Origin story of an 18 year old college instructor that dropped out twice. | by Wyatt H. Lang | Oct, 2025
I’ve been enrolled in 4 different colleges and still haven’t finished a Bachelor’s degree. Somehow I still got a job in a professional field. At 18 years old, I stumbled my way into teaching 3 full-time college courses, leading over 200 other students as a corporate instructor, and becoming my mom’s boss at work. This is my absurd origin story.
The Lead-up
I was a good student throughout my K-12 education. I wasn’t particularly talented, but I made straight A’s. I also took enough AP and dual-credit courses to skip freshman year of college. My parents and teachers expected me to do fine, but I had other plans.
I didn’t get (and didn’t try very hard to obtain) any scholarships leading up to college. I decided that taking on debt to attend 4-year universities wasn’t worth it. So, I went to my local community college and had a great first semester majoring in electrical engineering.
The Opportunity of a Lifetime
As my second real college semester approached, the community college launched a coding boot-camp. I lucked out getting the opportunity to attend. Grants for the inaugural class made the tuition lower than the standard community college tuition. They also allured me with the promise of a high salary, a chance to earn 19 college credits in a single semester, and a launchpad to start working early.
In another twist, my mom signed up for the program with me! She was looking for a career change, and took on the challenge. Being a teenager, I had mixed feelings about her taking the class with me. It ended up being a cool experience for us to share.
The program was jammed into 17 weeks. Students were expected to learn the fundamentals of I.T., learn how to write full-stack web services in Java and JavaScript, and complete 5 professional certifications. The program was full of ambitious, talented students. If it weren’t for a major, unforeseen macroeconomic tragedy, some of us might have achieved all the goals we set out for.
The Pandemic Changed Everything
Around half-way through the program, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. We eventually got everyone setup to continue the class remotely, but the disruption hampered learning and motivations were crushed by the depressed job market.
No one passed all the certification tests as expected. Most of us received some combination of 2 or 3 out of the 5. Despite how far we had come, it became pretty obvious we weren’t skilled enough to make any meaningful contributions to commercial software either.
Near the end of the class, we networked with many local employers in the industry, but the guests often spread more pessimism than words of encouragement. I found out the industry has quite a distaste for coding boot-camps, and their aversion was amplified by the economic uncertainty.
Having worked in the industry for 6 years now, I’ve also come to despise boot-camps churning out unqualified candidates and filling them with false confidence. Realizing I was still massively under-qualified to land a junior position — after working so hard and being sold on this dream — was soul-crushing. None of my fellow students found jobs in the short-term after the program. It was a great experience, but I began to accept that I would just have to continue college on the traditional path.
The Boot-camp Pulls Me Back In
Ed, the architect and head instructor of the boot-camp didn’t work directly for the college. Ed owns a technical training company and won the bid to run the program on a contract. He gave us all the effort he could before, during, and well-after the program had run its 17-week course.
He was also the first employer to give 3 of us a shot. He paid me an hourly wage to build a survey-tool over the next summer that he said he would use for his Agile consulting gigs. I think he just wanted to help me out by giving me a chance to get some hands-on experience outside of the classroom.
The college evidently still had more money to spend and still believed in the program. They hired him to run the boot-camp for its second term in the fall semester. It was apparent his budget (or willingness to accept a lower margin) wasn’t as big this time around though. In the first term we had 4 different instructors, all with a combined century of experience.
In the second term, he only had one other experienced instructor. To help distribute the instructor-load, he hired my mom and another student from the previous class as teacher’s assistants. Meanwhile, I was beginning my next full-time semester of college.
They decided they needed some extra help, and I discovered I had more free time than I thought this semester. In the second week, they offered to let me join in as a teacher’s assistant as well.
Disaster Strikes Again — This Time in My Favor
This go-around, Ed was busy trying to grow other parts of his business. He made frequent appearances at the beginning and end of class, but the new instructor was leading the class 8 hours a day. We’ll call him Joe.
Joe was not only a software engineer, but also a lawyer specializing in intellectual property for software. He had lots of interesting stories about his work experience. By all indications, he was more than qualified to teach the class — and at first the students were impressed by his background.
However, Joe started to exhibit odd behavior during class. A few days he showed up late, and on those days he was noticeably jittery, high-strung, and impatient while explaining new concepts. The students began submitting lots of negative feedback on our end-of-day surveys.
One day, Joe’s nose started spontaneously bleeding while he was lecturing. Regardless of what was really going on, multiple students accused Joe of abusing stimulants because of the symptoms he seemed to be exhibiting. The accusations combined with his negative survey performance ultimately resulted in his exit from the program.
Ed was still busy with other projects. With no lead instructor and 3 teacher’s assistants, someone was going to have to take over. My mom, the other TA, and I took turns leading chapters of the course. After the third week, Ed asked me to be the lead instructor for the rest of the course.
The 18-year-old “Professor”
The rest of that semester was surreal for me. Somehow I pulled off teaching the rest of the class. I was concurrently taking 21 hours of credits as a student myself. The course was an 8-hour day, 5-days-a-week boot-camp, but the students would earn 9 hours of college credit for the portions of the program I taught. Hence, why I claim to have taught “3 college courses”. And the cherry on top? I was technically my mom’s boss at work.
Growing up, I struggled with overwhelming social anxiety. I could barely speak to my own extended family. I vividly remember 3 times in middle school when I was asked to give a presentation — I would just freeze in front of the class and say nothing. I was sent to the principal’s office each time because the teachers thought I was just being insubordinate. I couldn’t even say anything to explain what I was experiencing.
My time masquerading as a college instructor was life-changing. It was the first time I felt like I could speak to people as if I were an extrovert. I got to know all the students I was hanging out with everyday. Overcoming the fear of public speaking when it came to code revealed that I may have found something I am actually passionate about enough to just override the anxiety.
All the hard work studying in that first run of this boot-camp started to really show as well. When it came to the fundamentals of the tools I was working with, I had basically memorized the textbooks. This is a distinct advantage I believe I’ve developed over some of the developers that come from more traditional training paths. We frequently glorify abstraction in software development, but mastering the specific implementation of the tools you work with is how you leverage their niche benefits.
I might not have been qualified to speak to the aspects of the course concerned with industry advice or problems that only arise in scale, but I had learned to mimic Ed’s and the other instructors’ stories to distill the kernels of value back down to this new group of students. This is another useful technique.
As a junior developer, you may have memorized the “what” of an important topic, but being able to explain and demonstrate the “why” is equally if not more important. Sometimes we read about problems that we think we understand the solution to; but, when we attempt to solve them for ourselves, we realize our understanding is more shallow than we anticipated. When I was preparing for the next day’s training content, I frequently realized I hadn’t truly internalized some concepts, just tricked myself into thinking I had.
Life After Boot-camp
The I.T. boot-camp program at the college still lives on today, but it is unfortunately no longer geared towards developers. We had improved our job placement rate with this cohort, but obviously not well enough to secure the funding to continue.
For the next two years, I continued working for Ed as a technical trainer for corporate clients. I worked with clients in banking, aerospace, government, and education. However, I decided (twice, different colleges) that continuing to pay for college wasn’t worth the return on investment when I was already able to jump-start my career.
I miss the constant opportunities to pick up new skills for the next course, but I found that concentrating all my experience as a junior developer in training was leaving employers for engineering jobs skeptical that I could actually do the work.
For the last 3 years, I’ve worked as a full-time engineer as a contractor and earned the vague, but still desirable “senior” title.
Anyways, this is the nontraditional origin story of my career in software engineering.
