After seven years of teaching elementary school, Charnelle Evans wanted to pursue a career in tech. But she wasn’t sure how to break in until an episode of the Teacher Career Coach podcast with a teacher-turned software engineer introduced a new kind of path.

“I listened to that and I was like, ‘Wow, they have coding bootcamps?’” the Bowie, Maryland, resident told Technical.ly. “I thought you had to go back to school to get a degree.”

Evans, currently a kindergarten teacher at Ridgeway Elementary School in Severn, was one of four recently-named winners of the We Stand Together scholarship from Galvanize. The software skills training provider is investing up to $1.8 million into the program as part of an effort to diversify the tech industry. Evans will use the award to attend the Hack Reactor bootcamp, a three-month, full-time intensive program that offers skills training toward becoming a JavaScript developer.

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