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# Appendix: Applications Checklist
There is no right or wrong as you take this journey. We hope you make the most informed decision possible. What are some steps you can take to remove some risks in your decision making and obtain more information and confidence?
## Checklist of Things You Should Know or Ask
We suggest you invest in your own list of key factors of your decision. Nevertheless, we share the following baseline list to get you started. You may want to directly request the some of the following information from programming course officials.
1. [ ] What are the standards of admission?
2. [ ] Describe the culture of the learning environment?
4. [ ] Can you describe the teaching philosophy? (e.g. how should students learn, do we pair?)
4. [ ] How large is the class size?
5. [ ] Who are my peers? With what sort of people will I be learning?
6. [ ] Can you refer me to an alumni who can share his or her experience?
7. [ ] What are the payment options? Is deferred payment option available?
8. [ ] What makes your programming course unique (or better or special) from others?
9. [ ] Can you tell me about the employment statistics - what are the median salaries? who are the employers? what is the graduate placement rate? (Remember, geographic location is a key driver behind these questions.)
10. [ ] Do you offer employment assistance in the form of coaching or networking?
11. [ ] Can you share some details about the curriculum? Basically, what can I expect to learn?
12. [ ] Tell me about the instructors. What is their pedigree (companies where they worked)?
13. [ ] What is the instructor:student ratio?
>You will also want to dig online to assess the reputation of the programming course. Resources include Quora, Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube Channels, and alumni blogs. Finally, answer for yourself these very important questions. These are unique and personal to you. When you consider these questions, try hard not to compare yourself to others or project someone else's opinions onto yourself. Only you can be you.
>
14. [ ] How will learning to code help me? Am I interested simply because it is cool, or because I am genuinely interested in working as a software engineer. (And do I understand that working as a software engineer possibly means staying up late into the night staring at my computer screen writing mundane unit tests or fixing someone else's crappy code that was impossible to debug and had no documentation?)
15. [ ] Have I actually bothered to ask a senior software engineer at a company that I am interested in working for what they think of this development path? Basically, what is my post-course game plan? (We agree this seems like taking things far, but it's a serious decision - are you serious about it?)
16. [ ] Does the curriculum align with the job skill-set that I actually want to gain? For example, if the school emphasizes a certain programming language, is that consistent with the programming language required in the job I'd like to have?
17. [ ] Your own gut check. Step back. Does it feel right? If not, why not? (Again, be you. Only you can be you. Don't do it just because you saw someone else do it and they seem happy.)