Coding Camps: A Smart Bet For MBAs Or A Waste Of Time?

CTO Will Sentance with Codesmith’s second cohort.

After applying to an array of schools, Sorenson received several acceptances, including invites from App Academy and Maker Square. According to Sorenson, something just “wasn’t right” about the camps he had received acceptances from. Then, after receiving an acceptance to Codesmith, and visiting the school, that feeling vanished.

“When I visited Codesmith, I was immediately like, ‘Alright, this is the place.’ It was a feeling I hadn’t had since I visited Darden before getting my MBA,” Sorenson says. “It was just the people and the community that exists at Codesmith that pulled me in.”

After going through 12 weeks of intense immersion in the camp, Sorenson finds himself a changed professional with a host of opportunities laid out before him. His introduction to new possibilities has thrown his original intent to pursue product management into question. Now, he’s considering entrepreneurship, founding a company, or possibly staying with technical work.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility that I take a job as a full-time engineer at a startup or at a larger company and do that for about a year before heading into product management. But it’s also not out of the realm of possibility that I’m just going to start my own company,” said Sorenson.

Codesmith aims to achieve the highest levels of immersion possible.

The tech-startup route is another possible application of coding skills by MBAs. Once again, as Sentance says, it’s all about speaking the language. For tech-startup founders, having the ability to communicate effectively with employees on technical subjects is crucial. Such founders can identify technical solutions to problems, while founders without this knowledge would not be able to reach similar solutions.

CODING CAMP OPENS THE DOOR TO SOME ENTREPRENEURIAL OPTIONS

Furthermore, a startup founder with technical knowledge can better understand which ideas are feasible over a given time frame. This isn’t to mention the cost-saving element, as an MBA founder can take on the early stages of developing a prototype product for the startup. Coding camps can enable new tech-startup founders to eliminate the initial need to find a technical co-founder, which

“If I decide to go down the entrepreneurship route, it’s definitely going to be through some sort of web product for a niche market,” says Sorenson. “I think that I have the technical skills to build such a product and, provided the product gets some traction, I would then use my business skills that I got while at Darden to build a team, a culture, and a company around that product.

“All I really wanted when I came into this program was to be a product manager, essentially. But as I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into the engineering aspect of it, I’ve realized that I really just love it – I love building things.”