52Girl Develop It is 6 months old!!!
How we’ve grown! We’ve learned a lot of things, and met many amazing people. Our students are our biggest inspiration; eager to learn and very bright. They organize study groups, stay after class for extra help, and ALWAYS do their homework. We’re proud of the progress we have made, and we thought it was time to show the world what we have been up to.
Check out some data
272 unique students have attended our 45 classes, where we have covered:
- HTML/CSS
- Javascript/JQuery
- Ruby on Rails
- Datastructures with MongoDB
- Intro to Git
26% of those students have taken more than one class:
We have had eight teachers that we owe everything to:
- Myself (Sara Chipps)
- Alexis Goldstein
- Vanessa Hurst
- Tony Bacigalupo
- Avi Flombaum (Avi donated his pay for being a teacher right back to Girl Develop It!)
- Emma Persky
- Ana Hevesi
- Scott Reynolds
Our teachers get from 60-80% of class revenue, depending how active a role they play in helping to coordinate their class. They are our lifeblood and, besides teaching class, they have done a lot of curriculum development and one on one mentorship with students in exchange for merely gratitude.
We have a Sydney location, run by the incredible Pamela Fox. It has offered many successful classes including Javascript and HTML/CSS, making us in New York very proud.
We have had countless teacher’s assistants that can’t all be named in this post. We thank every one of you, and I know our students do too.
Many amazing organizations have hosted our classes, all of them donated or offered at a reduced rate, including:
We received 56 O’Reilly books from an anonymous donor. For the past two months of classes, most of our students have left with a brand new O’Reilly book to take home and continue learning with. Check out some of our happy ladies with their books:
What’s in the future for GDI?
We are currently exploring programs to help continue our student’s education. Many have taken all of our classes and are learned but not experienced. We want to become a runway that curious women (and men) can depend on to take them from merely inquisitive to full fledged professional developer. We want to explore internships and apprenticeships. We also want to put together groups to go to hackathons together. It seems like there’s a hackathon every weekend in NYC these days, and we’d like our newbies to know they will have friends waiting for them there.
Working on new classes
We are currently looking for sponsors for curriculum development for HTML 5 first, then Intro to OOP with Ruby on Rails. We used to have teachers build their own curricula, but once we realized how much goes into it, we started creating reusable curricula for our classes. You can check out our curricula here.
Coming to a city near you
Girl Develop It has helped a lot of people to learn, but we’ve done a lot of learning ourselves as well. If you want to start a GDI branch in your city, we want to be in a position to help you get started and do it right. The level of commitment is high, but the rewards are much higher.
For now, we are warming up relationships with organizers in a few cities. Stay tuned for updates on that and, down the road, how you can bring GDI to your city too.
Looking ahead
We want to keep making software development accessible for everyone; women, and even *gasp* men. Low cost, an open environment, judgement-free, and easy to understand classes and programs.
There’s a lot more work to do, and we can’t wait to tear into it.
If you want to help, email us at board@girldevelopit.com.
