Chegg Skills

I had experience in the tech industry as a marketing guy, and I decided I'd rather make things than tell people about them. 

I taught myself webdevelopement for about 3 months before deciding on a boot camp. I chose Thinkful's Full-Stack Flex program because it was remote, at my own pace, and the offered a refund if I didn't get a job in the industry within 6 months of graduating.

I really liked my mentor (who I did code review with twice a week), and I wound up finishing the program ahead of schedule. I credit, learning on my own before starting as a big part of that. I highly recomend doing some video courses before you start so you can hit the ground running.

Also, they started doing more in person stuff about half way through my program. They're actively seeking to improve. 

Just got a job as a software developer. Totally worth it.

I've been trying to learn how to code for some time now, as I have gone through some of FreeCodeCamp, Harvard's CS50, as well as a JavaScript course on Udemy. Although I learned a lot utilizing those free resources, it was frustrating when I would get stuck on a problem and couldn't find a way out. Frustration quickly led to demotivation, and I found myself questioning if a career in programming was really for me. I then realized that although I had gotten quite far on my own, I absolutely needed some sort of rigid structure for learning how to code, if I seriously wanted to change my career. So, I thought about the idea of attending a bootcamp. After doing extensive research on coding bootcamps, Thinkful seemed like the best option due to high reviews, a job guarantee, and the ability to still maintain my full-time job, as I'm enrolled in the Full Stack Flex program.

Upon enrolling, Thinkful pairs you up with both a Program Manager as well as a mentor. The PM is responsible for overseeing your graduation plan and makes sure you are on track. The mentor is (usually) a seasoned developer that you'll meet with twice a week via video chat. In addition to these resources, you'll have an entire community of mentors and students alike that you have access to via Slack. There are also Q&A sessions that you can attend where you can share your screen with a mentor and ask any questions or try to fix a program that you're working on. 

Whereas I would get stuck and demoralized when I was on my own, it's nearly impossible to get stuck and stay stuck with all of these resources at your disposal. Oh and by the way, if for some reason your mentor doesn't work out, Thinkful will pair you up with someone else. It didn't work out with my first mentor as he was often late and straight up no showed me one time. My second mentor, however, has been nothing short of stellar. 

The Full Stack program is broken up into a few parts:

• Web Development Fundamentals (Intro to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery)
• Asychronous client-side apps
• Server-side programming (Node.js)
• React
• Computer Science Fundamentals

After each section, you will be required to complete a capstone which is a program that reflects what you learned in that section. You'll also conduct a mock interview where one of the mentors (also via live chat) will ask you behavioral and technical questions in addition to asking you to do live coding exercises. You are required to pass both the capstone and mock interview in order to advance to the next phase.

The curriculum is very, very reading intensive. I wish that there were some videos to go alongside the material. But even so, I think the curriculum is great. Sometimes you're encouraged to go out and learn about topics outside of Thinkful, and I've done just that.

I still have a couple months left, but from my understanding upon completion you are then paired up with Career Services and their job is to assist you in finding a position as a Developer. As mentioned before, Thinkful offers a job guarantee, which you can read about on their website.  Overall, my experience has been wonderful and I think this is one of the best decisions I've ever made. I have learned an insane amount over the past few months and I am looking forward to continuing the program, graduating, and changing careers! 

Finally, I'd like to mention that Thinkful is completely transparent about what percentage of their students graduate, find jobs, etc. If you're serious about attending this bootcamp I'd recommend checking out the below link. 

https://cirr.org/

I have been enrolled in the course for about 2 months and have found the curriculum very valuable. It is definitely guided with the intention of having their grads not just graduate but get employed. The mock interviews are great because they are ensuring i'm ready for the last and final step of the application process. Q&a sessions are extremely helpful when looking for a quick fix to a problem I might have. Most importantly, the mentors are the most valuable asset to any students success in the bootcamp. I am definitely excited to continue the next unit, knowing that I'm not alone in the journey.

Overview:

I recently graduated from Thinkful's Full Stack Flex program and I'm currently applying for jobs (will update). The program was challenging but I've learned a lot and I feel fairly well-prepared for an entry-level web developer position. I had the luxury of being able to work on the program full-time, but it still took longer than I anticipated, largely because I spent a lot of time on my capstone projects. These projects are a valuable and unique aspect of the program that teach you a lot and leave you with a great portfolio, but designing, building, testing, and styling these projects from scratch can eat up a lot of time. 

Community:

I was suprised that the community was one of the most valuable aspects of Thinkful. Emma, the program manager for Portland and Seattle, is amazing and puts on Thinkful Family Dinners every two weeks. These in-person events are a fun way to get to know other people in the program and often brought in speakers who presented on topics like networking, game development, and hackathons.

The Slack community was also great and quite active. It was a useful place to get feedback and have questions answered. Q&A sessions (open online office hours) were fairly useful, but I didn't end up using them very often. There is often a line of students waiting and it often takes quite awhile to get a question answered...some sort of quota or ticket system could help make these more valuable. TJ was a standout Q&A mentor and also leads great workshops on a variety of interesting topics almost every day.

Instructors:

I had great mentors throughout the program. Thinkful had to switch my mentors twice for administrative reasons, which was disappointing, but I got along well with each and they were all very knowledeable. Alanna was an excellent guide through the fundamentals portion before Lawrence took over for the majority of my program. He was instrumental in helping me choose projects, troubleshoot bugs, and understand difficult concepts. Ali was my mentor for the final month of the course and did an excellent job stepping in. He helped me wrap up my final capstone and was a great help practicing for technical interviews.

Curriculum:

Overall, the curriculum was thorough, provided good code examples, and covered the latest development technology. I'm sure it's a monumental task keeping up with constant updates for all the tools, software, and platforms they cover, but at times, it was sometimes frustrating to run into broken instructions (especially on Windows). The material is almost completely text and code examples, which are well-written. It frequently encourages you to use official documentation, which turned out to be a great skill that served me well as I moved through the program.

The major missing element was a search feature. The curriculum is very large and paginated by Unit, Section, Lesson, etc. It can be a challenge to find that one line you're thinking of without being able to search the whole curriculum.

Job Assistance:

Throughout the course, you complete mini career lessons, such as building a resume, optimizing your LinkedIn page, and how to network. These were helpful and I feel well-prepared to look for jobs. As soon as you graduate, you're paired with a career coach who you meet with weekly to check your progress and answer questions. Thinkful isn't going to necessarily find and get you the job you want, but they'll do a lot to prepare you to do it yourself.

Overall, I had a pretty good experience at Thinkful. Thankfully I spent about 6 months learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before starting, so I was able to get through the fundamentals section really fast which helped me to graduate on time. I know quite a few people who weren't able to graduate on time, which really doesn't surprise me since you do have to devote a LOT of time to studying and working on projects. 

The curriculum was good but really only covers the basics, and it's all readings (no videos or anything). For example, they gave you kind of a short tutorial on React, which definitely was not enough, so in addition to that I also had to read all of the React documentation, do a Codecademy React course, and watch some youtube tutorials. But they give you enough to get started. 

I also found the Node section to be extremely lacking, and I know a bunch of other people who feel the same about that. 

Also, I had four different mentors. My first mentor was very good, but unfortunately they only assigned him to me for the fundamentals section. I then got assigned another mentor who was terrible and didn't even know Node or React, so I switched. I then got assigned another mentor who was great, but had a VERY strong accent and it was very difficult to understand him, so I switched again. Then my last mentor was ok. 

But my husband, who is a full-stack developer, is the one who would help me the most. Sometimes my mentors would spend our entire session trying to help me figure out one of my problems, and they wouldn't be able to solve it, so I would have to ask my husband who would literally solve the problem is under 5 minutes. Sometimes even like 30 seconds. It was crazy. 

The Q&A sessions are also not very helpful, and I only went to a few of them. A few times they were able to help me, but mostly they weren't much of a help. Unfortunately there can sometimes be like 6 other people in the Q&A so they have to be fast with helping you. There are definitely some good Q&A mentors though, like Luis and TJ. They're really good! 

But overall, I definitely learned a lot. I still don't really feel like I'm that great of a developer, but I know that takes time, and I'm going to have to keep learning and doing projects on my own. I just graduated though and am hoping to find a job soon! 

Very interesting course that covers a lot of ground. Excellent place to test your abilities and push yourself farther than you had before. I came in to the course with some knowledge of C#, Ruby, and JS. This course pushed me to complete projects and then improve and make them professional looking. The mentors are a nice bonus but not as valuable as the reviews and practice interviews which will test your mettle and reveal your weaknesses. If you can afford it and have some experience and are looking to get serious about web development, give it a try.

First of all, I'm only giving this a 2* mainly because the mentor. I first enrolled in Thinkful's flex bootcamp. It said you need about 20-25 hours a week to complete the program which in my opinion without any coding background is completely inaccurate. You meet with the mentor for 1 hour 3 times a week. Although the experience of having a mentor can be great, Thinkful makes it sound like they will always be able to help you. A lot of these mentors do the teaching as a side job and are incredibly busy with their own jobs as well so don't expect much help from them outside of the mentor sessions.

Next, their course curriculum was pretty mediocre and can be a bit confusing (After the program I bought many Udemy courses which I thought were far superior). I was constantly using google and youtube to get a better understanding of anything and everything.

Lastly, I believe Thinkful themselves is still a growing company and therefore vastly short on employees. When I was a student they changed the program when I was directly in the middle of it without any of my knowledge and I had to go back and complete extra parts of the curriculum. I had to go through about 3 mentors and 2 program managers which is completely ridiculous. In the end, I felt completely cheated of not only my experience but my money I paid for the program. They make it sound great and promising in the beginning but in reality I was constantly left alone talking with a few students from slack. Don't comit this much money if you can't put a minimum of 40 hours a week into this program. In my honest opinion, save yourself the money and either try a different bootcamp or buy courses on Udemy.

I'm currently enrolled in the Full Stack Flex Bootcamp and I'm very much enjoying the process. It's tough so far, but it's been a great experience with my Mentor, Program Manager, and all the other enrolled students in the Slack groups. I always feel like I have support through the process (even late at night or early in the mornings, someone's in the Slack just like me) and I can always bounce off code or issues with my classmates. My mentor has been great, he's always available for a video/screen share and when I've been battling with something he helps me see where the issue came from but also reframes the problem and potential solutions in ways that make sense.

I'm excited to keep working away at my course and would highly recommend this course, and Thinkful, to anyone looking to extend their knowledge or make a full pivot into something else (like I am).

I'm currently enrolled in Thinkful's Full Stack Flex program, and I'm really enjoying it so far!  I recently graduated from college with a minor in computer science, and I wanted to get more experience with web development specifically to increase my chances of getting a job.  I feel like I've learned lots of good coding skills since I've started, and my mentor (who is amazing!) has also given me a lot of helpful advice on interviewing and networking.  The local program manager (I'm based in San Diego) has been very friendly and she organizes events periodically so people in the program can meet in person.  

So far the curriculum hasn't been too overwhelming or difficult for me- however, I had a decent amount of previous coding experience before I started, so your experience may be different.  The lessons are well organized, and they also provide links to many additional resources if you want more background info on a specific topic.

Overall, my favorite parts so far are probably the mentorship aspect and the fact that the curriculum is fairly project-based, so you end up with a good portfolio of projects that showcase the skills you've learned.  

Hi all! Im a Data Science student with Thinkful. It's been about two months since I started the program. It's been a great experience overall.

The application process was straightforward. My first contact with Thinkful was at a workshop for interested applicants. I had some great conversations with the people I encountered that day. They gave me access to a two week free-trial of the course. I then formally applied, had a phone interview and was admitted for the fundamentals course.

The course has been a great match for my background, while still being challenging. I have experience as an accountant in the film industry. I had coding experience with excel and was losely acquainted with Python through some Edx courses I attempted before Thinkful. The reason why I joined is that I wanted an actual commitment, which I didn't feel toward free online courses. The first parts of the fundamentals course were a bit of a steep curve on the programming side, for me. But after I became used to the basics, everything else fell into place gradually. I had more knowledge of statistics/math than programming, so take that into consideration. 

Ive done great advancements and am excited for the next part of the program. Im currently finishing my capstone report for the fundamentals course and Im impressed at how much I accomplished in just this past month. 

There's an active Thinkful community in LA. I've been going to several gatherings organized by Thinkful for its students. They are aprox every other week. I've met some awesome people there and learned stuff as well, since they all have discussions or presentations. My favorite was a "Sunday Brunch and Mimosas at the Park" in West Hollywood :). 

My mentor really makes a difference. I meet with a mentor online twice a week for 45min per session. Thinkful has its own videocall system where you can share your screen with your mentor while calling. Then I write code and follow his suggestions for improvements, etc.

I would recommend.

I’m about halfway through Thinkful’s full stack flex program. It was the best decision I’ve ever made for myself. The curriculum is solid, but the mentors are game changers. I’ve met a handful and they are wonderful people with a passion for helping others. Don’t get me wrong, this is hard work and takes patience and discipline. It’s worth it! 

The cost of the program may seem like a lot but I can tell you it’s worth every penny. You get a lot of bang for your buck. If I could go back in time, I would’ve joined sooner. Do it!