Erica Porter originally received her Bachelor’s degree in law at the University of Cambridge and then went on to receive her Master’s degree in psychology. However, Erica had always been interested in tech, so while she taught herself coding basics through online tutorials, she realized it was something she wanted to do as a career.
While taking a 12-week web development immersive in London, Erica knew she could benefit from having a dedicated expert to mentor her over a long period.
With that in mind, Erica purchased a Codementor Monthly plan (now discontinued), which allowed her to get an hourly 1:1 mentorship from an expert mentor online every week. Codementor’s team hand-picked her mentor for her – MIT-Educated Senior Rubyist with 10+ years of programming experience, Joel Beasley.
After 2 months of working together with Joel, Erica applied for a job at a startup called Motivii. After Joel heard about Erica’s job application, he personally sent an email to the company outlining his experience mentoring her. Thanks to Erica’s initiative to seek outside mentorship to become a better programmer, she stood out from her classmates and got the position as a junior web developer.
Erica’s Codementor Monthly Experience with a Mentor
The first few sessions were spent revising the core principles of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It worked well to use some of the assignments and projects I had completed in class as the basis for our lessons. From the first session, I was amazed by Joel’s ability to explain concepts in such an easy to understand and easy to remember way. He very quickly had a grasp of what I understood and what I didn’t.
Also, from the start Joel stressed the importance of writing well structured and clear code and has taken time to demonstrate the difference this makes in the context of a work environment. This was not something we were able to cover in much depth on my course although I know it will benefit me greatly as a developer.
I intend to continue my Codementor sessions for the foreseeable future given how much progress I have made and I believe this to be an important time in my career to continue to learn as much as possible.
I have no doubt that I would not be the position of having my dream job right at this moment if it had not been for my Codementor sessions with Joel!
I have had such a great experience with Codementor that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to others. I have always found the staff at Codementor very friendly and quick to respond to queries and that personal touch has really added to my experience.
