Sabio Alumnus Dominique becomes a Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services After Graduation

Dominique: The real part of trusting the process just knowing that you'll get the answers you need later. Just do what you need to do, now. The Amazon thing hit and it's already pretty much a full benefits full everything you get everything. My name is Dominic Lawson. I'm a US Navy veteran I did 10 years in the Navy. When I was in the Navy, I was in electrical engineering, I had ran across code and stuff like running systems and stuff, but never did any coding, typing in run in led the code run type situation. So that's the most I've ever had experience with coding before I even started the bootcamp after I got out of the Navy and went to school for music, business and entrepreneurship. I owned a recording studio. And then I decided to you know, I needed to make a little extra money. So I started doing side hustles like selling insurance and selling solar have ran into one of my friends. He's a cybersecurity engineer. And he does a lot of software engineering stuff. And he was looking at what I was doing as a sound engineer. And he was like, if you can do this, you could probably do software engineering stuff.

Q: Why did you choose Sabio Coding Bootcamp?

Dominique: I started looking into different schools, I've seen that they had the Vet Tec program, and I was just hustling every day to try to make money and I was really ready to find some stability, you know, being able to provide for my family. I was about to go to a whole different school I even enrolled in a whole different school and then it just didn't work out because I was doing like their pre work program. And it was just this doesn't make sense to me. None of this is coming together. It's not clicking right now. Then I looked into Sabio, okay, this school looks dope, they got a lot of good feedback, I went to a couple of info sessions and I heard a lot of good information there. I went ahead and enrolled and then everything was smooth coming into it. And then I did the 17 week program. So learning the basics before you get into like the serious stuff, I really appreciated how they were able to like do that for us versus trying to give you some work, and then trying to figure it out on your own. It's not really how I work, I can see somebody else do it then I can repeat it. And then I can ask questions as well. I don't necessarily get the job done unless I'm like kind of holding me accountable. Sometimes that's pretty helpful when it translates well over to you know, the job world.

Q: What advise would you give prospective Sabio students?

Dominique: I was gonna give any advice, it'd probably be like, don't try to move too far ahead. Don't try to figure out why we're doing this, just do it. And they will get to the part where you really start to understand why it is You did what you did at a later time. And that part was kind of difficult for me, we hear it a lot. It's like follow the process. The real part of trusting the process of just knowing that you'll get the answers you need later, just do what you need to do now.

Q: How did Sabio help with the job interview process?

Dominique: Whenever they started the job search portion of the workshop, I was completely overwhelmed with how many resumes they expected us to put out I just picked a number that worked for me and then I just committed to hitting that number every day I did a interview with an insurance company I got an offer with that one that was really cool. But then the Amazon thing hit and I think I'd rather go with that because Amazon was just a way better option. At the end of it I was able to get to where I really wanted to be at.

Q: Can you talk a bit about your paid apprenticeship at Amazon Web Services?

Dominique: It's interested in a way that apprenticeship is set up it's already pretty much a full benefits full everything you get everything once you put Amazon and AWS on your resume pretty much sky's the limit at that point. Just knowing that fact okay, this would be the perfect stepping stone to get into any position that I want to be in and once you're in Amazon, they pretty much allow you to go to different departments and learn different sectors and try anything out. That part was really what kind of made me be like okay, I want to do this because no matter where they put me now I know I can go and work on this music thing that they have over here that I want to work on.