Through Northwester's Center for Talent Development Summer, The Starter League offered a web design (front-end development) class for high schoolers. In this three week program, we were able to become highly proficient in both HTML and CSS. HTML is a markup language useful for organizing the content on a website into boxes. However, with just HTML the website would be plain black Times New Roman on a white canvas with the content aligned in a way that has marginal room for creative design. So, to create websites full of color and style, we use CSS.
During the course, Sandor Weisz, the lead teacher, invited 13 guest speakers that worked in web development into our class to talk about their job, how they got there, and provided us with some great feedback on what we should do if we want to pursue a career like theirs. We had speakers from all different backgrounds and with a variety of college degrees (none of which happened to be computer science, weird...) and we able to learn a lot just from listing to them and their process. It was really nice to hear the mistakes they made, so that we wouldn't make the same ones. But, also hearing their successes to know what to do in the future.
Sandor has had a variety of jobs in the web design field since recieving his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. He was the Design Editor for Daily Northwestern, the Associate Software Engineer for Sachs Group/VNU, the Senior Technical Designer for Niteo Partners/ZEFER, Senior Site Developer for the University of Chicago, tutored at The Academic Approach, and is currently the Principal at Methodtree and teaching at the Starter League.
Arjun is a high school math teacher at a Chicago Public School in the Little Village area of Chicago. He also is a Ruby on Rails consultant for Gantec Corporation and helped them design full-stack solutions for clients. Arjun studied at the University of Illinois and recieved a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and Phsycology. Now, Arjun is a teaching assistant at the Starter League.