Epicodus Housing: University Pointe

Prospective Epicoders know that they must put in pre-class homework in order to gain admittance to Epicodus. What may be overlooked is that those coming from out of town will also need to do their homework on where they will stay. This is more difficult than you may think, because not all landlords and subletters are willing to admit out of towners, given the uncertainty surrounding personality differences, financial means and following through on one's intentions.

Coming from the east coast, I faced each of these issues. I ended up signing a lease with University Pointe, a housing unit geared largely to college students near Portland State University. It has benefits as well as drawbacks:

The good:

Great location: right next to school and max rail line north and south

Great views of downtown 
Furnished

Some interesting characters

Lease is 6 months
Decent pricing

The bad:

Payment system is unreliable
Ultra-thin walls

Roommate Roulette

Moldy washers
Unsecured wireless. Seriously.

Lease is kind of scary

Check out my image gallery at imgur for more on this topic! Go here. 

If you would like me to expand on any of these points, please leave a comment below! As you can see from the amount of posts I have written on this blog in three months, I have been pretty busy!

Internships!

The hard work pays off. After three months of coding, the last of which consisted of building a new Rails app every day, I landed an internship with Bunker Labs, my number one choice. They work with Ruby on Rails and Angular, a JavaScript framework similar to Ember. I have a week to prepare for my new role. Very exciting!

As for the internship selection process, it was pretty seamless. Students selected their top choices from descriptions provided by a diverse list of companies. We were then matched with a few companies, and had interviews the following week. Most students interviewed with 3-4 companies. 

Last Thursday our internships were announced. Turns out that I wasn't the only one who landed my number one choice! The room was filled with both joy and relief. It didn't hurt that it was a beautiful day, either. A large group of us enjoyed lunch on the river, just minutes after our internships were announced.

A big thanks to Epicodus for putting this all together. Sure, the students displayed their skills for the employers during interviews, but if it wasn't for Michael, Dustin, Mac and Alex, we wouldn't have had those interviews in the first place!