Student Spotlight: Asia Lindsay

From day one I was always interested in natural languages. I learned French and Spanish at school and continued to major in Russian and Spanish at uni, with minors in Portuguese, Catalan and Polish. I followed that with a masters in linguistics where my curiosity was piqued by computer languages. My interest in coding grew as I realized its scope for social good and the strong community aspect that goes with the territory.

With so many free options, I was a little wary of paying for a service but when I won the One Month Women's Scholarship I was excited to try out the program—and I loved it! I thought it was really easy to follow and I recommended it to my friends in my offline part-time coding class. It was a nice complement to what we were covering in the class.

I started working at TED as their in-house linguist in 2012. While I was there I fell in with the engineers who were really supportive of my interest in coding. I started the TED Coding Club with the help of one of them and the rest is history, I am now changing careers and transitioning into becoming a full-time web developer.

I used to be quite suspicious of video learning but One Month changed that. I'm feeling a lot more inspired now to try my hand at learning different topics online—I want to start on Growth Hacking and iOS next. And then UX. There's lots to do!

I love Mattan's teaching style: I think he has a nice way of explaining things and breaking down complicated ideas. One Month's classes have helped me unlock new skill sets, jobs, and more — I now have a good understanding of Rails, and that's huge! Rails is so in right now, this will help me a lot once I'm a professional web developer.

Learning online has been quite useful, and the gamification aspect really helps me. I like being able to see how far along I am in the course and track my progress day by day. Whenever I got stuck I looked on the community boards and found everyone really helpful. I never stayed stuck for long.