This course focuses on engineering careers, particularly on leadership: coaching, leading people and organizations. Students will also focus on solving coding challenges and preparing for technical interviews. Students who perform well in this class will have the option to become peer coaches for incoming students at the start of the new school year.
The material you learn here will continue to prepare you for crushing technical interviews, and how to start the path of becoming a leader in your environment.
Course Delivery: hybrid | 7 weeks | 14 sessions
Course Credits: 3 units | 37.5 Seat Hours | 75 Total Hours
By the end of the course, you will be able to ...
- Empower peers through building trust and utilizing effective coaching practices
- Lead teams through using a variety of product management and communication best practices
- Develop the skillsets and confidence of teammates using the science of learning
- Become more comfortable with online, live-coding interview tools and take home coding projects.
- Demonstrate using various strategies to answer behavioral interview questions to highlight your specific story, skill set, and talents.
NOTE: Due to the shorter summer sessions, for some class sessions you will see multiple topics covered. This schedule compression is to ensure that we cover the same material that we normally would in non-summer terms.
Course Dates: Tuesday, June 1 – Thursday, July 15, 2021 (7 weeks)
Class Times: Tuesday, Thursday at 9:30am–12:15pm (14 class sessions)
| Class | Date | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tue, June 1 | Course + Interviewing Intro / Project Audit |
| 2 | Thu, June 3 | Pretty Portfolio Projects, Please |
| 3 | Tue, June 8 | Strategies for Behavioral Interviewing: Situational Awareness |
| 4 | Thu, June 10 | PMs & Communication |
| 5 | Tue, June 15 | Themes in Software Craftsmanship |
| 6 | Thu, June 17 | README Please! |
| 7 | Tue, June 22 | Identifying Oppurtunity + Information Dissemination |
| 8 | Thu, June 24 | Writing a Ticket |
| 9 | Tue, June 29 | Lab Day + 1:1 Check In w/ Instructor |
| 10 | Thu, July 1 | Validate Thy Biz |
| 11 | Tue, July 6 | Leadership Models + Warm Demander |
| 12 | Thu, July 8 | Writing Time + Lab Day |
| 13 | Tue, July 13 | Shipping is a Superpower |
| 14 | Thu, July 15 | Final Exam/Presentations |
All class recordings will be available here no later than 24 hours after the class session. For privacy reasons, please do not share the recordings outside of the Make School student body.
- User Interviews - user interviews help you understand and validate user needs. Here are user interview best practices and a template script
- Best Practices for User Narratives, Wireframe, Entity Relationship Diagram - see best practice articles, videos, and slides See class slides here.
- Sprint Planning Meetings (1 hour, weekly) - Meeting Agenda Template. Led by the PM. Team checks their roadmap and evaluate teams’ needs to decide what goes into the next sprint, and assign tasks. Teams can use planning poker to estimate task effort. Everything is logged into Trello. You can copy this Sprint Planning Trello Board template.
- Sprint Retrospective (½ hour, weekly) - Meeting Agenda Template. Complete the old sprint board by checking all tickets and moving incomplete ones over to the next sprint board. Then estimate the tickets that the PM have moved into the board ahead of meeting. Go over what was completed, what went well not if it didn’t go so well, but double check how everyone felt. Anyone feel overloaded on work? Anything the PM could have done differently? Sprint Retrospective Trello Board Template.
- Teamwork Rubric - rubric for individual performance on team and full team performance
Due: June 10th
A common interview practice is to assign a take home project for the interviee to complete. You're typically given a prompt or spec to follow, and a deliverable date or timeline. Through this assignment, our goal is to give you practice with a take home project with the same conditions you'd find in a real interview scenario.
Here are the requirements for the take home interview project.
Final Project due July 15th (40% of final grade)
Build your best product yet! We'll treat this semester as a simulation of Y Combinator.
Evaluation: Using the Portfolio Product Rubric for the respective track
Quiz will take place on June 15th
There will be a quiz on Leadership Models & Warm Demander. Expect there to be a mixture of multiple choice and free response questions.
Quiz link will be distributed on the day of.
**Quiz will take place on June 22nd **
There will be a quiz on PMs & Communication. Expect there to be a mixture of multiple choice and free response questions.
Quiz link will be distributed on the day of.
As you go through the interview process, you will encounter the same (or similar) behavioral interview questions in most interviews you take. It's good to have answers to common questions primed and ready to go so you can have examples and stories to share at hand that highlight your skillset and talents.
Answer questions from this list of behavioral interview questions and link to your answers in the course tracker
Submission:
- Schedule time with a peer to do a pair programming session
- Follow this agenda during your session
- Have your partner fill out this form to evaluate your efforts: http://make.sc/pair-programming-form
Evaluation:
To pass the pair programming assignments, you must do the following:
- Ensure that your partner logs your two pair programming sessions via the evaluation form: http://make.sc/pair-programming-form
- You utilize at least 2/3 of the senior skills outlined in the pair programming agenda
Evaluation:
- Must score above a 2 on the writing rubric to pass
- Must include 2-3 of the components listed above to pass
To pass this course you must meet the following requirements:
- Earn 70% of the cumulative points from the assignments above
- Actively participate in class and abide by the attendance policy
- Make up all classwork from all absences
Any additional resources you may need (online books, etc.) can be found here. You can also find additional resources through the library linked below:
- Program Learning Outcomes - What you will achieve after finishing Make School, all courses are designed around these outcomes.
- Grading System - How grading is done at Make School
- Code of Conduct, Equity, and Inclusion - Learn about Diversity and Inclusion at Make School
- Academic Honesty - Our policies around plagerism, cheating, and other forms of academic misconduct
- Attendance Policy - What we expect from you in terms of attendance for all classes at Make School
- Course Credit Policy - Our policy for how you obtain credit for your courses
- Disability Services (Academic Accommodations) - Services and accommodations we provide for students
- Online Learning Tutorial - How to succeed in online learning at Make School
- Student Handbook - Guidelines, policies, and resources for all Make School students