Be flexible. Be Surprised! | Graduate Spotlight

Since early childhood, Bailey Dennis of Part-time Web Development Cohort Evening 13 was always fascinated by computers. “When I was 4, my family gave me a computer they used to have, a dusty old PC running MS-DOS. I was instantly hooked,” she remembers. Though her interests jumped wildly from one field to the next, as they tend to do when you’re a kid, Bailey shares that she always came back around to programming. Bailey attended a state university where she took classes in Python and C++, though she didn’t graduate computer science like she originally intended. “Eventually I would graduate with a degree in Integrated Studies,” she explains. “[But] it was here I solidified my love of programming and decided to make moves to pursue that dream.” Enter, Nashville Software School (NSS).

Why did you choose to attend NSS?

“Being a developer is something I always wanted to do! I went to university and graduated in an unrelated field. I kind of drifted through life post graduation and was not comfortable with where I was in life. I was talking to some colleagues at different points and NSS came up in conversations over and over and over. I did quite a bit of research and the reputation that NSS carries is honestly second to none. So, I made the decision to apply and that was right when [the Coronavirus] really started to take off. In retrospect, I wish I had done it sooner!”

What was your favorite capstone project and why?

“My favorite capstone was the one on the front-end. I felt like the idea for the capstone was more solid than my back-end capstone idea. I also really enjoyed pushing myself to add a bunch of eye candy to the site and learned how to add a .webm video to the login screen. Working with animations was such a fun challenge!”

What advice would you give to current or incoming NSS Web Development students?

“Allow yourself to be surprised! Being open to new ways of looking at things and having the ability to be flexible and handle the unexpected is one of the unwritten curriculums of NSS. Yes you will learn JavaScript and C# or Python or whatever cool language you signed up for. Yes you will learn tooling and get comfortable with all of them. But, having the ability to be surprised will boost your motivation at key times, and drive you to dig further and push harder than you ever thought you were capable of.”