Chegg Skills

I started this program coming from a counseling and marketing background, and had started to learn on my own before realizing I wanted to pursue a career in web development. I had chosen Thinkful because of the flexibility - I didn't have to fly out and live across the country to learn, nor did I have to be online for a certain window each day. I was able to freelance and have other responsibilites on the side while still trying to devote as much time as I could to web development. I was placed with a great mentor who I video chatted with for an hour three times a week. He knew exactly what I needed to focus on to be successul in this field, which was very helpful coming in with no experience of the industry. The part that scared me the most when I decided to change career paths was the fact that I had to stop and take some time to go back and learn before moving foward. Investing in yourself is something you must do and can be very rewarding if you push through with the help of your mentor and the rest of the Thinkful community. At the end of the day, I felt better off for having chosen this program because although Thinkful is there to help you when you are stuck, part of being a web developer is getting stuck constantly and figuring out on your own what to do. The fact that there is no hand holding, however, is what will make you more successful when you try to get a job. For me, I was able to land a product manager position for a software company - so I'm still able to code and manage a team of developers, but can apply my past experience from other industries into my work. If you are willing to devote the time and effort, you can change your career path a lot quicker than you might think.

Thinkful was a life changing experience for me in terms of education. In the full stack boot camp, you learn industry best practices and cutting edge technologies. You not only build out a portfolio of full stack applications but also build your professional network.

I came into this boot camp with prior programming knowledge. Despite this, I learned many new things everyday. One big thing I learned from Thinkful is that as a developer, you never stop learning. Since technology is changing everyday and so vast, there are technologies and ideologies that you can learn everyday. So to anyone interested in bootcamps, I would say to expect to learn everyday and be excited to learn. 

I was able to land a job 2 months after graduation as a web developer with the knowledge and skills gained from Thinkful's boot camp.​

I would definetly recommend Thinkful because of they teach industry technologies, provide mentorship, have a dedicated career center, have a great professional network, and have a job guarantee. 

tl/dr: Thinkful is the best bootcamp on the market because it offers an organic, effective student oriented learning experience, with freedom to explore.  Others are formulaic, soul-less dev factories.

The following review is long and personalized because this stuff matters.

As you might be doing right now, I once put a tremendous amount of energy into selecting best bootcamp for all the obvious reasons... I wanted to learn programming, I wanted the best outcome upon graduation, I wanted to avoid wasting ~10-14k.  Top of my list were 1.) Full Stack Academy Remote, 2.) Hack Reactor Remote, and 3.) Thinkful (as a fall-back option).

Before I explain in detail the rationale for my original thinking and the what the actual outcome looked like I will share the most important lesson I learned from the bootcamp experience:

Imagined expectations about an experience can differ significantly from the reality of that experience.

My key takeaways from that lesson:

          1.) You never really know what something is like until you personally live through that experience

          2.) Marketers/Brand Managers/(Even Hiring Managers!) whose main goal is to sell you on something,                  work very hard to preemptively fill that gap - the one between imagination and reality.  

Fortunately, for bootcamp buyers, we have Course Report, and people who are willing share their actual experiences.  I'm doing that today because... spoiler alert!... I like Thinkful.   

Prologue

Once I seriously decided to pursue a full-time bootcamp in early 2015, I took the admissions test for Full-Stack Academy. I failed the test.  My preparation had been reading Eloquent Javascript. Again, in hindsight, if you want to learn programming at any level you can't just read, watch videos etc.  You must practice until you succeed, with the measure of success being ~20% getting a working and error free program, and ~80% having fluidity (or fluency) in both recalling necessary programming syntax and generating solutions for a particular problem.  I would recommend CoderByte.com as a source of these practice problems, but many of the practice problems there marked 'Easy' either require or give their solutions using Regex (which although ultimately easy, learning right away as a beginner is either a brilliant move or a distracting detour).  My source of practice problems was the Full Stack Academy BootCamp Prep course in Lower Manhattan, where I got my initial exposure to both live learning and quality practice problems.  In hindsight, I cannot recommend it for the money it costs.  The best things about it were that I received access to quality javascript practice, and I got to study with real live people, albeit unfriendly people.  Instead, to prepare for any bootcamp, I would recommend attending a local MeetUp of beginner programmers who are likely to be more relaxed and more inclined to share selflessly.

Applying to FullStack Academy, Hack Reactor, and Thinkful

After FullStack's Bootcamp Prep, I applied to Hack Reactor, and flunked their entrance exam because I got nervous on the test.  The combination of pressure + tentative and superficial grasp of the many nuances of the javascript spec = bad result in programming.  Programming challenges for bootcamp admissions shouldn't really exist, but they do because it is baked into the business strategy of the "Top BootCamps", to accept the most advanced incoming students, and churn out the most "advanced" programmers who will boost their stats on the highest average salaries.  From a student's perspective, this is bad practice.  It layers an unnecessary pressure-cooker environment on what will already be an overwhelming intense learning experience.  Yes, you can read on Medium about one kid out of Hack Reactor who was able to grab $100,000+ plus salary by gaming the hiring system, but the reality is if you are coming out of a bootcamp with < 1 year's experience you are a junior dev, period. You can certainly move the needle up a bit and be a competitive junior developer in the marketplace, but not going to Hack Reactor or FullStack certainly doesn't preclude that either.  So next I re-took took the Full Stack Academy test, and gritted my way through it.  I was given a positive signal about my recommendation for their full time program.  In casual conversation with the interviewer, he tipped me off to a little FYI that would bring about the most fortuitous turning point of affecting my future bootcamp experience. He said, paraphrasing, "You should be aware that at FullStack Academy you will be subjected to periodic assessments where if you fail the program managers will make a determination if you should be held back (and join the next cohort) . . . WHAT!? Now I'm thinking, "So I hand over $14,000 in cash to be taught programming, and they can effectively set my career back 6 MONTHS (to the next cohort) while still holding my cash, because I missed a 'return' statement in my 'if...else' block???” This may be my own mental exaggeration, but I do struggle with conceptual comprehension from time to time and I’m not always capable of gaining absolute testable competency according to someone else’s predefined schedule.  And generally this threat was credible because previously at the FullStack BootCamp Prep course I witnessed the exodus of 1/3 of the class on the second day after the prior day's opening assessment.  In a business context I have no doubt they wouldn't hesitate to steamroll my life and my career, if they thought I might "underperform" according to their metrics in the job seeking phase, just to be able to print a higher average salary on their marketing materials.  I sent a message to the Full Stack admissions department, naively expressing eagerness, but making it clear that being summarily dismissed from their program for a bad assessment was unacceptable to me and I was promptly rejected.  (Hack Reactor gave me the same warning regarding assessments).  

Thinkful

Meanwhile, I had kept Thinkful coals burning after a few exploratory exchanges.  I liked the people I was talking to but had a difficult time getting past my own preconceived notions about the quality of their program respective to Full Stack and Hack Reactor.  Their marketing simply didn't grab me like the others did  Still, I took the plunge with Thinkful and I’m very glad I did.  Thinkful contained none of rigidity that the other programs had telegraphed.  They’re just very reasonable. They want you to succeed and work very hard at designing effective learning materials and offer a surplus of live instructional support to make that easier for you.  They put forward a curriculum that is up to date on the fast-moving javascript world.  

curriculum

Thinkful teaches the M(ongo)E(xpress)R(eact/edux)N(ode) stack. The challenge of the topics accelerates very quickly .  The curriculum (and your Thinkful BootCamp life) is focused on a well-designed dashboard page that gives you access to everything you are going to learn for the next two weeks. Daily subjects to be learned are linked to here in the form of well-written learning modules.  The modules themselves have 99% of the information you'll need to learn the topic at hand, whether that is Javascript Fundamentals, Node, Mongo, React and everything else. I customized the presentation of my learning module page with CSS and the Chrome extension StyleBot because I preferred to read Serif font, and completely hide the sidebar unless it is hovered on. The best part about the learning modules is that they very expertly balance presenting the most relevant parts of the topic that you will need to know to gain confidence, and shielding you from the insane depths of some programming API's.  For example, Mongo the database, and Mongoose the ORM on top of it - Thinkful scrubs the worst and most arcane bits of the official documentation and offers step-by-step instruction.  The modules alone are worth the price of admission.  

the instructor

Joe was our primary cohort instructor for the bootcamp.  He is a seasoned programmer and teacher, is intensely dedicated facilitating understanding, developing course materials and infrastructure, and has a wonderfully English sensibility around learning.  You just feel smarter after speaking with him.  

mentors

They help put Thinkful over the top of the Bootcamp pack.  I'll admit that it sounded a bit cheesy at first to have a mentor, like I'm going to be saddled with a Mr. Miyagi / Danielson    - esq relationship.  Well, ignore that, because you don't know how valuable it is to have senior programmer assigned to work with you 30 mins daily on video chat and close to 24/7 on Slack to answer any question you have.  This is the curious mind's dream. My mentor and I, besides talking about the day's lessons, deep-dived about operating systems, computer science, the wacky Javascript Type System, what it's like to be a working developer, and much more.  He even turned me onto Planck's Constant when somehow we meandered upon my 20 year curiousity about what is smallest measurement an object could be in the universe.  Never get that at Full Stack I assure you.   

pair-programming

Thinkful, with their full-time program imposes pair programming like all the other bootcamps.  It is an imposition, but a valuable imposition.  You will get frustrated working with your partner but you'll get frustrated with your future coworkers too.  This exposure gives you an early opportunity to learn how to handle yourself in these relationships.  Theresa, the program manager at Thinkful, helps guide you through managing these relationships masterfully resulting in added value and reduced stress about working with other people 1-on-1 for 6.5 hours each day learning new and challenging material.  She gets it.  

other-students

The cohort was composed of a good mix students from all backgrounds.  The number of people was enough to get a strong diversity of perspectives/personalities and not too many to get lost in a crowd.  Regardless of who you’re working with, learning can be more memorable or ‘sticky’ when working with other people because the knowledge becomes embedded in the context of a relationship.  

t.a.'s

The t.a's are brilliant additions to learning environment.  They are not ex-students, they are working professionals who live in another timezone (Europe).  Alex, is the most dedicated instructor I've ever met, he will help you solve any problem.  Siddhath, can also solve any problem.  They are friendly and helpful, and essential.

projects

There are many projects throughout the 4 month bootcamp and range from one day to three weeks with the average being one week.  The projects offer a great opportunity for deep learning because they give you time when you don't need to cut new ground on the learning side. The exceptions to this are the ‘flex-week’ where you can pick any new technology you want (I chose GraphQL) and the final project called the Capstone.  For the Capstone our team decided to develop and Ethereum application.  I'm speculating but I imagine it's the first and only Ethereum app every developed as a Bootcamp project.  Kudos to Thinkful for letting us do it.      

being remote

For learning programming through a bootcamp I can't imagine not working remotely.  There is no commute, so you maximize your productive hours.  You can make yourself comfortable as you undertake this uniquely intense period of your life.  It was really nice to hunker down for the entire winter indoors just and emerge in the Spring as a learned programmer.  The daily workflow is the following: For me, I live on the East Coast, I woke at 8 am, and worked on the previous day's curriculum for an hour, then switched to previewing the current day's lessons.  At 10 am, the cohort met in a video chat room called Owl (some codename Thinkful's proprietary solid video chat client.  It's way better even than Google Hangouts) with Joe, our instructor on screen welcoming us to the day, and proceeding to deliver a 45 minute lecture on the day's material.  Then, we break into our programming pairs, (assigned and curated by Theresa according to responses from daily feedback called Reflections)  and work on the learning modules until 12:45.  At 1:30 we get back in the video room for a recap on the morning where we present any challenges or questions to Joe in front of the group.  After that we resume with our pair programming exercises, with the addition of the t.a's for help until 5:30.  The day then concludes, (sometimes with your head spinning), then you can relax until you meet with your t.a. who will help help unspin your head if you haven't yet stopped it from spinning.  

Multiply this experience by a rough average of ~120 days interspersed with the above-mentioned projects and you are a full-stack developer with an unlimited ability to pursue anything as a software developer.  You'll have built impressive things as a web developer and be capable of building even more and better things.  They guarantee you land a job. I've chosen to try to make it as a freelancer but that's my choice.  I'm sure I could land a job as a junior developer now, and most tellingly for me those supercilious timed code challenges that once struck me down with fear, and still stand as proxies for programming aptitude are no longer intimidating.  I don't sweat them now.     

I'm currently just over 2 months into the flexible full-stack course and I'm loving it so far. I've dabbled in working with the web since 1998 but never dived deep until now. There is a lot to learn in a short amount of time but having a mentor to keep me accountable with the program has done wonders for keeping me on track. I have already learned a ton and am doing things I have never gotten into before such as the backend/server and database stuff. Very exciting.

I dropped one star for curriculum due to the fact that it is currently undergoing some changes and some things seem inconsistent or incomplete. If there are any issues, I usually ask someone or my mentor and figure it out quickly.

My one concern, and this probably goes for any bootcamp style learning, is being able to retain knowledge since you move through the course so fast. With that said, I've been doing pretty good but find myself reviewing a lot of past topics when it comes to doing challenges and projects.

I have nothing but good things to say about the time I spent doing the Front End Deveopment program at Thinkful. The program gave me a solid foundation for what is relavent in web development today. The course work covered basically everything that I ended up doing at my first job as a junior Front End Developer. Also the support from my mentor Marius was invaluable! Despite not being in the program anymore I still talk to him to this day and his friendship/ mentorship alone is worth the program cost alone. On top of helping me learn some of the tougher concepts of Front End Development he helped me prepare for my first Front End Development interview and gave me crucial career advice that has helped me tremendously. He also gave me a ton of advice on managing my first freelance client as well as my first large personal web app project. Acquiring a great mentor who has years of experience made my learning curve much smaller when navigating through the field of Front End Development and I can't thank him enough for that and Thinkful for connecting me with him. 

When it comes to the actual course work the projects get more difficult as you progress through the course and it is self-paced which is super nice. My advice is take your time and throughly understand the concepts that you need to learn and don't try to remember everything little thing thats what google is for. Depending on what you are paying you can meet your mentor multiple times a week over skype (or something similar) and get feedback/help on any difficult topics you are working on. I believe this is crucial for constant improvement with a manageble amount of frustration that comes with learning how to code which is difficult but much like everything else you are only as good as the amount of time and effort you put in. I worked Full time and dedicated 20-30 hours a week to coding and focused on throughly understanding the topics and got a job by myself before the program was over. With that said I cannot comment much on the job assistance but I know a guy who was in my co-hort that got a job through Thinkful's connections so I know it does work. At the end of the day getting is job depends on knowing your stuff and proving it in an interview and a nice portfolio not only the job assitance of Thinkful. 

Before I started Thinkful, I was 4 years out of college and not happy with my professional life. I decided it was time for a change. I decided to look into online coding bootcamps, and after doing a lot of research I found Thinkful. My overall experience at Thinkful was excellent. My mentor, Mario Mol, was fantastic. He was very supportive and was able to break down complex topics in a way that made sense. The React/Redux knowledge I gained through Thinkful was crucial to me landing my current job. The Slack community for Thinkful is very supportive as well, there is a great community of students and mentors that are always willing to help you with whatever problem you run into at any time of day!  

After I graduated, I was put in the career services program. My career services mentor, Jennifer Best, gave me great advice on what to look for in a job, how to network, and revamped my resume. I now have a job I look forward to going to daily thanks to what I learned through Thinkful! 

The flexibility that Thinkful provide is awesome, and really enabled me to work hard but not to disrupt my life. This kept me happy and motivated! The material is well paced and (now that I'm employment I can verify this) really contemporary with what's going on in the industry. Thinkful really care about the students, and I was never pushed too hard or made to feel inadequate in any way- real positive encouragement from my mentor and all of the support staff.

If you decide to go with Thinkful you won't be disappointed, but my advice would be to make sure you seek help when you need it. The trouble with remote learning is that it's harder for staff to notice when you're struggling, but I promise you it's a safe environment and you won't be made to feel awkward. I feel like I maybe didn't speak up enough, and as a result felt a bit directionless at times, but never for too long.

In April 2016 I quit my job as a barista, and in September that same year I accepted a job for twice as much money with BBC. I can't argue with the results.

I arrived to US as an international student and applied for asylum in 2014. I was working as a pizza maker, server at different places until at the end of 2015 I found out about Thinkful. I enrolled to Frontend Web Development Courses and finished at June 2016. I haven't have any coding experience before. This courses not only taught me programming skills, I also learned how to solve different problems on my own and where to find answers when stuck. My mentor was very good at explaining and everytime I got stuck, he would push me to the right path. During job search process, a career advisor did a great job with helping me to find the right companies for me to apply and where to find those companies. I'm working full time now as a Web developer and very appreciate that I found Thinkful! It was a great experience.

I am currently a student in Thinkful's Flex (Part Time) Fullstack Web Dev Program and could not be any more pleased. The amount of information at your fingertips once you are a student here is truly incredible. All of this information is no doubt available online, but Thinkful provides most of it for you flawlessly through its lesson based curriculum. No more digging through countless open tabs piecing together pieces of stackoverflow answers to come up with the basic information you are seeking, hoping that it is still relavant. For the most part, the important aspects to understaning the material is provided clean and concise and there are always links for recommended resources to further explore and understand each lesson's topic(s).

With that said, researching topics on your own is integral to the process of truly understanding concepts and becoming sussessful as a programmer / coder. Having read some of the reviews saying Thinkful should provide more information to students, I have to say I could not disagree more. I studied Computer Science for roughly 3 years at UMass Boston and although I learned alot about data structures and CS theory, the amount of information we were required to learn on our own was astonishing. I had a class on algorithm efficiency that used Java for any projects or test questions and our professor did not even know Java, he would show examples (rarely) in C even though the course tested / used Java! Point being, in any other setting this amount of information bundled into easy to read lessons coupled with working examples is unheard of, at least in my experience. I have learned more hands on, real world coding skills that you might see at an actiual job in 2 months with Thinkful than the three years spent studying CS. 

Also, the attention to creating projects with the prupose of using them on an actual portfolio website is awesome. Not only do these projects teach us different aspects of web dev and give us practice with each of these topics, but they are the very things that will help us land a future career. In my opinion, that is priceless. 

My only wish is that I had heard about Thinkful sooner! 

I've just graduated from the flex bootcamp and couldn't be happier with the expereince I've had with thinkful. 

Coming in to the course I had a fairly good grasp of front end html / css as well as some very rusty and very basic php knowledge. I was entirely self taught and working as a freelance "web developer" I knew I wasn't happy doing what I was doing so took a year off to decompress and decide what I wanted to do next. I decided I wanted to stay in the industry and this time learn the right way. Thinkful seemed perfect for me since it is fully remote and can be worked through entirely at your own pace. 

The first few units covering the fundementals of programming in Javascript were so eye opening to me and plugged a considerable amount of holes in my fundemental understanding of programming which allowed me to move forward through some of the more complex curriculum with confidence. 

Jesse, my mentor, was awesome. We met 3 times a week and he was always ready to help, whether I had specific technical questions or more general questions like how the things I was learning would apply to real world development, he was always eager to help. One of the things I really appreciated about Jesse was that he was never afraid to say when he didn't know something, I've known plenty of teachers who when faced with something they don't understand will attempt to confuse the student as a way of hiding the gaps in thier knowledge, Jesse wasn't one of them. We would either find the answer to whatever I was stuck on together or if we got really stuck, he'd reach out to his network for some help while pointing me in the right direction for me to continue my own research. 

More than anything else, thinkful gave me a huge amount of confidence in my own abilities and helped me to understand that it's ok not to know how to do something as long as you know where to look to find out! 

As I was woring towards the end of the React content I had a job opportunity come up that involved Angular. Thinkful allowed me access to their angular content at no extra charge while I was preparing for my interview. I got the job a week later (which I started yesterday) and Thinkful "graduated" me early. 

The icing on the cake is that because I finished the course well before the 6 month estimated timeframe, they're refunding me the prorated amount and I'll still have lifetime access to the course curriculum. 

The curriculum is challenging but if you're willing to work hard and stay motivated, willing to put in the time, visit the awesome Q&A sessions and reach out to your mentor you'll get there.  my expereince with thinkful was amazing and I couldn't be happier.



 

I decided on taking the Full Stack Developer course through Thinkful.  I'd say I"m a lot more calculated and skeptical than most when it comes to these type of decisions.  There were others in my "top 3", but Thinkful seemed to be the best bargain for the dollar. The timing was bad for me since I had recently gotten promoted with my job and unfortunately, I couldn't dedicate the time I needed/wanted towards the program  At any rate, the curriculum seemed solid and helpful, which at some point, ill need to go back and revisit it.  I don't think coding is something you learn once and change the world.  Repetition and dedication seem to be the key as with most things.  Another big sell for me is that they seem to have a lot of integrity and deliver on what they promise.  My advice for those looking to code is give careful thought to the time you can devote.  Ten or more hours seem to be a decent starting point.  Also, keep in mind that there will be frustrating moments, but know that in the long run, having a more solid coding foundation can be very helpful