NSS is Seven. Another anniversary and another goal - 1000 graduates!

It seems barely yesterday that we celebrated our fifth anniversary and set a goal to graduate 500 graduates by the end of that year. But two more years have gone by and we not only reached 500 graduates but we have exceeded 800 graduates! Hard to believe so much has happened in two years:

• 500 graduates in Sept 2017
• Data Science Bootcamp launched in 2017, two cohorts have graduated and the third starts in September
• Analytics Jumpstart launched this year, third class is currently in session
• Data Analytics Bootcamp approved in late 2018, first cohort fully enrolled and starting next month
• Web Development bootcamps expanded from 8 to 10 cohorts per year in 2019
• Moving into a new facility in July (fingers crossed) that has six full-size classrooms and twice the floor space overall

The pace just seems to keep increasing - sort of like everything in Nashville these days! So much so that we will come close to having 1000 graduates before the end of this year - in other words, it took us five years to reach our first 500 graduates, it will take us just over two years to add the second 500 graduates.

Just as we did two years ago, we’re planning on a short series of blog posts about our seventh anniversary and about some of our plans for the future. But before we start on those posts, I’d like to take a few minutes to reflect back on the last seven years.

Reflecting On Seven Years

There are so many great things that have happened to me and to NSS over the past seven years. So many people to thank, so many things to be grateful for. We talked about many of these things in our five-year anniversary series of posts, things like: What We Mean When We Say Community, It’s All About The Opportunities, Why A Non-Profit?, Why A Six Month Curriculum?, and of course No Single Person Makes NSS Happen.

But more than anything else, what the last seven years have been about are our students. That includes the 800+ graduates and over 130 current active students at NSS. Starting NSS was a leap of faith. Maybe several leaps of faith all tied together - faith that at least some employers would work with this new fangled coding bootcamp as a source of talent, faith that Nashville’s tech talent gap was real and wasn’t going to go away, faith that the tech community would welcome and mentor our students, and most importantly, faith that Nashville had a large community of talented people with the latent potential to do software development.

All of those leaps of faith turned out to be valid. All of them happened. And the last one, the one about the pool of latent talent, was the big winner. Seeing our 800+ graduates progress through our programs and then have the vast majority get jobs using the skills they learned at NSS has been just an incredible experience for all of us here at NSS. It’s what fuels us and keeps us going. Without all of those talented people who were willing to put their futures in our hands and trust us to help them launch a new career none of this could have happened. Getting the chance to meet our students, getting to know even a little bit of their stories and share in their journeys has been an incredible gift. Thank you to all of our students for giving us this chance and for seizing the opportunity that NSS provides.