Hack Reactor Expands California Coding School Footprint With New MakerSquare Los Angeles Campus
MakerSquare working with Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino and past state Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez to "train a highly skilled workforce" to address the technology talent gap in the greater Los Angeles area
SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The Hack Reactor collective of in-person and online programming schools focused on student career outcomes, which graduates over 1,000 Software Engineers annually, announced that Austin-based partner MakerSquare will open a campus in Los Angeles to help fill technology skills demand in the region. This marks MakerSquare's second California-based location. They are now reserving seats for their first Los Angeles cohort, with classes starting June 29. Interested students can apply here.
MakerSquare is part of the Hack Reactor collective, which will soon produce the most Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) graduates in California. The network of partner schools includes Hack Reactor's flagship Onsite program in San Francisco, Hack Reactor Remote available anywhere, MakerSquare, and an Oakland-based coding school for underrepresented communities, launching summer 2015 in response to the White House's TechHire initiative.
With the growing need for Software Engineers at technology, entertainment and media companies in the Los Angeles area, Hack Reactor, which has three founders who are University of Southern California graduates, identified fertile ground for MakerSquare to educate, train and mentor technologists at the other end of the state. Hack Reactor's Hiring Network, which places hundreds of Software Engineers in jobs each quarter, will represent and place MakerSquare graduates in jobs in the region.
"We are excited to help bring MakerSquare to LA," said Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino who represents the 15th District. "Expansion of the tech industry into Los Angeles and my district are pivotal to our economic development. We are answering President Obama's call to train a highly skilled workforce and are proud to partner with MakerSquare."
"Coding isn't just a niche field – it's the core skill of the new economy and there is a need for coding schools to expand beyond traditional tech centers and into big population centers," said MakerSquare Co-founder Harsh Patel. "Los Angeles is one of the regions hit by the shortage of highly trained Software Engineers. Currently, Southern California still lacks in number of advanced coding schools to sustain the workforce demand of the region. We are aiming to help fix that problem by graduating exceptional Software Engineers in the area."
Many technology companies have opened up offices in Los Angeles in the past few years, including Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook and Google. There are also burgeoning startups there, such as Nasty Gal, Hulu, Dollar Shave Club, Tinder and Snapchat. MakerSquare and Hack Reactor already have graduates working in the LA area at companies like Google, Boeing, the Getty Museum and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Jeff Louie, who now works as a Software Engineer at NASA JPL in La Canada Flintridge, cites attending MakerSquare as the pivotal experience that allowed him to quickly fulfill his career aspirations. "It's important for MakerSquare to open a campus in Los Angeles – there is definitely a demand for a school of MakerSquare's caliber in the area and there's a tech scene here too," said Louie. People don't have to travel all the way to Silicon Valley, or in the case of MakerSquare, to San Francisco or Austin to learn the best in tech. Now they'll be able to both go through the program in LA and immediately find a job here."
Individuals interested in applying to MakerSquare Los Angeles, visit http://admissions.makersquare.com.
About Hack Reactor
Hack Reactor's mission is two-fold: to empower people and to transform education through rapid-iteration teaching. Hack Reactor designs and conducts advanced immersion education programs that train students 11 hours per day, 6 days a week, over 12 weeks. Our curriculum cultivates mastery of computer science fundamentals and the JavaScript programming language. Hack Reactor educates more software engineers every year than Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, combined. We maintain a 99% employment rate and a median graduate salary of $110,000. Alumni work in a variety of mid- to senior-level engineering roles at industry leaders like Google, Adobe, LinkedIn, Uber and Amazon, as well as at several growing technology companies. For more information, visit: www.hackreactor.com.
About MakerSquare
MakerSquare aims for students to take away two things: an exceptional understanding of JavaScript, and a fundamental understanding of software engineering principles to have a long and successful programming career. MakerSquare is a software development training and educational company offering an immersive 12-week web development bootcamp in Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA. Alumni work in back-end, front-end and full-stack engineering roles at companies like IBM, HP, Apple, Rackspace and many growing startups. For more information, visit: www.makersquare.com.
SOURCE Hack Reactor
Share this article