A Teacher Switches to Tech to do Even More for Students: Tiffany Hall’s TripleTen Story

It’s easy to tell that Tiffany Hall was a great teacher. In conversation, she’s engaging and friendly, and when she talks about education, her devotion to helping students is unmistakable.

But this commitment that made her so good at her job is also what spurred her to move away from teaching and pursue a new career in tech. See, the innovations in pedagogy brought about by the pandemic evaporated once in-person classes resumed. For her, that was unacceptable. 

Here’s how she transformed an extensive background in education into a career in tech and did something about it.

A decade and a half of experience

For fifteen years, Tiffany worked as a special education teacher. She started with elementary-school kids and slowly made her way to working with older students, eventually taking on more responsibility in roles such as department coordinator and campus-wide director of special education.

Then COVID hit, and she needed to adapt. Quickly, she refocused and used tech to make sure students were getting the attention they needed even if they couldn’t be in-classroom. She thought this could be an opportunity once the restrictions eased.

“After coming back from the pandemic, I was so excited going in, thinking, Great. This is the moment when we rebuild what we want to have. That didn’t happen, and that broke my heart a little,” she says.

This disappointment made her next choice clear.

I believe so much in technology and embracing it. I realized I gotta get out and make sure that educational tech gets more opportunity in front of teachers and students.

She could also see what was lacking. “There were some things out there that didn’t exist, and I could build them if I knew how. So I started teaching myself.”

Closing the gaps

“But I found it really difficult to feel confident in what I was learning,” she adds.

So she went to a conference where she found out about TripleTen. She applied for a scholarship to the bootcamp and got it. She could tell it was for her from the beginning.

“The very first meeting that we had in the full program with my cohort was all of us on a screen together, and that was pretty rad because then it was like, Oh. This is real.”

The bootcamp was a challenge, but she developed a system. “I would get up at five every morning, even on the weekends, and between five and seven, I was back on the computer, and that’s pretty much how every day went for almost a year.”

Then, as she was closing her time with TripleTen, she started looking for the role that would let her combine her background with her new skills – in short, a job in edtech. “I probably would send out between 30 and 50 applications a week. But I came across this job.”

The right skills, the right job

The position was at a company that was working on an algorithm to determine what instruction a student needs and for how long, something especially important for special-education students.

“I wanted this job so bad. As an educator, it’s like working for Google or Disney. It’s just that level,” she says.

Thanks to her background and the skills she gained at TripleTen, she got it. In fact, the bootcamp even prepared her for her on-the-job tasks.

TripleTen has these code challenges. We all had to work together to build an MVP, a minimum viable product. It was the exact same process at my job. It was so wild.

The confidence she had been looking for when she went to the conference? She’d found it. “I was like, I already know how to do this. That’s awesome.”

Since then, she’s kept growing, merging her experience in education with a newfound aptitude for tech. She’s building the software she lacked in her previous career and making a difference in even more kids’ lives. 

In fact, she’s now a full-stack developer at a company known for measurably improving student outcomes: Scholastic.

Hear the story first-hand in our video:

Our pitch to you

If you, too, are looking for a part-time bootcamp that will help you reapply your knowledge and skills to tech, TripleTen is the place for you. Check out the programs we offer, and if you’re not sure which tech specialty to pursue, try our career quiz.

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