Chegg Skills

I am a software engineer and recent graduate of Thinkful's full-time Engineering Immersion program. I had previous web development experience, but knew that I was falling behind in terms of my modern, relevant development skills. I'd tried books, online tuts, videos and Meetups. They were helpful, but none of them worked - for me - to get me to the next level. I'm not a twenty-something, so I really didn't think a coding bootcamp was an option for someone like me. I happened to find myself in a JavaScript Meetup - and that's when everything changed!

The Meetup was put on by Thinkful, which I'd never heard of, at the time. After talking to the Community Manager there, I decided it would be worth it to sign-up for their 2-week trial. As soon as I logged into their portal, I WAS SOLD!! The curriculum is challenging, but presented in a very managable way. It is also 100% relevant to what I am doing in my job as a software engineer. There are live Q&A sessions and workshops with experienced mentors almost around the clock (including weekends). Not to mention my designated mentors that I worked with daily, 1-on-1 throughout the entire program. We also had mock interviews after every module of the program to test our knowledge of the material and get us more comfortable with talking through the various technical questions and processes.

Speaking of the mentors, every single person I interacted with so supportive, so passionate and so committed to my success that I was constantly reassured that this huge investment was going to pay off. I "pair programmed" with other students in my cohort almost every day, so I got to know them pretty well and we got to draw energy from one another, which helped keep productivity high. I did have an issue with one mentor. He was making an effort, but I wasn't getting what I needed from his instruction. I took it up with my Program Manager, who immediately went to work finding me another mentor. The Capstone projects and GitHub repos that we produced were definitely looked at by potential employers, so the mentors and program managers reviewed my work and made me bring it up to a certain level before I could move on or graduate.

I was initially concerned about the 100% online format, but that concern was quickly put to rest. I never felt stuck, disconnected or alone. Between Slack and the live video sessions every day, I had all of the support and connection I wanted and needed - without ever being in traffic! But for the times I needed to be with real people, my city also offered in-person dinners, events and study sessions. So, I had the best of both worlds.

Finally, my dedicated Career Services mentor reviewed and advised me on my resume, LinkedIn profile, portfolio, salary negotiations, interview questions, provided emotional support...everything that I needed during my job search.

I cannot speak highly enough about my Thinkful experience! Again, it IS challenging but if you do the work and stay in communication with them; you will get everything you need out of the Thinkful staff and curriculum -- and, most importantly, you will get a dev job! About 6 months ago, I wasn't sure what I was going to do...and today, I'm living MY dream!

My qualifications for this review: biology undergraduate education, no formal/previous background in coding at all, joined Thinkful's Data Science Bootcamp about a month and a half ago.

My program search and why I chose Thinkful: I knew others who had gone through this program and talked with them about their experiences, searched Course Report for what online bootcamps were popular, discussed my questions with Jessica (one of the Thinkful advisors), and spoke with others about their experiences in other programs. I would recommend any prospective students to ask A LOT of questions to people who are just a few steps ahead of you. But, it's ultimately your decision. 

I chose Thinkful because I liked their track record of taking people with non-coding backgrounds and ensuring they did not just learn the material, but were also confident about their newfound skills, and their ability to apply them in concrete projects at multiple stages along their course. Thinkful also has great graduation rates and job placement records for past graduates. The mentors are highly qualified (ask any program your interested what qualifications all of their mentors need to have). Additionally, I liked all of the different payment plans and potential loans that the Thinkful program offers. Other programs were not as favorable on a month to month payment basis as Thinkful's is. I also liked the idea of being able to specialize in a certain data science focus after developing the basic skills. I had some doubts "how do I know I'm chosing the right one?" and other thoughts like that. But the mentors ensured me that they would work with me, give suggestions, and that I wasn't "locked in" to a specialization after I've chosen one. It might take more time to switch specializations, but the benefit of potentially learning a bit from two might even give me a uniqueness about my background that could be favorable on the job market. Additionally, I hear you get multiple mentors in Thinkful (one program manager, one mentor (who you meet with 2x/week 1:1), multiple Q&A leading mentors, etc..That's a lot of attention, which I think is so essential for an online program where you could just otherwise be a name on a course enrollment list. 

Overall experience so far: I'm glad that I learned the basics of Python while I was working. In my downtime, I went through Codacademy's free Python modules and got about half way through before starting at Thinkful. That helped me have confidence that I could track with the coding logic for at least the beginning. This helped me go through the pre-course faster than otherwise because there aren't as many interactive lessons for those initial drills as there are in Codacademy. I was thankful for the instructions that told you not to spend more than 20-30 minutes on a CodeWars challenge. That brought a lot of relief to me because I knew it was ok to ask questions after trying a bit on my own. I recognize that my biology background has helped me understand the statistics, research proposal and sampling rationale curriculum so far, but the material is challenging and I get stuck at times on the challenges. Drew, my specific mentor, is superb. He has helped me on this journey and I look forward to what I'll learn as I continue. 

After veering away from a career in web development, I was looking for a bootcamp program that taught me how to leverage python for data science. Thinkful's online model was great for me, as I was looking for a flexible curriculum that I could complete at my own pace and in the comfort of my own home. I also really enjoyed the idead of having a mentor that I could meet with 3 times a week and email as I saw fit. Going through difficult concepts with a mentor who has years of experience in the field made the process that much easier. Thinkful also has lots of learning opportunities throughout the week hosted by various mentors. This course curriculum was definitely the highlight of the program for me, providing a high-level, holisitic view of what can be done with the available data tools. This high-level view was augmented through conversations with my personal mentor, other students and other mentors. 

One thing that did leave me slightly disappointed concerned the career services section of the course. I expected Thinkful to provide a list of hiring partners, but I think, due to my east coast location, it was slightly more difficult for them to do so. However, I adhered to their guidelines on how to approach the hiring process and things still ended up working out. 

In summation, I really enjoyed my time with Thinkful. I learned a great deal about how to leverage the available tools for data science and it made me job ready. 

Thinkful provides a content-rich, supportive learning environment that is designed to help students flourish. I graduated from the full-stack flex program, and came away with the skills, confidence, and connections that would have taken me years to develop on my own.

This owes to the strength of Thinkful’s staff, curriculum, and student support.

• Staff: As a Thinkful student you are provided a wealth of dedicated people to help make sure you’re meeting your learning and career goals. Your mentor is your primary guide—in twice weekly one-on-one meetings, they’ll help you squash bugs, offer new explanations for tricky concepts, show you best practices, or just offer encouragement as your work through a difficult project.
  
  You can also drop in on Q&A sessions that will let you ask questions live to an expert, or just eavesdrop on other people’s programming questions. Or check out the various Thinkful slack channels. There’s always someone around to help.
  
  Your project manager is the connective tissue for your Thinkful experience. They’ll check in to make sure things are going well with your mentor, give you a heads up on events, help you set check points, and chase down answers to non-programming questions you have.
  
  I don’t yet have experience with this, but you’ll also get a career mentor who will help you polish up your job materials. (I gave it 5 stars below because I'm required to put something there. I'll come back and edit this if something unexpected happens.)
   
• Curriculum: Before Thinkful, I checked out a number of other online resources. Thinkful’s curriculum is, far and away, the best I’ve seen for web development.
  
  The writing quality is, generally, superb. Each section lays out key ideas plainly and with plenty of examples. And most of the units offer multiple, well thought out interactive coding exercises along the way.
  
  I appreciated the focus that the curriculum offers. On my own, I tended to jump around from topic to topic, learning the same concepts over and over from different sources, or in slightly different ways. Thinkful’s curriculum makes sure you’re constantly learning something new, while reinforcing fundamental concepts.  
  
  Some of the later sections could use a re-organization. When I went through the course, the section on Node.js seemed to jump around a bit, offering high level overviews of JS Promises, and then not returning to do anything with them until much later, for example. The content was solid, it just came in a strange order.
  
  The final unit on data structures and algorithms isn’t quite on the level of the other sections. Here you’ll find yourself going outside the curriculum (or bugging your mentor) to really gain an understanding of the ideas.
   
• Student support: Thinkful does a lot for its students and will find a way to make sure each student can fully leverage its resources. I found the mock interviews to be a really enriching experience, for example. When scheduling those, I was offered the calendar of over a dozen different interviewers, so I could pick the exact day and time that worked for me. When I wanted to switch mentors – just because I wanted to try out a different learning style – my PM listened to me, and made it happen within a day. The various people in the TF community have made sure to include me in all sorts of opportunities—from assisting with in-person instructional sections, to setting up career meetups, to just hosting hang outs.

Thinkful has been a truly rewarding experience for me, and I hope it can be the same for others.

Warning: this is a long review. Skip to TL;DR if you don't care to read it all.

Attending Thinkful's Engineering Immersion program was definitely one of the best decisions I have made for my career. Everyone in the organization truly cares about your success. I was fortunate enough to have the support of my employer to make this career switch, but even if you make the leap on your own, Thinkful adequately prepares you to be EMPLOYABLE in less than 6 months. This review will be for the full time program.

TL;DR - The tech stack is top notch and relevant for what the market is looking for. You also learn soft skills that make you a great developer - perseverance, curiosity, patience, working on a team. The full time program is tough and you will doubt yourself over and over but if you stick with it and utilize the wealth of resources around you (mentors, TAs, slack channel, office hours), you WILL be successful and you WILL find a job.

THE PREP

You begin with 3-4 weeks of prep material to get you up to speed on HTML, CSS, git and Javascript. The prep course will give you base level knowledge so that you can pass the technical evaluation. It's self paced, but will have "milestones" that you need to complete to be ready to join the next cohort. A new cohort begins every 5 weeks. Therefore, there is no need to panic if you don't do well or feel like you need more time. You also have a prep course program manager and a mentor that you meet with 3 times a week during the prep course. Sidenote -- what other bootcamp gives you a mentor BEFORE the program actually begins?? Mentor support at Thinkful is truly remarkable.

THE TECHNICAL EVALUATION

Once you complete the prep course, you will schedule your technical evaluation that is held with one of Thinkful's mentors. Everyone does it differently but it essentially will gauge if you have a handle on the basic concepts to be ready for the rigor of the bootcamp. Be prepared to discuss concepts and do some basic coding challenges. Don't worry -- your program manager will give you a study guide. It won't be on anything that you did not cover in the prep course. After you pass the tech eval, you'll do another interview that's essentially a culture fit. They want to make sure you'll work well with other students. Pair programming is a central part of the full time program.

MODULE I: JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS

For me, the first two weeks of the program felt like getting hit by a truck. No lie. I knew it would be hard but it was super fast paced. We worked on a lot of exercises to get used to git then dove into object-oriented programming, jQuery and hitting APIs from the front-end. I think there was an API project sprinkled in there too. It's all a bit of a blur since we went quick.

MODULE II: SERVER - NODE, EXPRESS, MONGO, POSTGRES

After a relatively quick unit in Javascript, OOP and APIs, we moved along to server-side code. It seems like a lot of people struggle with this part of the curriculum simply because the backend isn't sexy. There's not really any instant feedback like there is on the client-side. Personally, I loved it since I have a data background. Anywhoo, after 5-ish weeks on the server, you'll do your first big capstone that should showcase your knowledge of RESTful APIs. 

MODULE III: REACT, REDUX

Back on the front-end, you'll learn about React, the Javascript framework developed by Facebook and used by many companies (i.e. AirBnB). The market is HOT at the moment for developers with knowledge of React, so pay attention! (haha) In all seriousness, React is super fun. As someone who struggled a bit with jQuery, it was cool to work with a framework that gives you instance feedback without manually reloading the page. You also will dive into Redux, which is a library that manages your application's state.

Thinkful does a great job at introducing you to tools that modern Engineering teams use to manage large codebases (you MUST maintain the state of your application SOMEWHERE or there will be CHAOS! ^_^)

After about 4 weeks learning React and Redux, you'll be paired with someone to do a Full Stack Capstone, marrying what you learned about Node.

MODULE IV: DESIGN WEEK

Chill, fun week that gives you a bit of a "break." You learn about design concepts like typography, layout, and color schemes. Here, you'll get a start on your portfolio and receive feedback.

MODULE V: COMPUTER SCIENCE FUNDAMENTALS

The last type of formal instruction that you get as an EI student is a crash course in computer science fundamentals -- they fit Data Structures (i.e. Arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues) and algorithms (sorting, searching etc.) into about 2 weeks of material. It's A LOT. But don't panic. This stuff is hard and they want to prepare you for the inevitable white-boarding interview that you may encounter during the job search. It's important to be able to intelligently talk about WHY you solved a technical problem a certain way and what the performance benefits and/or limitations are (Big O notation). Though many companies are shying away from the traditional white-boarding interview, you still need to be prepared to talk about technical concepts. You'll be able to practice during this part of the course with mock interviews (sidenote: there are mock interviews throughout the duration bootcamp but this one is supposed to be more challenging of them all).

You'll have another capstone centered around algorithms at the end of this unit. This one was probably my favorite because of how much it made my brain hurt (ha). Struggle ====== GROWTH.

MODULE VI: FLEX WEEK

Pick a technology and you have a week to learn about it. Don't pick a low-level language like C -- there simply isn't enough time. Most students do a different front-end framework like Angular, React Native or Vue. The goal of flex week is to figure out how best you can learn new technologies on your own. That is honestly 80% of the job as a developer. Speaking as someone who has only been working professionally as a developer for two months -- i've had to learn so many new concepts in a short period of time. However, it's no longer daunting because Thinkful floods you with information until you figure out what works for you (everyone is different). 

MODULE VII: FINAL CAPSTONE, CAREER SERVICES

After flex week you'll be working on a larger team (about 3-5 of your classmates) to do you final capstone! This is a 3 week project where you'll get a taste of what it's like to work on a real development team. You'll no longer have your instructors or mentors to hold your hand. You're mostly on your own except for your team lead that is a Thinkful mentor and he or she will just make sure your team is on the right track. This project should be impressive (you have 3 weeks!) and you'll each have some sort of role -- Project Manager, design lead etc. etc. It's hard work and almost identical to what you'll experience as a professional.

After that, you take a week to finalize your portfolio and submit it for feedback, after which CONGRATS, you've graduated. I was lucky enough to have a job before I graduated, so I can't speak about career services other than they make sure to get you ready to apply for jobs. They guarantee that you'll find a job or you get your money back -- that's how confident they are.

IN CONCLUSION

Making the leap over to the tech community is the best decision I could have ever made for my career and I'm truly grateful that I was able to attend Thinkful. Not only have I forged awesome relationships (the Thinkful communities in D.C./LA/NYC/ATL are very active!), I now have skills that nobody can take away from me.

Honestly the educational experience with Thinkful has been amazing. I'm close to finishing the course and I never thought I could be this comfortable after a regular bootcamp. I was actually supposed ot go to a 9 week immersive bootcamp here in Toronto, but 9 weeks feels too quick and I decided to choose Thinkful because you get 6 months ot learn concepts that are foreign to beginners. I have very little previous knowledge havign completed a prep course for another bootcamp. The curriculum forces you to do research to figure problems out on your own because that's how you learn. My advice for anyone joining is the course materials are there to guide you into finding a solution, do yoru own research online, and in the Slack community it really helps you undertsand what you're doing. 

I am currently in the midst of the full stack flex program at Thinkful. While I had tried learning on my own through the many websites that are available to learn web development I always felt something was missing. That is until I found Thinkful and it's 1 on 1 mentor sessions it has greatly improved my understanding of web development and I can not stress how useful it is to get instant feedback and help that my mentors have provided for me so far. They ask me questions to make sure I understand the material as well which I feel has really helped to squash the dreaded 'imposter syndrome' because they give me the opportunity to show to myself that I know what I am talking about. On top of that, the projects that are giving are fairly open-ended allowing you to be creative with only guided lessons to help you take a project from the planning stage to completed app. On top of all that each lesson is ended with a mock interview which not only helps get rid of 'imposter syndrome' but also helps to get me ready for the real interviews to come. While I am only in the middle of the material right now I feel extremely confident that after I graduate I will be able to get a job as a web developer thanks to Thinkful.

ps. Job Support is listed n/a only because I haven't utilized it at this time.

I love this boot camp. I was a bit tentative in deciding whether or not to do this boot camp due to the fact that I was already employed full-time. The prospect of having 25-30+ hours a week of coding on top of my already busy schedule was something that I had to get used to but when it comes down to it,  I haven't regretted my decision one bit. 

There is no doubt that the material is difficult and having to manage my time has been something I have struggled with. The curriculum itself is awesome (though hard!) and the drills and projects I have done so far have provided me with a great base to build upon as I continue through the course. I really feel that when I finish, I will have the knowledge and skills to pursue a career in web development.

More than anything, I cannot be more grateful for the support that I have found in the Thinkful community. From my mentor who has gone out of her way no matter the hour to help me with bugs and broken code to the Slack community of other mentors/developers/students who are always available to answer my questions or give me feedback when it's most needed. 

For anyone that is looking for a great program that is flexible but challenging, look no further!