Elliot Milco

My Story

While I currently live and work in New York City, I was born in western Illinois and grew up in Chicago. As a teenager my passions were fantasy novels and philosophy. I have a BA from Yale University, where I focused on intellectual history, with an emphasis on 19th and 20th century European philosophy. I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa my senior year and graduated Magna cum laude.

After college I did a lot of soul searching by trial and error. I seriously considered the Catholic priesthood, got a master's degree in theology, and then spent a couple of years as a high school teacher. I became super religious, lost my faith, and moved a few times.

None of the careers I'd entertained up to that point really fit. I wanted work that engaged the systems-oriented part of my brain that so delighted me when I was studying philosophy in college, and I wanted a career that would let me grow and learn and keep developing new skills.

So I left my job and did a coding bootcamp. As a teenager, I'd tinkered with Scheme while working through the early chapters of Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and picking up coding again proved empowering and enjoyable. Prior to my bootcamp I took some independent online courses and learned Javascript, basic Python, and a lot of Ruby.

The bootcamp I did, AppAcademy, was 12 weeks long, and focused on single-page app development with React and Rails, with a reasonably strong focus on algorithm and data structure fundamentals. It was a good foundation. I was the first person in my cohort to land a job, less than a week after graduation.

Since then, I've been happily chugging away as an engineer.