some form of housing’ means in different situations. I don’t know what things are like at App Academy now, but when I first got back from Korea, I wound up in San Francisco for a small vacation and visited a friend who was going there at the time. App Academy was letting students with no housing accommodations sleep at the campus while they completed their education. Though hardly glamorous, this beats having to spend hours trudging through the quagmire that is San Francisco’s real estate market.
The Software Guild has worked out a deal with local housing provider 401 Lofts to secure student housing that’s just a few minutes away from the campus. A little under $2500 for the full 12 weeks gets you a private room, cable, furniture, a pool, and a fitness area. Definitely worth thinking about!
DevMountain makes affordability a priority, and includes housing in the cost of tuition. This means sharing a reasonably nice apartment with 4-6 other students.
You need to investigate the specifics of the program you want to attend. Some will offer their own housing, some will have third-party providers, and some will leave you on your own. It really just depends.
Housing Options While Attending Coding Bootcamp
If your bootcamp has no housing provisions, you’ll need to find your own.
The obvious first place to look is for a short-term lease on Craigslist, Krash, or WeLive. You could also see what sort of a deal you can work out with a property listed on AirBnb.
Over time, most of these bootcamps cultivate pretty extensive alumni networks, and it’s worth seeing whether or not you can tap into those. The Galvanize community Slack channel is pretty routinely pinged by administrators working on behalf of new students to find a place to sleep for a few weeks. Try reaching out to someone to see if you can post a request that’ll be visible to current and past attendees. They might be willing to help.
Wherever you wind up, just remember that it’s part of the investment you’re making in a better future.
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