Tuition for the 26-week program is $17,500.

We offer a $1,000 scholarship to anyone who is accepted into the program and successfully completes the optional free 3-week prep course prior to the start of the program. Participation in the prep course will help to ensure that you have validated your love for code. Additional scholarships include a $500 diversity scholarship for anyone who identifies with an underrepresented member of the software engineering community and a $500 scholarship to any United States veterans. These scholarships may be combined.

Approximately 20-30% of students finance their tuition through SkillsFund which offers deferred tuition payments three months after graduation and monthly tuition payments thereafter based on either a three or five year plan. They also offer up to $6,000 in addition to tuition financing for students to use for any cost of living or computer expenses during the program. You can learn more about whether SkillsFund is a good fit for you by visiting their website here.

We are an approved vendor of the State of Massachusetts' Unemployment Department's Training Opportunity Program which entitles enrolled students to extend their unemployment benefits through the duration of the program. You can learn more about this program and check if you are eligible for participation here.

<p>We have returned to campus. Through the years, people have come to Launch Academy to benefit from the many attributes of in person learning. While we have been teaching the 8-week part time phase one virtually since 2013, we continue to empathize with learners who seek an in-person paradigm. Students have the option to alternate between working remotely or on campus during the 10-week full time phase of the program based on what best suits their learning style. Everyone is encouraged to work from home if any symptoms arise or if they have been in contact with anyone who has contracted COVID-19. We will continue to monitor public health data and adapt accordingly to ensure we are taking a conservative approach to prioritize health for students and the team while on campus.</p>

Launch Academy is a longstanding member of the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting ("CIRR") which provides transparent standards, accounting for 100% of students, allowing straightforward outcomes comparisons with other skill schools who prioritize transparency of student outcomes.

CIRR requires us to report twice per year based on specific calculations for outcomes including placement rate, median annual base salary, graduate job titles and more on the basis of 90 days and 180 days after graduation. Our outcomes are audited annually by an unbiased third party as determined by CIRR. During the audit, all graduates are contacted to confirm reported data.

Launch Academy is not like college and not everyone graduates. The program is rigorous and unsustainable by design and thus not always a great fit for everyone. We believe this rigor sets our graduates apart and provides them with a strong starting point to a successful career in software engineering. Our exceptional placement rate proves out this theory.
We like to say that the term 'adult education' has the word 'adult' in it for a reason. There is no hand holding at Launch Academy. Rather, we expect students to meet us halfway and commit to be successful in the program and beyond as they pursue a career in software engineering. Successful students prepare themselves by employing discipline in their day-to-day lifestyle during Phase one of the program and beyond, ensuring that friends and family support protected learning time. While we have a rocket in our logo, learning to code is not rocket science. We may not subscribe to the popular mantra that everyone should learn to code, but we do believe that those who do choose to pursue a career in software engineering can be successful with the right amount of determination, discipline and grit. You can check out our CIRR statistics here.

Launch Academy consists of three contiguous phases.

I) Phase One is 8-weeks virtual, flexible, part time learning requiring 20-25 hours per week. Students make one submission per week and can continue to work their full or part time jobs during this phase. Collaboration between students and the software engineering team occurs via Slack chat and live and/or recorded Zoom video calls.

II) Phase Two is 10-weeks, in-person, full time learning requiring 40-60 hours per week. We strongly discourage any professional commitments during this phase of the program. Students have the option of working on campus or virtually during this phase during COVID-19 protocol.

III) Phase Three, aka Post Grad Support, consists of 8-weeks or as long as it takes to secure a job. This is when we help you with the job search by scheduling interviews with companies, helping with outreach to open job listings, assisting with networking, preparing you for job interviews and assisting with negotiating your compensation package if requested.

Once you’ve obtained a job, you unlock Lifetime Access to Alumni Support. This provides you with free quarterly curriculum update access - we update the curriculum around 20% every 90 days based on hiring partner feedback as to what hiring managers are seeking in people they are hiring into open positions. You also have free access to the Campus after 2pm on weekdays to work with other alumni on side projects to learn new skills. We want to help you continue your learning long after graduation so that you can obtain promotions and continue to have the gift of loving what you do for work.

Launch Academy exists in order to help people get jobs as software engineers. At the heart of that mission is our dedicated Career Services team.

Approximately 20% of the curriculum during Phase 2 of the program consists of professional training or career services content. We’ll sit down with you at the beginning of the program to discuss your career objectives and align your digital assets towards those goals. We’ll begin to craft and refine your Github profile, LinkedIn account, resume and cover letters to optimize each of these assets based on historical hiring pattern feedback. During Phase 2 we’ll begin putting you through mock interviews which aim to mirror the format and energy that you will encounter when interviewing at companies following the program. We’ll provide feedback after each mock interview and repeat the process so that following the program you’ll walk into job interviews with the confidence required to land an offer.

During the Post Graduate Support phase, we’ll help support and guide you through the job search. We’ll assist with scheduling job interviews, networking, application processes and prepare you prior to interviews based on our knowledge of a certain company’s job interview format. We’re here to serve you as your personal technical recruiter and nothing makes us happier than alumni landing jobs!

Launch Academy employs a project based approach to learning where you learn by building and writing software on a daily basis. Our non-traditional approach favors a learn-by-doing approach to that of a more traditional lecture series. You’ll submit daily projects during the first six weeks of Phase 2. Thereafter and prior to graduation, you’ll build two larger projects in addition to these smaller challenge based daily projects.

Small Group Projects occur in Weeks 7 and 8 of Phase 2. You’ll build a large fully functional app with three other team members. At this time, you will learn both technical and soft skills in a dynamic environment. While learning new technologies you will begin to review code and pull requests as well as work with agile methodologies including morning stand-up. Small group project weeks will arm you with real world experience which you can reference during job interview questions revolving around team oriented software development experience.

Breakable Toy projects, aka Capstone Projects, occur in Weeks 9 and 10 of Phase 2. This is when you will build your own large, fully functional app from the ground up. People come to Launch Academy with ideas on what they want to build and it's our responsibility to help you scope these ideas into a 2-week project you can present to companies following the program. Your project may cover a nagging problem you’ve been trying to solve for your personal or professional life or perhaps an app that friends or family have been wishing for. At this stage of the program, you have now acquired the necessary skills to bring these ideas to life! We can’t wait to see the wonderful things you build.

Our approach to curriculum development is iterative. We only hold four cohorts per year and in between each cohort we take three weeks off from teaching. We call it the offseason. During this time, we meet with various companies and ask them what skills they are seeking in people they are looking to hire onto their software engineering teams in the coming months. Armed with this intel, we work as a team to rewrite approximately 20% of our curriculum each cohort so that we know students are graduating with in demand skills required to land the job during interviews following the program.

Core to our pedagogical philosophy is the Polyglot mentality which states that people who are proficient in two or more technologies can more easily learn additional technologies thereafter. This is important because following the program, many students work at companies whose stack differs from that of the one we teach. By attending Launch Academy, you are essentially learning how to learn to code. This offers you the ability to quickly learn new technologies at companies on the job. Software engineering is a lifelong learning process. We want to equip you to be successful long after you land your first job.

Launch Academy's Software Engineering program equips aspiring software developers with what they need to succeed as professionals in today's technology companies. While you'll learn in-demand technologies through this course,  the core objective of the program is to teach you the fundamentals and best practices of programming. This makes our graduates well positioned to adapt and grow with the fast-paced industry of web development.

To ensure our students learn the technology required by today's industry demands, our curriculum and this syllabus are constantly evolving and improving. These changes are informed by feedback from employers, current students, and our alumni. At Launch Academy, we believe that deliberate practice is the most effective way to learn software development.

That means the course is entirely structured around a learn-by-doing approach. As a result, you will graduate the program with a portfolio of projects, experiences, and code examples which will help to set you apart in your job search.

During the program you will learn programming foundations with javascript, web foundations with SQL, HTML, CSS and the DOM, advanced object oriented programming and dynamic web applications including test driven development, front-end development with JavaScript and ReactJS, databases and full stack web applications, agile methodologies including iterative development and daily standups, integration of third party API's, how to deploy a full-stack application built with ReactJS and NodeJS.

The Post Graduate Support phase offers additional learning opportunities from students including Redux, Ruby on Rails. You can learn more about the technical aspects of the program by downloading our syllabus here.

Launch Academy is a zero-to-sixty program with no prior coding experience required. That said, we do recommend people participate in the free 3-week preparatory course prior to attending the program to validate your long term interest in coding and begin to make the necessary adjustments to your weekly calendar to optimize yourself towards learning. For those who apply to the program and are accepted prior to the 3-week prep program, we’ll provide you with free resources so that you can begin obtaining an overview of the fundamentals.

Successful students are committed to learning and have built discipline into their daily lives to ensure they have prioritized learning in order to set themselves up for success during the program. Common traits leading to success include a passion towards collaborative learning, an interest in hands-on learning, a willingness to think differently about how to best learn a new skill, fortitude to fight through the struggle of learning and a trust in those who have learned in a similar paradigm so that you can stand on the shoulders of giants as you achieve your goal of loving what you do for work.

We are naturally biased on this one so we always recommend prospective students reach out to graduates of any program you are considering via LinkedIn or other mediums. Ask them about their experiences to gauge and gain confidence in the program you are considering. That being said, here are the structural differences between Launch Academy and other programs in the Metro Boston region:

• Full time software engineering instructors resulting in continuity, commitment to teaching and empathizing with the needs of students on a daily basis through relationship building.

• Iterative nature of our curriculum. We update our curriculum up to 20% per quarter (per cohort) based on feedback from our hiring partners around what are the specific skills they are seeking in people they are going to hire in the next hiring cycle in 90 days. The result is graduates with in demand skills at the time of job interviews.

• Our program is longer than most totaling 26-weeks when considering the 8-week part time phase plus the 10-week full time phase and the 8-week post graduate support phase (or as long as it takes to land a job).

• Lifetime relationship with alumni via 'Lifetime Alumni Support' . Grants students free access to (1) quarterly curriculum updates to upskill on the job long after graduation and (2) free access to the campus after 2pm on weekdays to work on side projects and further their learning.

• Commitment to transparency of student outcomes. We are a CIRR member and we provide readily available student outcomes on our website through our student disclosures section

• Boutique nature of the program. By focusing on the skills of software engineering in one city with a strong focus on quality we are able to provide a high quality education experience. We offer easy access to the founding team with small cohort sizes ranging from 25-30 during the on-campus phase of the program. This results in a highly iterative learning environment with low student to teacher ratios.

• Rigor. The program is very intense and thus not always a great fit for everyone. We believe this rigor sets our graduates apart and provides them with a strong starting point to a successful career in software engineering.

Yes, you need a computer to participate in our program. A Mac laptop is strongly recommended. While you will be able to use a Windows PC for this program, the majority of software jobs that graduates enter into after graduation require working on a Mac. To ensure you are set up for success in the long run, it's beneficial to learn to code on the type of dev environment and machine that you're most likely to work on in your future on the job. Which model you chose (Macbook vs Macbook Air vs Macbook Pro) is really up to you and your budget. A large portion of the Launch engineering team and students use a Macbook Air, so don't assume that you need to buy one of the more expensive options. From a technical perspective, as long as it can run the latest version of OSX, you'll be fine. The 8GB version will serve your needs for the program.

Graduates receive a Letter of Completion with the ability to add the Launch Academy logo of experience to your LinkedIn profile for prospective employers to validate your successful graduation from the program.

Our phased structure is built for beginners and aims to ensure everyone moves onto Phase two with a baseline of knowledge prior to us accelerating the learning curve. Students will receive regular feedback from our software engineering team including weekly ‘systems check’ results with support to strengthen areas of opportunity and provide non core material to foster your strengths. Students have the opportunity to defer once to a future cohort prior to week 7 of Phase one of the cohort if they feel like they would benefit from additional time prior to starting Phase two. Doing so provides you with continued access to the curriculum and allows you to retake the first seven weeks of Phase one.

While we don’t set specific cohort size limits, we do like to keep size during the on campus phase to less than 30 students. Like all rules, there are exceptions. However, one exception we will never make is providing low student to teacher ratios. This is one of the pillars to our high level of education at Launch Academy. People learn better when they have support - ideally in person - and in small groups. Deviating from that philosophy is a nonstarter for us.