Chegg Skills

I took the FEWD course in the Fall of 2013 and I'm so glad I did! The curriculum was comprehensive, the community was super helpful and my mentor gave me all the guidance I needed to complete the curriculum and make my projects the best they could be.

I loved the project-based curriculum because it gave me hands-on experience and practice implementing what I was learning, while helping me build portfolio pieces to apply for a job.

Shortly after completing the course, I got my dream job as a Jr Dev at an awesome company, and I have since been promoted. I give Thinkful a lot of credit for giving me the guidance and self-confidence I needed.

(I orginally posted this review on Quora)

I took the Thinkful front-end course and am now in the middle of the Angular course. After dabbling in code for a while and learning with other tools, I can definitely say that Thinkful has played a significant role in propelling me further in my programming skills and confidence.

What I love most about Thinkful are the hands-on projects you are tasked with at the end of almost each lesson. These projects are what really help me absorb the curriculum and the new tools and skills I'm learning. I've tried a lot of tutorials and online programming schools before including Codecademy and Code School, which were great. But what I was really missing were opportunities to use what I was learning in a real context. With Thinkful I've built numerous apps and sites and now feel way more confident to build something from scratch.

The mentor aspect of Thinkful also played a huge role in this, since there was someone reviewing my code each week and giving me feedback. My mentor also went out of his way to push me further when he saw that I was quite ahead in the course, by giving me extra curriculum projects to work on.

One could argue that you could find similar projects to work on and just use free tools. Maybe. But for me the bundle of the Thinkful curriculum, plus mentor, plus projects was really a winning formula. Different people learn in different ways. But if you're busy with a day job and family, and are serious about learning, I really would recommend Thinkful. It will save you time and maximize your learning. Good luck!

When I first began reviewing software dev training options I found two disctinct groups: free online resources, and $10k intensive bootcamps. Thinkful was the only option I found that lands in the middle of these options. I decided on Thinkful over simply using free resources because of two critical factors that are difficult to put a price on: motivation and mentorship. I decided on it over a bootcamp because of it’s flexibility, price, and the thought that I could always enroll in a bootcamp if I got through Thinkful but couldn’t land a job (spoiler: I landed a job almost immediately after finishing Thinkful).   I started with the Front-End course, which provided the fundamentals and best-practices I needed to start with next to no coding 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 - far faster and more effective than posting to SO or IRC.   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.

(Note: This review was originally published here)

Introduction

This week I’ve completed the FEWD (Front End Web Development) course at Thinkful. It’s been three months of hard work in which I think I’ve made good progress in sharpening my web development skills. In this post, I’m sharing my impressions for those who want to have the opinion of a former student about the course before making the decision to take it.

Who is this course for?

This is a course that can be taken by absolute beginners to learn html, css and javascript from the ground up, but it’s also useful to people who already have some experience, but want to improve in any of the technologies involved.

What does the course include?

The resources available to you as a student are:

• curriculum: the course content itself. It’s made from content already available on the internet for free, but structured to introduce new concepts progressively. It also includes a set of assignments to ensure student comprehension that have to be posted to the community for feedback (see below).

• mentoring sessions: every student has half an hour weekly meetings with a mentor that will provide guidance and specific advice in any area the student is interested in. This is good not only to get personalized information about problems, but also because of the accountability that is generated when you commit to finish some assignment for the following week.

• community: this is where the work on the assignments is posted to gather feedback aside from the one provided by your mentor. If you’re in trouble this is a good place to ask for help because you’ll get faster feedback than if you wait for your mentoring session. Also, if you help other students, it’s a nice mechanism to reinforce your own learning since you’ll need to take a look at the same kind of problem multiple times.

• office hours: these are daily meetings in which you can also ask a mentor face to face about problems you might have and learn from the questions asked by other students. As for now, the time isn’t very convenient unless you’re in the US, but still it’s a good experience to attend them.

What assignments will I work on?

In case you’re curious, the assignments that you’ll need to work on are (including links to my personal work):

• Google clone: reproduce the Google homepage.
• 37signals clone: reproduce the 37signals homepage.
• Hot or cold: Number guessing game.
• Shopping list: Todo list application.
• Quiz: Quiz application.
• API hack: An application that takes advantage of public API.
• Portfolio: Final project to showcase the work done during the course.

What will I learn?

This almost entirely up to you. The more you involve in the community and the more you work in the assignments, the more advanced stuff you’ll get out of the course. Of course, you can get by with just basic html, css and javascript with jquery; but if you’re curious you can much further than that.

In my case, some of the things that I learned are:

• Object oriented javascript
• MVC frameworks
• Data binding libraries
• Template libraries
• CSS preprocessors
• Single page applications
• Responsive design

I’m not an expert in any of the above, but now I’m confident that I can refer to the documentation of any library and/or framework in the future and get up to speed quickly if I need to.

Conclusion

After three months of work, I’ve learned quite a few interesting things and I’ve got a portolio that I can improve in the future. I believe this is a quite good outcome for the time spent.

What makes the course shine, in my opinion, is that it includes weekly meetings with a mentor and access to a community of students that are going through the same problems as you are. This is really powerful to create accountability and get rid of procrastination to make progress in short time.

In case you’re wondering, I feel that I could have learned the same stuff on my own, but I don’t how long would that have taken me. If you’re really good in setting your own goals and keeping the motivation to accomplish them and you’ve got plenty of time to look for good learning resources, then you might not need the course, but I’d still encourage you to think about taking it.

Thinkful does a horrible job of helping students understand the intricacies of complex concepts. They walk you through the basics, then test you on something extremely difficult in comparison. There is no intermediate, there is not enough practice, and there is not enough support. 9 times out of 10, I have to go learn from someone on youtube, instead of from the course I paid thousands of hard earned dollars for. I regret choosing this course each and every day. It has been one of the worst decisions of my adult life. 

I found that program overall to be rewarding, but highly challenging. I chose the UX/UI certificate because I have some design in my background. The program of 6 months part-time is extremely difficult for working adults. Especially if you have a child and are on a limited budget, still I chose it and graduated in 7 months. There is a bit of deceptive marketing. It's very hard to finish the time permitted -especially if you think you might have your loan forgiven -should you not find work. That is not the case. You are put on a very hard-to-navigate schedule that you must follow in order to have loan forgiveness. Keep in mind this is a bank loan, so there is no Gov deferring.  You are;t in a class with others, that's left to Slack, where you have to ask the community. The advisor I had was a no-show every time I reached out. Homework was often double the amount of hours stated.  The biggest falsehood is they sold me on helping you find something and they would help with any agism you faced. That wasn't true. I did gain a lot from this program in terms of understanding and skill. I like the portfolio I made with the three finished projects. I'm just disappointed in the false marketing. Again, if you are older, I strongly caution against the UX/UI certificate. Maybe go for Data Analytics or coding. 

Thinkful is mediocre and incompetent at best, at worst it is a predatory and heartless company that prays on the dreams and aspirations of young people for a better life and income on a tech salary. They failed at pretty much every point in the program and I'll try to go into every detail that I can but inevitably, I'll likely miss some things. If there are some class action lawsuits out there against Thinkful, please don't hesitate to contact me as likely not everything I wrote here is actually every single detail. 
For those with a short attention span go ahead and check out firstly,

Great Alternatives: I know how scary and intimidating it is to learn to code on your own. I would suggest joining codecademy’s discord, as there are many people active there and it’s easy to find people to code with. Freecodecamp.org, exercism.org is also completely free and there are mentors actively there helping other students (myself included who had just graduated from this bootcamp). Try checking out https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/wiki/faq/#wiki_where_do_i_start.3F For a very handy guide on how to get started. Lastly, for additional questions or to just reach out and talk, go ahead and add me on discord: mollie#3232
Now, Starting with
The Recruitment Process: The recruiters canceled one me twice a few minutes before the actual phone call believing I was outside of the United States (likely because I have a very foreign name). Rescheduling it was a nightmare as the person who had canceled it kept insisting that he wanted to talk to me and I had to consistently request speaking to someone else. The recruiter I finally spoke to bought me on the tuition refund guarantee (you won't ever get it, I'll go into more detail why later in this review), he was very pushy. 3/10
Thinkchat: it just…doesn’t work half the time? Either because of technical problems on Thinkful's side or because the people who are “technical coaches” barely are able to code themselves. Most students give up after trying them a few times
Slack Channel: the slack channel is completely dead and devoid of life. Sometimes some students ask for help and the mentor graciously reads them the error that is printed on the console. Unfortunately, as many students are illiterate, they’re never able to understand the copy pasted message from the console that is sent to the student :(
Students: I was obviously kidding in the last sentence. The students are great, intelligent, super helpful and supportive of each other. The only light in this hell hole and honestly a beacon. I LOVED my fellow colleagues and students. The were awesome! But since they’re not really a part of the course offerings, they’re just kind hearted and poor victims, Thinkful doesn’t get any credit for them. 
Mentorship: I had one mentorship meeting over the period of 5 weeks (even though you're supposed to meet twice per week from the beginning). The reason for this is because my mentor kept cancelling over and over, or just simply not showing up at the designated time claiming he had forgotten. He was also just rather rude and saying that "I didn't try hard enough" or felt "dedicated enough" because I complained about aspects of Thinkful's teaching curriculum (more on that later) and if I really wanted this enough clearly I would just deal with him never showing up and deal with Thinkful's bad curriculum, as if I didn't pay to be here. The one time he did show up, he was driving in his car lmfao. My mentor had about 15 students at one time and eventually just sent out a mass email to all of his students apologizing for having no-showed so many of us (I was part of this email chain). I'm not even mad at him, the guy was doing extra hustling and getting paid from Thinkful for doing nothing. It was honestly on Thinkful to have done some sort of screening on the mentors but as long as you have an impressive resume they don't care about anything else (source: asked an actual mentor about the process etc.). I finally did get paired up with another mentor, but they did not have time that week for me so finally we rescheduled the week after. Yes, I did contact ASM but they are awful (more on ASM later). I have never been offered any reimbursements from Thinkful because of this, either in more mentor hours or in tuition. They just don't give any fucks. As far as any interaction that I have had with other mentors on Thinkful, they tended to be rude, dismissive gaslighters. They did the minimum of showing up but often were not very knowledgeable and it was clear that there was a lack of knowledge and obvious that mentors were there only for the money. Mentors will often offer “help” and then ignore messages immediately as soon as they felt bored by the situation (not talking about any single particular mentor, I’ve talked to many, this is the general pattern I’ve noticed).
incompetency: I once had a substitute mentor who didn't know the library that I had to write a capstone project in, so we just schmucked around and talked for the 2 meetings. He was a nice guy, but I found it strange that Thinkful has mentors that don't even know how to help students complete the projects. Most of my interactions with mentors involved them reading back to me my error messages. This may come as a surprise to people, but I don't need help in this area because I am literate.
Lies: Thinkful staff and employees will directly lie to your face about certain aspects of the tech industry  in order to defend and justify their abuse of students. They often say things like, “it will work in your favor, imagine when you’re in your career and you will be so much stronger for it”, “this is the type of thing that happens in industries all the time”. The reason I know that these statements are lies is because I have friends and family who work in the tech industry and they’re able to tell me that what Thinkful employees say are blatant lies used to cover up their abuse of students. I imagine that the average student does not have these types of resources and this type of lie can be bought into much more easily. This is the reasoning in which they are able to, as well, feed you technical jargon about how your ‘code needs to be fixed’. Because I have friends and family that are not thinkful employees but also senior level software engineers, they were able to tell me that the technical jargon they fed me was false and a way to gaslight and mislead me. One of the things that was a clear cherry on top of gaslighting was being told that code that had been verified by 4 senior level engineers, was then told to me by the SAME 3 who work for Thinkful that in fact my code had been flawed the entire time. So they approved the code but as soon as the grader made a mistake on his side, immediately “it’s obvious the code is flawed” and sent me solutions to fix it that didn’t work. They sent me on a wild goose chase.
ASM: ASM often will not reply to emails for several days. The emails go straight to India where they just get forwarded to another place. Many students complain about consistent delays in receiving emails back from ASM, so this is not just a "me" problem. Furthermore, most of the emails were canned responses, and I genuinely questioned if I were speaking with a human or not. It wasn't until I wrote a long letter about not having a mentor for the first 5 weeks (this mentor who was being paid off my tuition) that they finally forwarded my message to another mentor who was obligated to hop on the phone with me for 30 minutes to help me prepare for a javascript evaluation. They also claim to have a role in helping you "keep up with the curriculum by making plans and schedules". I did have a full time job at some point in the curriculum and fell behind two weeks. Their suggestion to me was laughable, as they literally just wrote "in order to catch up you'll have to do two weeks of that curriculum in one week". Wow. Amazing. As if I was so stupid I couldn't have figured that out myself. Incredibly patronizing. 
Curriculum: The curriculum is shit. Everything about it is shit, from the buggy code (capitalizations and lowercase seem to be a consistent problem), inability to report any bugs or actually talk to anyone about the bugs in the code, sometimes problems submitting assignments because of bugs on qualified causing errors. In this case you have to contact ASM and wait a few days for them to reset qualified. They don't help in any way other than that, and trust me, they don't care so just don't bother. The teaching in the curriculum itself was...sink or swim. If you don't have some SWE background it's going to be tough. I had taken CSE courses before, and even this was difficult for me to follow. Just the teaching is awful. Sometimes skipping parts that were important and assuming the user could infer them from the text (often they didn't)
Capstone and assignments: The directions are awful. They will often contradict each other if you read the instructions in the qualified for example and then the readme in the actual assignment. Sometimes they aren't detailed enough, missing critical points of the project that in any job would need to be discussed with the hiring manager (how to deal with timezones for example). Also the fact that we have to deal with timezones, which is insane as they are incredibly tricky in Javascript. This is a problem senior devs have, but we have to figure it out. But there are also no explicit directions on how they want us to deal with timezone differences either. Often the best way to survive these bad directions is to write code that just passes the tests at a minimum and look at the grading rubric but this may not always be enough (more in final capstone as I found this capstone especially suspicious)
Careers: Many students have complaints about how they forced us to make the resume "incredibly cheesy" and that they don't even pass  any ATS. Seriously, not a single one. I once had an assignment rejected on a submission module because I didn't write "dear hiring manager" but instead used the name of the hiring manager in my cover letter. Once I pointed this out they approved it. It's likely that the people looking at your assignments do not spend more than 5 minutes on it. Once I’ve graduated, they seem to add on additional terms to the TRG (as I qualify). Many of these terms, for example 3 of the jobs you apply to out of the 10 per week MUST be through connections, 10 of the jobs each week you apply to must be from the TRG city, you must average more than 1 networking event per week to qualify to TRG (this one is hard, be careful out there guys). They can, and will definitely extend the TRG as they deem necessary up to one year (but this is the fine print they don’t tell you about). 
Grading: the grading is shit in the sense that they will pass you if you're lucky but they will also definitely fail you for absolutely no reason. I have had numerous times where I have submitted assignments, and had them rejected for weird reasons. I even once had a grader send me a screenshot of another student's assignment (I could see in the url) and claim this was the reason they failed me. I resubmitted it and it finally passed. This has happened numerous times (at least 2-3). They sometimes asked for fixes for things not in project requirement specs, because again, the instructions for the assignments are bad.
Final Capstone: I decided to make a section specifically for the final capstone as I found some things about the final capstone suspicious. One is that for every other assignment on Thinkful, you submit the project on qualified to prove essentially that you wrote code that passes all the tests. This isn't the case for only the final capstone. One might argue it's because the final capstone was code that was written pretty recently. This is not true as this has been around for at least one year. I suspect that the reason they do this is because they can reject the capstone based on "failing tests". This was what happened to me, despite submitting proof of passing tests in screenshots on submission and then contacting the ASM about it, they let the graded assignment past the date of my graduation making me ineligible for TRG. Before submission I also had the code reviewed by 3 mentors (who work directly for thinkful) who all approved the project and ran the code separately each on their computers. We also tested the code manually by clicking through it together. After hearing that my project was rejected they kindly reached out to ASM (very nice of them). It's been three days and we are still waiting twiddling our thumbs. They needed to wait this time in order for me to pass my original graduation date so I would not be eligible for TRG. The reason I bring this up is because, some, like me, may join Thinkful believing that they have some kind of "insurance". Essentially, following the directions and graduating on time means that you could have insurance that you wouldn't be 10k in debt if things didn't work out. Just keep in mind that Thinkful controls all of this. And why would they want to return money to you? Thinkful has run off with my money in hand and I'm stuck holding the bill. With an experience this horrible, I'm convinced they've engineered it to be this bad, as it can't simply be incompetence. After several days of waiting and mixed messages from various staff a Thinkful, I was told that my project was already reviewed on Friday but they had not told me any progress about it until Monday, again in order to push me past my normal graduation date, which is what I suspected would happen. After speaking with the grader he confirmed that graders can ask for revisions at their own discretion, not needing to following grading rubric/guidelines, and because of a lack of communication between graders and students, there is no way to know what the grader wants directly. I had to fight to be able to speak with my grader who told me that the feedback he gave for the project was completely different than what my ASM and Jessi Whitmore (an educator success team member) had told me. That the revisions he asked for were completely different than what was communicated to me, and that these employees had sent me on a literal impossible task of debugging for 5 hours (this wild goose chase by me, my mentors and other students). It culminated in the grader himself confirming the task was impossible. I felt insane telling my mentors and the ASM and Jessi that the task they had given me was impossible and I was being gaslit the entire time, being thrown off by technical jargon I didn’t understand completely only to be confirmed I was correct all along. The abuse that Thinkful inflicts on students is absolutely unacceptable.
Gaslighting, just so, so much gaslighting: they will literally just close their eyes and say ‘la, la, la’ to avoid listening to any of your concerns or acknowledging them. I had a lady say that my code was the problem in the grading capstone, and then when I showed her video proof of the problem she said that she wasn’t enough of an engineer to watch the video and said I should not message her anymore. Many mentors will continually gaslight you, even if they can’t find an error in your code, somehow it still IS your fault and the grader must somehow be right. Alright, so show me the bug (they can’t). 
Miscommunications: (recorded audio between student and grader, starting around 5 mins in) I really had to fight in order to be able to talk to a grader about the capstone and the revisions they needed. Essentially they don’t allow any communication or any feedback from the grader so there were a lot of miscommunications along the way. 
Graduation: Light at the end of the tunnel. Oh yeah, they intentionally pushed it back, consistently lying about when they received feedback from the grader. It was confirmed on audio that the grader had sent feedback on Friday, while other employees had claimed it was Saturday or Monday. 
Unfortunately, my situation is not unique. I wanted to get this out there in hopes of even deterring one person from taking out loans or owning Thinkful money. There are a lot of better ways to get into tech. Freecodecamp.org and codecademy are two that I can think of (codecademy pro is 250 usd for one year, and is much less than thinkful's 10k for 6 months).  This was a huge mistake on my part and I feel like a huge idiot. Don't make the mistake I did. Run far away from Thinkful. 
Other notes: Be very wary about positive reviews on Thinkful as they are likely fake. Thinkful has admittedly great SEO and a lot of the first things that pop up show Thinkful in a positive light as they are websites that are promoting bootcamps (and likely get some type of commission). The vast majority of students I spoke to have had similar problems, although some may have different variations of these problems. For unbiased reviews of Thinkful try looking at their google reviews as well as reviews on Facebook as they will not be moderated by Thinkful. 
Things other people are saying about Thinkful:
Things other people are saying about Thinkful:
https://ibb.co/h7gmdMzhttps://ibb.co/tDd3kkyhttps://ibb.co/Qk6d4Nrhttps://ibb.co/3fyGsQPhttps://ibb.co/9Ym3SGHhttps://ibb.co/fH2sBVQhttps://ibb.co/5Ggnjg8https://ibb.co/cYSLXzHhttps://ibb.co/tL1YqTGhttps://ibb.co/gJ83b34https://ibb.co/jbrSwBkhttps://ibb.co/qyKQG2Ghttps://ibb.co/2NqWN3gAudio recording of thinkful staff directly lying,, miscommunications (starts around 5 mins in): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bMScUROZRWLVosyk-YFO9pZBmKv0s92M/view?usp=sharing https://ibb.co/L6pZNTyhttps://ibb.co/WHVz1yBhttps://ibb.co/dD6JV4Lhttps://ibb.co/PtybvHnhttps://ibb.co/VWdQXZthttps://ibb.co/9wQZxNMhttps://ibb.co/cvCsbLLhttps://ibb.co/styXJBXhttps://ibb.co/ZB6jzF2https://ibb.co/SdF3fVshttps://ibb.co/M85Vqk4https://ibb.co/6vKxMhshttps://ibb.co/CnSgDsdhttps://ibb.co/VBYv1yMhttps://ibb.co/h7njf1Bhttps://ibb.co/P5pr386https://ibb.co/dj6HwCfhttps://ibb.co/YPRdxX8https://ibb.co/T8BPgy1https://ibb.co/2h8MDsWhttps://ibb.co/jrB9p8whttps://ibb.co/hDbFbxShttps://ibb.co/hYmsZqnhttps://ibb.co/QdySv60https://ibb.co/0KZ1zF7https://ibb.co/CKS7rz5https://ibb.co/7k2QNHdhttps://ibb.co/1T6CZyghttps://ibb.co/z4BTq32https://ibb.co/ZNNjvtDhttps://ibb.co/kgCMvFVhttps://ibb.co/5FmZLwFhttps://ibb.co/pKSZXwchttps://ibb.co/cwV1XZchttps://ibb.co/KhL9y7fhttps://ibb.co/yBpyCtB

"Admissions" is definitely outsourced to Asia. I didn't want to assume due to the rep I was talking to but common grammatical errors were made via the chat and I was getting frustrated that very basic questions couldn't be answered so I ended the chat. I was sent an email from the rep where I was asking follow-up questions. The rep apologized for the delay in response due to "different working hours". That was the nail in the coffin I needed to realize they outsource "admissions". I asked to speak to someone over the phone and the rep kept forcing me to respond via email. I still have questions and "admissions" was going to get a call rep to call me instead of someone who actually works within the institute. $17k for outsourced underpaid workers?? It's giving scam. No one even asked me questions, to set up a phone or video interview. I was just sent a link to sign up for funding, pre-work and the syllabus. 

The program was extremely easy for me. I did not feel challenged at all. Never had to put any tickets in for help. But this is just my experience and I know a lot that struggled through the program. For me I felt the projects could've been bigger and more requirements should've been inserted. Since I opted for the ISA with living stipend I am paying 15% of my monthly salary. The only thing I probably took away from the program was data structures and algorithms. The rest I was just off learning on my own since the modules were lacking. Careers services is great. They helped me land a job but many in my cohort are still looking.