Chegg Skills

My experience with Thinkful was extremely positive from the beginning. Before enrolling, I wanted to make sure that I would be able to get a mentor that really worked with me. They asked me for guidelines in choosing a mentor for me, and assured me that I could request a change if we didn't "click." Luckily, we did. 

The material is very well-presented in an order that makes sense. You dive in actually writing code right away, and work on projects throughout. These projects provide not only hands-on learning, but finished pieces you can show to prospective employers. Many are still in my portfolio today. 

The weekly sessions with your mentor are what what really set this program apart from others, IMO. My mentor was great. She helped me when I needed it without just fixing things for me, which helped me understand things. She was available by email outside our scheduled sessions. She was AWESOME. 

In addition to mentors, there is a student community where you can post your projects for help or feedback, both from other students and other TAs and mentors. This is frequently the fastest way to get help. There are also office hours daily (or close to daily) via google hangout with different mentors. Anyone can go into the office hours hangout and get help or ask questions. Sometimes the mentor will talk about aspects of the industry if there's not people that need help with specific questions. This was SO valuable! 

I also found the support staff to be friendly and quick to respond to technical issues or feedback. 

When I finished my course at Thinkful I felt confident as a junior front end developer. I would highly recommend this program to anyone, especially those looking for something in between completely self-directed study like Treehouse and a full bootcamp. 

I believe that since I finished, they have expanded the course to include job search assistance, which would make it even more valuable.

The Front-end course at Thinkful was one of the best experiences that I've had during my journey to become a developer. They have a easy to read and understand, yet thorough material set. I started with no knowledge of programming or writing markup, and afterwards was able to build sites from the ground up. One of the reasons that I feel I got so much out of the program is that I was able to have one on one time with a mentor. I could talk through the problem that I was stuck on and they would help me figure it out. The keyword being help, you don't learn anything from someone spoon feeding you the answers. Learning to solve problems is such an important skill. 

The other reason that I enjoyed the program is that I never once felt like I was competing against my peers. I was able to work at my own pace and not burn myself out. I did move from Thinkful to an on location bootcamp and I feel I can say that people are able to learn without coding 16+ hours a day. 

I want to explain the 1 star for Job Assistance. During my enrollment at Thinkful they didn't really have any career help after the program. They have since started a career assistance section. I haven't taken it so I can't give an honest opinion of it. 

During the summer of 2014 I attended the online Thinkful FrontEnd Web Development (FEWD) course.  I use to be a web developer, but had since fallen out of the game, not knowing what was relevant vs. irrelevant. 

In a very short period of time, the FEWD course got my interest back in the field, and also got me up to speed on pertinent things to focus on while trying to get back into the field.  This course come down to how immersed you allow yourself to become in the overall course.  By overall course I mean, using the community chat, joining the office hour hangout meetings, as well as completing your assignments, etc...

Weekly hour long, and they typically went over, sessions with the same mentor throughout the course was more than beneficial.  My mentor would give amazing real world examples of scenarios that I might find myself in somewhere along the line, and I could ask him or her questions about certain WebDev ideas that I may have and they would dive right in, helping me every step of the way.

In summary:

• Great course
• Worth the money spent
• You get out what you put in
• Great people!

If you are autodidactic but need a little bit of guidence, Thinkful is amazing. I had a little experience building static websites with HTML and CSS, but really wanted to get more programming experience with Javascript. I had clear objectives and knew what I wanted to learn. This is important because I hit a wall with my first mentor, but Thinkful was accomodating and found me someone who could take me the rest of the way through the course with my particular learning goals in mind. 

I had high expectations for the Full Stack Rails course, however I was very disappointed.  Their coverage of most topics is superficial and the links they provide for in depth information are to other organization's free online resources.

They skim over many fundemental topics and have you enter a code snippet without explaining fully why.  If you have any difficulties with tasks in the course, such as database migration, they request that you go search for a solution in stackoverflow or search in google.

I never have received a mentor.  The person who met with me for my first "session" promised to email me their contact info but never did.  I have two chapters left but don't know if I will bother completing them.  Visually the curriculum is nicely packaged, but you will not gain any true depth of knowledge from it.  

I finished Thinkful in January. All the content used in the Front-end development course can be found on online for free. In, fact I completed alot of the resources they used before I started Thinkful. You do get a mentor. My mentor didn't show up for scheduled meetings. You are better off using codementor.io to find your own mentor (that meets your requirements) at a reasonable price. It's cheaper than paying $500 a month for free content and mediocre mentors. You will have a portfolio when you finish, but it's not worth paying $1500 for three months. 

I'm writing this here to help anyone that might be on the fence about thinkful...
1) They don't teach, sure you can ask your mentor stuff, but the actual lesson plans, the ones your supposed to spend all day doing... I kid you not they tell you to go to Google, or stackoverflow to find the answers.

2) they raised the price to $500 a class, because they offer "career services". I'm not sure what this means because they don't offer you a job or help you find one.

3) at the end of it all your spending $1500 to Google html, CSS, and javascript. You'll find your self using free resources on the web, thinking to your self. " why the hell am i spending $1500?". ohhhhhhhh cool I made a portfolio....

 I had a background in sales, with little coding experience, but was eager to make a career shift to software development. I decided on Thinkful over a bootcamp because of the flexibility and cost.

The course provided the fundamentals and best-practices I needed to start with next to no experience. I found that the mentor sessions and office hours alone were worth the investment - having access to expert programmers for several hours a week is totally invaluable. Think about this, a comparable "mentor session" from a service like airpair can cost over $200/hour. To me, this is what made it a no brainer.

Beyond the obvious benefit of having a mentor to help you work through problems, I found that having a mentor session or office hours to attend kept me motivated - I never wanted to show up to a session without progress or questions. After finishing the front-end course, I completed the ruby/rails course, and less than two months after, received three offers (rails dev, front-end dev, angularjs dev). I'm now working as an angularjs developer and loving it.

Several months back, I found myself needing to brush up on my front-end development skills. An in-person boot camp is a scary proposition due both to the cost and sometimes the need to move in order to have access to one. (The tech scene isn’t great here in Knoxville, and, so far as I know, we have no developer bootcamps here.)

Thinkful was an attractive alternative. I’ve taken online courses before, but this really is much more like a bootcamp. In more traditional classes, the curriculum is very rigid and instructor interaction is minimal. In the Thinkful course, I have access to a mentor every week which is really great. I’m also bringing my own projects to the course which greases the wheels of learning. Each lesson, I’m getting closer to reaching a goal that means something to me.

The staff has also been very responsive. I’m able to get in touch with the “powers that be” and make suggestions, and they actually respond. They seem genuinely interested in building the thing their students want.

It’s been a great experience, and I’d highly recommend it.

Like many people out there, depite competing demands on my time, I had a real urge to increase my understanding of web related technologies and programming in general. While self-taught for the majority of my knowledge in, networking, programming, Linux and basic scripting I discovered self-teaching was taking me a lot longer than I thought. As a military instructor, I came to the realization that I needed some scope and objectives to try and achieve my goals. In the middle of 2013, I started to search for a flexible course I could take to help me get a foothold in the coding field.   

There didn't seem to be a lot of institutions out there that provided the mentorship and scoping that would really help me grow as a student and fledgling developer without investing university level fees. Then I stumbled across Thinkful. They offered a great, always evolving syllabus and mentorship. The most attractive feature of the courses they offered was flexibility. From what I read on their website, I could fit their course work around a schedule that could have me working normal office hours one day, then 5 hours later, be searching for vessels in distress in stormy seas in the middle of the pacific ocean. 

To be honest it was a no-brainer, I signed up, there wasn't anything really to lose. I never looked back, I have fantastic mentors, who provide honest, critical feedback and have excellent experience. As an instructor, the critical analysis of my code was invaluable to help dme grow as a developer. I also have immense respect for the patience and enthusiasm that Thinkful mentors have. They deal with a multitude of students spread over different time zones, yet always have time for a quick email exchange or chat outside of normal hours. The course flexibility allowed me to work hard when I had the time, and then put in a course pause when my job required that I deploy to a place with minimal connectivity. 

I completed the front-end developer course in May 2014 and am currently working through the AngularJS syllabus when and where I am able. I've put the skills I gained in the FEWD course into my job developing applications for my current job, and helped me enhance our own teaching cirriculum.

As a learning institution and flexible educational model, Thinkful is well worth investing time and effort in. The on-going access you gain to an ever evolving detailed cirriculum, fantastic community of mentors, students and developers is outstanding. It also ensures you can go back and review anything, anytime. I highly recommend Thinkful to anyone who is looking at a structured course and highly-motiviational mentors for getting into the programming game.  

I was teaching myself front end development for a year or so but felt so overwhelmed by the amount of information and resources out there. I was never sure if I was going in the right direction. Thinkful was the best solution I could of hoped for to solve this problem. Their well crafted and up-to-date curriculum tied with passionate mentors created a winning formula. They have mentors that can answer those difficult questions that googling cannot. These answers are delivered in a succinct way based on real world experience and genuine passion for what they do.

After completing the front end web development course at the beginning of 2014 I have since moved from a role that didn’t involve writing code to a full time front end development role. I am now back at thinkful to begin 2015 taking the Backend in Node.js course. I know by the time the three months is up I will be equipped with yet another set of invaluable skills to further my career as a developer. 

Without Thinkful there would be no way I would be working as a developer today. I highly recommend Thinkful to anyone looking to switch careers or just to tie up the loose ends you have with any of the subjects they offer. You won’t regret it