Um well, I could tell a little bit about my story s Oh, I am actually the first person in my family to go to university. Uh, growing up in high school, I got a part time job working at McDonald's and I loved that part time job. I actually rearranged my school schedule in high school so that I could have my spare in my lunch at the end of the day. And I would leave school at 1 p.m. Or something about to do Ah, full shift at McDonald's. Uh, ultimately, 4 to 5 days a week s. It was pretty much working almost full time hours, um, in high school, and I became a manager of the McDonald's that I worked out when I was 16. So I started building management skills pretty early on in my life. Um, I decided to go to university to study business, and I specifically chose business because McDonald's was a business and I liked working at McDonald's. So that's sort of exactly how much thought I put into what I should study. I went Thio Western University here in Canada, and for my last Mr of school, I was really lucky to have saved up enough money to go on exchange. So I packed up my bags and moved to Hong Kong, and it was pretty much my first time being abroad. A soon as I got there, I sort of realized that I knew nothing about the world and decided that I needed to stay abroad even longer. So even though I had a job, uh, in Toronto, where I was supposed to start working after being in Hong Kong for a few months, I ended up sort of reneging on that job offer and staying in Asia, actually moved to the mainland and started studying at a university in China. And so I stayed there for about 10 months altogether on the mainland, and it was really interesting. I ended up not liking what I was studying in school so much. It was international relations and just didn't interest me. Um, but I did somehow along the way come up with this idea that I should learn how to code. And I had no previous experience with coding. I didn't know anyone in my life who was a developer. Um, but somehow I got this idea in my head. And instead of going to class, I just started spending all day, every day, you know, in coffee shops, coding websites and learning programming. Um, after, you know, being in China for 10 months, I decided I was sort of ready to come back home to Toronto. So I moved to Toronto, moved right downtown into, ah, friends Living room. Basically. So I lived in a living room. I did not even have a door. And that was sort of my first grown up apartment. I guess you could say, um, I had a couple different kind of random jobs here and there for the next year or so. But after about a year of being back in Toronto, I I was still trying to learn how to code and had found it, you know, pretty difficult to make a lot of progress on your own. I mean, some people obviously figured this out, but for me, you know, finding the right tutorial was really hard. Finding the right, you know, resources online was really hard again. This was sort of 2010 now, 2011. So it wasn't like today where there's tons of boot camps and coding courses and tutorials that you could do. There wasn't as much back then. Eso At some point in 2011, I tweeted that there should be a group in Toronto for women who want to learn how to code. And the idea just kind of blew up. People started sharing it, retweeting it. People started reaching out to me, offering to help organize it. Um, somebody even reach out to me, offering to give me $3000 to get the organization started to help us with any startup costs or, you know, nonprofit incorporation costs. Um, so I was really surprised by that reaction and sort of realized, like, I guess this is what I'm doing now. So I started putting my efforts into organizing this nonprofit. It was called Ladies Learning Code at the time, and it has since re branded to be called Canada Learning Code. And it was workshops for women and their friends who want to learn programming skills in a social and collaborative way. And the workshops were super super popular. Everyone loved them. They were really fun. And it wasn't long after we started running these workshops that people started coming. Tow us afterwards, saying, You know, this one day workshop is great, but can you actually make a course? That's multiple months long so I can really learn these skills. And so I thought about that and thought that was really interesting and at the same time, sort of late. 2011, early 2012. There were these coding boot camps starting to pop up in the U. S. So I saw that happening and thought to myself like Okay, that's interesting. Toronto is a really big city. Of course, there's gonna be a coding boot camp in Toronto, And if it's not me who starts it, you know, I'll probably really regret that. So in February 2012, I started working on the idea for, you know, my coding school. We launched it in June of 2012, and then the first sold out program started in the fall of 2012, and we've since rebranded it to be called Juno. We've since registered it as a private career college, so we're, you know, completely registered with the government, and, you know, I don't know the exact number, but we have something like, you know, seven or 8000 or 9000 alumni and we served, you know, 1500 to 2000 students a year. And we do that from our head office in Toronto, which obviously is closed right now, dude Cove it. But, um, you know, we'll be open again soon. We have 12,000 square feet, a beautiful space for students. Toe hang out and chill and and be together. And my team is around 35 to 40 people full time.

um, we have one sort of career pathway, as we call it at the moment, which is basically a way that someone could go from being a relative beginner to coating to being job ready, and that is in the topic area of Web development at the moment. Eso with that program, you know, you'd be a beginner. You would decide that coating sounds interesting. Maybe you'd be interested in a career change and you would apply to us. And then you would join this sort of beginner friendly program, Um, twice a week in the evening for eight weeks or once a week on the weekend for eight weeks. And we even offer, like, a two week, full time format where you come kind of Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 for two weeks. And that course gives you a really solid foundation in Web development. So you understand, um, what it's all about. You could build websites from scratch, and we find for a lot of people that that really gives them a sense of what Juno's all about. Do they love it? Do they love the way that we teach? Do they love our style? It also shows them what Web development is about. So if they do decide to move forward with the boot camp program, which would help them get the skills they need to change jobs, they're really confident in making that decision. So after people complete that continuing education course, as we call it the first part of the career pathway, they may apply to the boot camp program. And that program is very intense. Eso if you get in it z nine weeks full time on DWI usually recommend that people expect to put in about 20 to 40 hours a week outside of class. So it really is a boot camp in the true sense of the word. And after that, you know their job ready. And we haven't Outcomes Team here that works with our graduates to make sure that they, uh, get placements as quickly as possible. We have a few other programs as well. You know, we have a U X program. We have ah, data science program that we're working on, and we're also working on turning some of our programs into career pathways. So right now we're working on data science, so you'll be able to come sort of for beginner data science course soon and then continue on with us into a data science boot camp program that would help you change career. So we're really interested in serving career areas where there's lots of demand. Um, we like areas where starting salaries are, you know, relatively high so that there is a true r a y to your education with Juno. So it can clearly make sense for you to come to us, change jobs and get a new a new career.

it's super important, so we have to make sure that our curriculum is amazing. We have a curriculum team that focuses on, uh, collecting feedback from courses, analyzing it, creating roadmaps for programs and determining what the priorities are each quarter in terms of what changes need to be made to which programs. Um, our instructor team actually also works on curriculum changes. So they are, you know, working with the content every day, teaching students on Ben, also making notes about you, know what content doesn't feel right anymore, needs some improvement, needs some changes, and then they would actually be the ones to implement those changes. So it's a very hands on curriculum, editing process and updating process over here. We also obviously like to make sure that the curriculum that we're creating is leading to jobs. So, you know, we have done in the past like different curriculum review sessions with employers, but also we really keep a close eye on our outcomes, and this is our first leading indicator that we might need to focus on something. So for every cohort that we have, we track their placement rates, and we know that if placement rates are starting to slip. There's something for us to look into. Are we, um, you know, teaching the right things in the program Has something changed on admissions? Eso. It's just an indicator for us to sort of take a close look and see if we have any hypotheses about what the issue might be and then figure out ways to address those problems.