Welcome to Lambda Labs!
First of all, congratulations! You completed the primary instruction for your Lambda course. Take a moment to revel in your awesomeness, I’ll wait.
Alright that’s enough. Ready to take all that hard work and fresh knowledge and put it to use? Good!
Lambda Labs is engineered to equip you with the tools, stories, and real-world product development experience that impress hiring managers. It’s a simulation of your future workplace environment: no other aspect of Lambda School will better prepare you for what to expect on the job.
You’ll get a chance to apply the skills you’ve acquired, grow and develop them further, and help build projects that demonstrate your mastery to future employers.
In your future work environment, your team may have designers, mobile developers, data scientists, marketers, project managers, front-end web developers, back-end web developers — to name a few! Adequately preparing you for this means working in cross-unit and cross-functional teams to collaborate toward a shared product goal.
Labs gives you a meaningful opportunity to evaluate your collaborative skills, problem solve, and align your work with stakeholder expectations.
Essentially, Labs provides the experience you need and helps you develop a real-world product to demonstrate that experience.
Welcome to Labs.
The chance to craft a story that proves you have what it takes to work as a professional in the tech world
- The experiences you'll have in labs will resemble a real-world workplace. By the end of Labs, you won't just have learned a great deal, you'll be experienced in shipping product. This will set you apart in the job market.
The opportunity to showcase your abilities developing a real-world product
- Labs provides the opportunity to create sophisticated portfolio projects that demonstrate your skill-based mastery and help align it with hiring manager expectations.
A collaborative experience in a problem-solving environment
- Labs creates endless opportunities for teamwork in a professional context. Working as a team to tackle and solve real problems.
A real product development cycle
- Labs gives you the opportunity to experience a real-world development process. Real products with real users; engineering, design, and product managers on hand to lead and train you. Real team problems and solutions.
We want to prepare you to go into an interview armed with at least two things: 1) a quality project that demonstrates your skill to hiring managers; and 2) real-world experience that sets you apart from the average boot camp grad — someone who knows how to deliver value in their first day on the job.
This is what makes learning to code, design, or model data truly magical: learning to organize chaos and create something from nothing. We know that the first few months on the job are a massive learning experience...but what if we could start your “on the job” learning experience before you were actually on the job? That's what Labs can do.
Think of Labs as an internship: one targeted at giving you the experience and work product you need to land your dream job.
Hiring managers tell us over and over that they are looking for problem solvers. You will face obstacles and problems as you attempt to design, research, analyze, and build solutions. Your willingness to proactively take on and overcome these problems will determine much of your success here in Labs.
To set you up for success, we’ll be...
- providing meaningful products and features for you to build.
- preparing you in a world-class product development environment and providing onboarding training on how to succeed.
- grouping you in cross-unit and cross-functional teams to collaborate together toward a shared product goal.
- using the product you built to help measure your mastery of the objectives you’ve learned so far at Lambda School.
You and your team will need to complete the planning, research, and deployment preparation necessary for a project to succeed. This will be measured before project work begins.
As an individual, you'll succeed as you contribute your skills in helping the team plan, solve problems, and ultimately deliver a project that can be demonstrated to a hiring manager. Your team will succeed as they align to the product and stakeholder vision, collaborate, and solve problems together.
Your project is complete when it...
- can be fully deployed and used by real users without bugs.
- has sufficient research, documentation, and testing.
- successfully solves the product and stakeholder vision.
We work closely with hiring managers to understand what they're looking for in the portfolio projects you produce. All of your work during Build Sprint and instruction culminates in delivering a real product, design, or data analysis to a real user. We will measure the quality and delivery of that project.
Labs will have three key rubrics:
- Student individual contribution and collaboration rubric
- Team collaboration and delivery rubric
- Project quality and delivery rubric
Labs will measure the quality of project delivery as well as peer and Team Lead reviews for each student.
Student pass rate on the individual contribution and collaboration rubric
- Measured by sprint challenge scoring
Student effectiveness at working with other team members
- Measured by peer reviews
- Measured by Team Lead reviews
Project average quality and average deviation from median quality
- Measured by plan quality and project quality metrics
These five key areas below are measures you may be asked about during the hiring process. Your experience in Labs will help you confidently answer questions like these: “What can you show me that demonstrates you’re ready for the job?” or “What experiences do you have that have prepared you to work on a real team?”
- Preparation
- “Our team did the work to understand the data, expectations, and customer need.”
- Quality Delivery
- “I have a quality portfolio project that I’d like to show you.”
- Strategic Alignment
- “Our team understood expectations and our project solves a real user’s need.”
- Contribution and Collaboration
- “We succeeded as a result of our teamwork and my personal contribution.”
- Problem Solving
- “We worked independently and as a team to overcome numerous obstacles along the way.”
We design meaningful projects based on hiring manager input, market utility, and social impact.
We’ve talked (and continue to talk) to a lot of hiring managers about the skills they need you to master. We’ve structured Labs around this knowledge.
We’ve also scoured the market for product concepts that address a genuine need in the world community — you won’t just be developing the skills your future managers are looking for, you’ll be doing it while you build something that matters.
You won't be developing some pointless "toy app" for the sake of a learning exercise, you’ll be immersed in a product development environment where you work with a team to develop a real product that the world actually wants. You’ll be contributing to the code base of a meaningful piece of software that will help to make one small segment of the world a little better.
You’ll demonstrate your ability to ideate, plan, collaborate, and deliver value for the organizations that will ultimately hire you: building, modeling, or designing projects that fill a genuine need for real users.
We do not believe in busywork; we believe that all of you can contribute as active, responsible, engaged tech citizens — and we want that to start in Labs.
Here are a few examples of projects Lambda School students have built in the past: