While filling out a job application today, this actually stumped me. How was I to proceed? Having been asked earlier what my cumulative GPA in school was, I had already begun to suspect my education would be questioned further. Unfortunately, I couldn’t upload my transcripts because I had graduated six years ago and my school had been shut down when the company that owned it could no longer maintain it. So I wrote them a letter.
I never attended a traditional college or university. I never attended the local community college, like the vast majority of my high school classmates. But I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Culinary Management. Where did I go to school then, you may ask. I attended the Art Institute of California- San Diego, a college of Argosy University. Yes, I received a Bachelor of Science degree from an art school; my wife (BS in Neuroscience) is always thrilled when I remind her of this. However, it wasn’t in the classroom that I learned the most about my field of study and industry. It was through the “school of hard knocks” as the old chefs used to call it. Because of my experience working full time while attending school, I am very much in support of “alternative” secondary education and I think many companies are losing out on great potential employees if they don’t open their minds to it.
I graduated from the Art Institutes of California- San Diego(Ai), a college of Argosy University in 2014 and since then my school’s campus has closed. My Bachelor of Science of Degree in Culinary Management was conferred to me on August 16, 2014. Shortly afterward, the parent company that owned my school, Education Management Corporation was involved in a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit involving the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and former and current students because of their very aggressive student loan tactics. The lawsuit resulted in the selling of the Art Institutes and Argosy University to Dream Center Education Holdings, but the company was unable to maintain the campuses as student enrollment dropped. In March of 2019, my particular campus closed suddenly and without warning to alumni.
During my time at Ai, I was also working full time as a line cook and thus didn’t particularly care to track my GPA. I attended classes, submitted my homework, and passed my exams. Included in my studies were typical general education classes and my degree focused classes in business management, with a heavy focus on the restaurant industry. My primary focus, as I said though, was gaining real world experience in my chosen field of study, and although there were many students in my degree program who made Dean’s List and Honor Roll, or were presidents of various clubs, none of them had actual working experience and didn’t work in professional kitchens like I did. By the end of my studies, I was well respected by my classmates and Chef Instructors because of the hard work I put in, had earned the privilege of becoming a “Class Sous Chef” and easily passed my Institute Effectiveness Exams and earned the professional titles of Certified Culinarian, by the American Culinary Federation, and Certified Food Safety Manager, by Serv Safe, a program sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and had authored a paper exploring the use of the Fibonacci Sequence and the golden ratio and golden spiral in plating theory.
After over 12 years working in the restaurant industry, with 5 years of experience as a supervisor in various roles, I decided to pursue another dream I once had in high school and enrolled in General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive Remote course. After 480 hours of instruction, countless hours working on homework and projects, and many long nights puzzling over problems, I completed the course and began my new career as a software engineer.
How are these experiences relevant to being a software developer? I have shown that I have the ability to learn through a variety of methods that include hands on practice and experience, written, and oral instruction. I can work well in a team, and have led various teams accomplish various goals. From the age of 16 I have worked professionally and have found practical education in the work place can sometimes be much more educational and important than theoretical education in the classroom. If a Computer Science student can regurgitate the principles of Object Oriented Programming, but doesn’t know how to construct a class with various properties and methods and create objects to inherit them, what good are they as a software developer? I may not know the history of the development of pure functions but I know how to use them to create asynchronous API calls to display data from a backend database. I may have only graduated a coding bootcamp, and my school may be shut down, but I have spent the majority of my life learning through practical application. I may have failed at times, but I always strive to learn from these failures so I can succeed.
I’ve already seen companies begin to drop the requirement that their employees have a four year degree if they have practical experience instead. Coming from an industry where we’ve already seen the value of practical experience over culinary school, I hope more companies follow suit and open their minds to alternative education.
The Measure of a Man 