Hack Reactor Precourse Work

Hack Reactor is a 13 week long intensive immersive coding boot camp. It was recently voted one of the top coding schools in the world.

Hack Reactor is incredibly successful in its development of very competent and qualified full-stack programmers after only 13 weeks of training. Their success is reflected in the stats that 99% of their graduates are able to obtain full-time employment after graduation. The average salary of graduates is $105k!

Applying to Hack Reactor and getting accepted is a very challenging endeavor. They only accept 3% of the applicants into the program. Once you are accepted you are assigned to a cohort class that will be starting anywhere from 3-9 weeks in the future.

The reason for the delay in starting is that you must complete successfully all of their pre-course work. Even if you are accepted into Hack Reactor, you will not be allowed to start with your cohort until all your pre-course work is completed.

Hack Reactor Pre-course material

The material you need to complete for your pre-course work is a very hefty 25 page document. When you read it the second paragraph clearly outlines that they estimate it will take you 50-70 hours to complete. From my personal experience that is a very low estimate of the actual time it will take.

The pre-course material is a very solid introduction to JavaScript programming, CSS, HTML, GIT, debugging, closures, scopes and hands-on programming exercises. Just completing the pre-course work provides you with enough knowledge to actually get a junior JavaScript programmer position that does not require experience with frameworks and other products.

What is Required in Pre-course Material

The pre-course material is a combination of watching training courses, reading targeted articles on a particular subject matter and doing actual coding exercises.

Here are some of the topics that are covered in the pre-course material:

• Introduction to JavaScript Programming
• CSS and HTML
• Advanced JavaScript Programming Syntax
• Git and Terminal
• Test Driving Development
• JavaScript programming exercises
• Debugging
• Recursion
• Scopes
• Scopes
• Execution Contexts
• jQuery

As you can see this is a very extensive list. The goal of the pre-course work is to prepare you for the intensive work required at Hack Reactor.

Timeline to Complete

The pre-course material is broken down into three sections. You will be given a soft deadline and a hard deadline for each section.

The soft deadline is the recommended deadline to have all the material completed in that section. hack Reactor has an automated system that will grade your material and provide you feedback on the deadline date. That feedback will tell you if you have completed the material successfully or not.

If you do not pass a soft deadline then you have until the hard deadline to complete it successfully. Usually the hard deadline is about a week or so after the soft deadline. If you fail to complete the material successfully by the hard deadline then you will be dropped from your cohort and will not be allowed to start.

Hack Reactor Community

When you are given your pre-course material, you will not be expected to complete them by yourself in a vacuum. Hack Reactor provides a community for all entering students.

Within this community every student has the opportunity to ask questions and get assistance if they are having problems. During my pre-course time, I learned quite a bit from other students through the community.

Starting about a month or more before your cohort class start date, Hack Reactor starts a series of Class Parties. These are 1 hour live hangouts with all the students and representatives from Hack Reactor.

These parties are held 3 days a week for approximately 5 consecutive weeks. The topics are well planned out and provide you with any additional support and guidance that you might not have gotten in the online community area.

You are given an extra breadth of knowledge prior to starting your cohort class as a result of these pre-course parties. Basically you are given 15 hours of instruction before you even start your training. Just another reason why Hack Reactor is consider the best immersive coding boot camp in the world.