Scholarships We Love: DevPoint Labs Women’s Scholarship

Table of Contents

• Women in Computer Science
• The Scholarship
• What It Takes
• Why We Think It’s Awesome

DevPoint Labs is an 11-week, full-time, immersive bootcamp with campuses in Salt Lake City, Utah and Las Vegas, Nevada. DevPoint Labs’ full-stack bootcamp features an intensive 80 hours per week learning Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. We’re breaking down the DevPoint Labs Women’s Scholarship, a unique and comprehensive scholarship available for women in tech.

Women in Computer Science

While computer science today is largely characterized as a boys club, it wasn’t always a brogrammer’s world; women played an integral part in the development of programming as a field. Mathematician Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the “first programmer.” Grace Hopper paved the way for Steve Jobs, developing the first programming language to use words instead of numbers (COBOL) while she was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy.

In the 1980s, as the home computing revolution began, an insular, male-dominated “techie” culture took hold, and the number of women involved in computer programming began to decline rapidly. Now women make up only about 25% of the computing workforce in the US and they earn less per dollar than their male counterparts. Women only receive 12% of computer science degrees conferred. Coding bootcamps have a unique opportunity to reshape the face of technology by encouraging, recruiting, supporting and retaining women in bootcamps. And technology will certainly benefit from diverse perspectives going forward; Ty Diamse of DevPoint Labs says, "Women add tremendous value to the programming world. They're able to add a unique perspective which leads to innovation."

DevPoint Labs is committed to changing the current state by promoting women in tech, and offering this scholarship for the betterment and education of female programmers. One student in each of the Front End night class and Full-Time Web Dev course will be offered the award.

The Scholarship

The scholarship covers the full tuition of each program which amounts to 440 hours of coding experience. In addition, scholarship recipients will be hooked up with a 3 month paid internship after graduation as well as 6 month membership with Church & State, a business incubator providing free resources to entrepreneurs. Ty from DevPoint Labs specifies, "Women that make it into the full tuition scholarship have the same benefits as a regular student including a three month paid internship and a 6 month membership at Church & State."

What It Takes

• A complete application to either the Full-Time Web Dev or Front-End night class.
• A series of short essays (<300 words) covering the applicant’s background, the source of their interest in programming, a list of current skills, and an explanation of what the skills gained would be used for.
• Grit, a passion for learning, and ambition to succeed.

Why We Think It’s Awesome

DevPoint Labs is an intensive program that prepares students for the rigors of the web development industry. Anyone who still thinks that women can’t hang in coding hasn’t been paying attention to the explosion of interest over the last few years. Meetups, bootcamps, and scholarships for women coders have only been growing in number, and the DevPoint Women’s Scholarship is another opportunity to get women back in tech and turn their significant interest into substantive education.

Want to learn more about DevPoint Labs or this scholarship? Check out their School Page on Course Report or the DevPoint Labs website!