Hi, I'm Areeb Cursell, co-founder of Flegate Academy here in Seattle.
Our first cohort just finished Unit 1 front-end web development.
Let's take a look at their journey over the last four months.
I was introduced to Flegate Academy through my cousin.
She read an article in the magazine and she knew I was interested in coding software and
so she shot me a link and I read the article, gained my interest and now I'm here at Flegate.
What I really like about Flegate is that there is this sense of family and community and
so we support each other in this space.
It feels like home, like when we come in it feels like we're in someone's home, our
TAs are great, all of the other students are great and if we don't know something, he will
slow down and teach it to us instead of going forward and telling us to learn it on our
own.
One, it was free and two, they were starting in the spring so I was just like, yeah, let
me go ahead and look at this so I went to the website and saw that they were targeting
specifically black people and I was like, yeah, yeah, I gotta do this.
I think that, you know, any of the software industries, their software is so much better
when they have different perspectives, you know, software is used by everyone so if everyone
builds it, all of those perspectives will be taken into account, it can only be better.
But you did that through dot notation, right, it wasn't just like, oh, I know this is Risha
so I'm just going to get Risha, you can't make that kind of logic want to fly, you have
to program this.
I have to forget I plan to just build an empire and really I would like to do it in Africa.
I pay attention to the growth and I see the potential and I feel like my energy, the time
that I'm going to put in the effort, I want it to benefit that continent because so much
has been done to strip the continent of what it is.
I really enjoy working with people and I have a passion for technology and so what I'd love
to do is just be able to combine the two.
Three things I will do with my target education is change my career to be a web developer,
help the community and obtain a long lasting skill.
One of the biggest things for me is helping out my East African community.
So I definitely want to go out and make, you know, those small training programs for high
school, middle school students and just let them know there's programs like this, there's
college and understand that, you know, even though you came from struggles, you have
an opportunity to be great and there's resources to be great.
I intend to either start my own business or go into work for one of the companies that
are around me in the surrounding area.
I intend to gain as much knowledge as I can from one of those companies.
If I decide to go that route, so when I do start my own business, I'll know the ins and
outs and be able to venture across that world along with networking and have the foundation
to build upon that.
