Danielle Pascarella (Front End Web Development, New York City) left a cushy job as an investment specialist at J.P. Morgan to focus her career on social good, and created a nonprofit to teach financial literacy. To make her organization’s lessons accessible, Pascarella needed to digitize them — a massive undertaking that she couldn’t achieve with financial expertise and a strong writing background alone.

“I knew nothing about web development and I had no idea where to begin,” she says. A mentor suggested General Assembly, and she enrolled in GA’s part-time Front-End Web Development course in New York City. “My teacher was able to break down a concept that was completely foreign to me so that I could understand it easily,” says Pascarella, who learned how to harness the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the keys to a fully responsive, interactive website.

By the end of the course, she had built a prototype for what is now Invibed.com, her thriving fintech company that helps individuals in their 20s and 30s get their financial lives together. “Best of all, the part-time program was flexible enough to fit in with my busy work schedule,” she says.