The end of the year often brings about time for reflection and a look at the year ahead. While we have many exciting things in store for 2020, we wanted to take a moment to look back on 2019.

2019 was a year for the books!

• The big move! We doubled our square footage and added 2 more classrooms. All 6 classrooms will be in use on Tuesday evenings and Saturday in 2020!!
• Sweatpocolypse. Two weeks we’ll never forget. Thank you again to the Nashville Technology Council and Trevecca Nazarene University for giving us classroom space.
• The alumni hackathon returned!

Bootcamps and New Programs

• Launched the part-time Data Analytics Bootcamp and Analytics Jumpstart
• We graduated 9 Web Development cohorts and 1 Data Science cohort
• We held seven Web Development Jumpstart classes and five Analytics Jumpstart classes
• Hosted our first AWS class and held two UI & UX for Digital Product Design classes
• Graduated our first IT infrastructure class with Apprenti Tennessee

Community Support Grows For Career Development

Our graduates are ready for their first job in tech thanks in part to members of the Nashville community giving their time to speak to classes, attend a roundtable or mock interview event, or attend a demo day to hire our grads. Thank you to those who gave their time and talents this year to prepare our students for their journey after NSS.

• Launched a new mock interview event where 30-40 working professionals volunteer their time to interview the students from each class as they near graduation. This has given the students valuable experience as they head into their job search and has even led to at least one job offer.
• 36 first-time guests took part in our mock interviews or roundtables
• 326 hiring managers and internal recruiters attended a Demo Day
• 48 employers hired their first NSS graduate

The NSS Team

• New full-time team members: We added three new teammates to the learning side of NSS - Adam Shaeffer, Michael Holloway, and Nathan Vaughn - and one new teammate to fill an open position on our operations team - Kate Wilson.
• New full-time junior instructors: We added three junior instructors to our team - Madi Polk, Bryan Nilsen, and Kristen Norris. Our junior instructors spend one year with us before they start their first development jobs. With Madi, Bryan, and Kristen joining the team, we said goodbye to Emily Lemmon and Kimmy Bird, who started their first development jobs this year, and Meg Ducharme, who left us to start her family. (We can’t get enough pictures of her adorable twin boys!)
• Volunteer of the Year: Earlier this month, we recognized Shu Sajid of Web Development Cohort 26 for his dedication to the alumni Common Tables in 2019. The Common Table brings alumni together with current students to answer questions about code, network, and mentor each other. Shu not only coordinated alumni participation, he attended most of the sessions himself. Without Shu’s hard work, these Common Tables would have quietly disappeared. Thank you Shu!
• There was also a lot of work happening behind the scenes to improve the NSS experience for prospective students, current students, and graduates. A big shout out to our operations team for all their work to improve our processes and our students/graduates experiences this year.

Of course, none of these accomplishments are as great as those of our 215 graduates (in 2019)! Each one of them had their own unique journey that led them to NSS and we could not be more proud of the work they’re doing in companies all across Middle Tennessee (and a few beyond). We’ll share some of their 2019 reflections next week.