A Day in the Life of a Henry Bootcamp Student

The global tech industry is booming, and the experts project it will continue that way. However, in Latin America, there’s a profound shortage of qualified people ready to grasp the economic and career opportunities that lie before them. 

Last year, there were more than one million tech job openings in Latin America, but the region had less than 100,000 professionals with the training necessary to fill these roles, reports coding bootcamp Henry. In 2025, it’s estimated that there will be 25 million job opportunities in the region.

Will you be one of the people to change your life and take advantage of this boom in the tech industry in the region? 

Why Choose Henry Bootcamp?

Henry, a remote computer school offering lessons in Spanish, can help you do just that. The school trains students to become the next generation of Latin American software engineers and take advantage of the job growth.

Henry was founded to challenge the status quo of education in Latin America by giving access to anyone willing to participate in their intense coding program. To make this possible, Henry offers an Income Share Agreement (ISA), a financing model that lets students pay zero upfront cost in exchange for a portion of their future income after graduation.

According to Henry, the ISA scheme provides opportunities for people to land jobs that pay on average four times higher than their previous salary. It’s a life-changing opportunity for those in a region that has high-income inequality rates and a more affordable training path for those in countries like the US where traditional education costs are skyrocketing.

If you have been waiting to change your career, read on to understand what the Henry bootcamp is like and where it can take you.

Choosing Henry Bootcamp: Julieta’s Story

Julieta Cheruse is a graduate of Henry. She’s one of the many students who transformed their lives through hard work, passion, and Henry’s tech program. 

Julieta has always loved computers and wanted to learn about programming, but she didn’t pursue her passion until recently. 

Before enrolling in Henry, Julieta was working in human resources. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, she had to make a change, and that’s when she decided to try her hand at becoming a software engineer.

“I didn’t do well in math in high school, so I didn’t want a career with a lot of math…But with years passing, I realized maybe programming wasn’t all about math, and I was right.” 

At first, she didn’t have the funds to pay the high tuition rate of a bootcamp, but Henry’s ISA model meant that she could take its program and pay nothing upfront. “It was a no-brainer for me. If they want to invest in me, I’m going to let them. I gave my all because I had nothing to lose, and I was very well rewarded because of that.”

A Day in the Life of a Henry Student

During her time at Henry, Julieta learned full-stack web development, focusing on JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, and SQL. Julieta lives in Argentina, and she enjoyed taking the program remotely. Curious what a day in the life of someone studying at Henry remotely looks like? This is what it looked like for Julieta.

Lectures

“The lessons started at 9am, so while I was preparing breakfast I attended the morning lecture. That would go until noon or 1pm, where there was a break.”

During her lunch break, Julieta took time to go to the gym and eat lunch.

“In the afternoon, we had pair programming. During that time, you have to do the assignment and homework for the day.” This was the time for a lot of interaction, Julieta notes. Classmates were constantly reaching out to one another for assistance. If you take a while to do the work and struggle, you can ask your classmates for help. 

These activities helped foster a collaborative and engaging learning community at Henry, which is a critical aspect in any software development workplace. “We had one or two hours for pair programming. And in the last session, from 5pm to 6pm, we had Stand Up.”

Stand Up

Stand Ups represent daily student meetings at Henry.

“At Henry,” Julieta explains, “you have two months of the bootcamp that are all about specifically learning.” This is when students learn all the theories and strengthen their understanding of such through several homework and coding exercises.

The next two months is when students “demonstrat[e] that learning,” says Julieta. This phase is dedicated to creating projects and synthesizing all the theories they learned and putting them into practice.

During the first two months in the program, you attend Stand Up in the afternoon. This course is conducted by two Henry students who finished the first part of the program and have moved on to the second part. 

Students get together with classmates and raise problems, difficulties, or questions in the day’s work. The two students running Stand Up are called Teaching Assistants, and they help unblock any obstacles faced by their peers, suggest new tools for addressing technical questions, and show tips and tricks and new ways of writing code.

This practice allows students in the first part of the program to get their questions answered and students in the second stage of the program to practice their knowledge.

Henry Projects

In the second part of the program, students complete projects individually and in groups. For individual projects, students build apps from scratch. They connect everything learned in the first part of the program and take workshops on Deployment, GraphQL, TypeScript, CD/CI, and Docker.

In the final group project, students develop robust projects with their teams. They build fintech, e-commerce, and ed-tech platforms from scratch. This group project environment simulates a real-world working environment to prepare students.

Each class officially ends at 6pm every day, but often Julieta didn’t stop her work there. She kept studying and practicing in the evening even after the program was done for the day.

“The funny thing is that I was in front of the computer for sometimes 12 hours, but I didn’t even notice. I wanted to keep learning, so time flew for me.”

Henry: A Community That Keeps You Going

Julieta had a great experience learning at Henry. It was a tough road for her at times, as the material wasn’t simple. However, she eventually prevailed due to her determination to build a better life for herself.

“The thing that kept me going was the community and the vision that Henry has for students to learn by doing. You always can get help in real-time. In the beginning, I struggled a lot with starting the assignments we had each day, but I always had a classmate that could help me with them.”

The community at Henry is what she values most, she says—how students were eager to help each other and felt they were in it together stood out to her.

“You learn one new aspect of technology every day. It’s really important to have peers [who] can help you.” 

There were times that Julieta felt burnt out, she says. When you learn so much in a short amount of time, there are times where you get self-doubt. “Sometimes, my brain hurt from learning so much. But since we were all in the same boat, we all encouraged each other.” 

She says that the Teaching Assistants she met during Stand Up offered great advice and perspective. They reassured students that they, too, had difficulties but were able to move beyond hurdles.

It Pays to Have a Learning Community

Overcoming adversity is crucial in your career, and these may come in many forms. Julieta faced challenges during her studies but managed to find a way to overcome hurdles. “I didn’t pass the first module of the program, so I had to redo it,” she says.

Failure can be discouraging when pursuing a new career, but Julieta didn’t let the problem affect her ambition. She says that when she didn’t pass Henry’s first module, she wasn’t frustrated because she knew that she needed to nail the first module to be sure of her success in the second module. 

Her confidence in her abilities led her to where she is now—working at a company she adores.

“I’m working for Scale AI, a Silicon Valley company. It’s growing very fast—we’re at almost 300 employees now.”

Scale AI is a company that Julieta says has a lot of potentials. Named Silicon Valley’s latest unicorn by Bloomberg, the company works with major players in the tech industry. Julieta started working on their team after graduation and now helps develop tools for 3D annotation for products like self-driving cars, known to be a vital application area of artificial intelligence. 

Julieta keeps in touch with many former classmates at Henry. Scale AI is now hiring, and she has a lot of her peers working there too.

“I love it. I love my team,” she says. “It’s amazing how you know that what you’re doing now can shape the future in a couple of years. Feeling that you’re in a company that can change the future is awesome.”

Julieta landed this job less than two months after she graduated.

“I’m living the dream,” she says, referring to a dream she achieved through hard work and the help of Henry.

“Henry has a policy that they want you to be happy,” she says. “They sit you down with your manager, and they ask you what you want after the bootcamp. I couldn’t have imagined that it was possible to be so happy in the workplace, and I owe it all to Henry.”

Could Henry be the missing link to transforming your life and living your dream? Apply to Henry and be part of their next cohort.