App Academy’s Bootcamp Prep is considered the best intro-to-programming course by leading analysts of professional schools. But few people actually know how far Bootcamp Prep grads get in the tech industry — until now.

In the following list, we look at how Bootcamp Prep has helped a financial analyst become a software engineer, how it led a college student to a job at Google, and how it once taught a linguist the commonality between the classics and programming languages. All of their stories have one thing in common: people taking a chance to switch their careers and finding something amazing.

Ryan Mease

Learning programming languages is not exactly like learning human languages, says Ryan Mease, a University of Chicago Greek and Latin Studies graduate as well as a Bootcamp Prep alum. It is closer, he says, to translating dead languages that need to be experimented on to make sense.

It really is decoding. In Greek and Latin