Lighthouse Labs Prize propels Master of Digital Media grad’s career

By: Tessa Perkins Deneault

As the 2018 recipient of the Lighthouse Labs Prize, Master of Digital Media (MDM) student Sherlaine Lau completed a web development bootcamp in December 2018. A week later, she landed a job. 

She is working with Kater Technologies to develop a new ride-hailing mobile app, and she couldn’t be more pleased. 

“This is exactly what I wanted to be doing when I graduated,” she says.

While completing the 10-week web development bootcamp at Lighthouse Labs, a Vancouver-based coding school, Lau also completed her MDM course work and will graduate from SFU in June 2019.

It was at the Lighthouse Labs Demo Day event where she met a representative from Kater Technologies. They were impressed by her final project and arranged a job interview. She started work the following week. 

Lau applied for the Lighthouse Labs Prize, which offers a free spot to Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology students in the school’s intensive web-development bootcamp. She wanted to gain coding knowledge she felt would complement the project management, collaboration and digital media skills she learned in the MDM program. 

“I wanted to be able to talk to developers and speak their language,” she says.

Most students in the bootcamp find the pace of learning difficult for the first two weeks. Lau describes it as four years’ worth of material crammed into 10 weeks, but says the instructors are very supportive and students always have access to a mentor.

“There was a bit of imposter syndrome to overcome, but it’s okay if your intention isn’t to become a web developer.” 

There were times when Lau was close to dropping out, but she says she is glad she persevered and feels a huge sense of accomplishment.

“If I didn’t stay in the bootcamp, I wouldn’t have this job right now.”    

The deadline to apply for the 2019 Lighthouse Labs Prize is Mar. 4, 2019. Applicants must attend a mandatory information session at Lighthouse Labs on Feb. 27, 2019. Students from all areas of FCAT are encouraged to apply. 

About the Lighthouse Labs Prize 

Established in 2014 with a generous gift from Lighthouse Labs. This annual prize provides a space in to one FCAT student each year in the school’s specialized Web Development Bootcamp. Valued at $8,000, the prize recognizes promising, creative students from any area of FCAT who have a demonstrated interest in web development.

About Lighthouse Labs

Lighthouse Labs is a Vancouver-based coding school where students learn full-stack web development through immersive, fast-paced, bootcamp-style courses. The Web Development Bootcamp takes students through the fundamentals of source control using Git, HTML, CSS and stylesheet preprocessors, Ruby on Rails framework, Javascript and the jQuery framework as well as Node.js. As part of the course, students contribute to open-source projects and build their own apps under the supervision of a team of industry experts. The course is ideal for anyone looking to enter the startup community or build their own web applications.