Chegg Skills

I am a graduate of the Full Stack Flex program at Thinkful and would difinitely recommend the program to prospective students. The program is full of many high quality features and benefits designed to help you throughout the learning process. In addition to 2 weekly 1-on-1 meetings with a dedicated mentor, you also have access to several on-going live Q&A sessions as well as a dedicated slack channel where you can turn to with any questions or challenges you're facing. Aside from these, the curriculum is very well structured, and the program interface is very well designed, creating a smooth user experience from start to finish. Overall, I am very satisfied with my experience and would highly recommend it to anyone looking to advance their career as a developer.

I have been doing Full Stack Flex program at Thinkful for almost three months now and I have learned so many things. One of many things I like about Thinkful is their on going/live Q&A lead instructor sessions. Through out the day and night there are available sessions where students can join and as questions  or get help with their capstone projects.  Another point I like that makes Thinkful special is their weekly mentors. I meet with my mentor whose really knowledgeable and knows how to teach,  twice a week.  We go over examples  but pretty much they can answer those difficult questions that you can't find in your own or  need further explanation. I also appreciate having the slack group but want makes it special  is those local groups  where students can get together for activities or study groups. Over all, I am glad I joined them ! 

The thinkful coding bootcamp experience was extremely helpful to someone like me with no professional experience or coding experience. I was able to complete the bootcamp while working (delivery driver) and got 4 portfolio projects to show for it. I believe this is what is helping me land interviews and code challenges. Also the mentor they pair you with is very experienced and helpful. I still stay in touch with him to this day. 

After graduating there is job assistance that is super helpful. My coach has helped with resume and linkden (invaluable for someone with no experience in the area) and we meet weekly to discuss goals 

Hello World,

I chose Thinkful because of Course Report. After I committed myself to learning development, I spent 3 days reading and using Course Report to get a sense of how students felt about their time in a particular program, what would fit my schedule, my budget, and what I felt I needed for resources to be successful. Course Report has all of that, so read up and see what fits you and start your coding career.

To start, learning something new is going to be all about "YOU". The time you put in and  the drive you have to learn the material will be what makes this program successful for new students. Thinkful will provide the opportunity if you provide the hard work and dedication.

Thinkfuls Engineering Immersion course was a daily 9-5 coding experience. Plus studying at night and at times on the weekend.

Engineering Immersion provides daily stand ups lead by an Industry Certified instructor giving a material overview and explanation of the the days exercises. Paired programming throughout the days exercises to work along with someone. T.A.’s to help during the day to resolve any issues your pair runs into. One on one mentoring sessions to review and share the skills learned from the exercises, and guidance given for better coding practices. Q and A sessions that have a specific technology focus to help get in-depth answers. Workshops to introduce you to new technologies or to learn programming tricks and secrets. Program Managers that go out of their way to make sure you are getting all the resources needed to be successful and that your goals are being met. There is a lot of Active Slack channels. Some are where your group discussions turn into ideas. Tech specific channels to get late night answers. Career channels where alumni recruit new students for employment, and City channels to get to know your community of developers and hear about events in your area.

After this experience, I am excited to take the next steps in my career. Here is a link to my portfolio => https://www.dameonmendoza.com

Thank you Course Report, and Thinkful for giving me this opportunity.

Thinkful has a lot of information and there are good people there but to find them you have to sift through all the mentors and helpers on their Slack channel that think you should already know everything from the curriculum. The curriculum is good for people that learn from nothing but reading. I however have to build applications to truly understand the material. I have had two program managers during my entire time at Thinkful and I have only ever spoken with my first mentor and that was only twice. The first was my introduction and the second was when my mentor quit in the middle of my introductory course. That is a total of 5 out of the 6 months with no contact. I am a project manager at my current job and if I had team members that were not on track to meet their goals I would be reaching out to their mentor and asking them why not. What is the Mentor's plan to get the team member back on track? Has the mentor talked to the mentee about their schedule and about how to help them learn? What goals have the mentor set with the mentee for this week? Did the mentee meet their goals for the previous week? If not what was missed and why? What needs to be done differently to ensure the mentee meets their goal? As a leader we have to take responsibility for everything. I am a leader and I take responsibility for not meeting all my goals but if I was the Program Manager I would have monthly skip level conversations with the mentees to ensure that my mentors are performing as expected, and that the mentees understand where they are and motivate them to succeed. I say there is a lot lacking in the Thinkful model and most of the issues come from the top down. As leaders all failure is a reflection of our leadership.

I've been a self-taught programmer for many years with dreams of taking my skills and enthusiasm into the progessional setting, so I was excited to find out about Thinkful's Full Stack Flex program. They work with you on a curriculum to give you today's most marketable skills like ReactJS and Node as well as professional coding practices you might not pick up on your own like testing frameworks and using Git. 

Beyond the curriculum and coding practices they instill, the real power of Thinkful's program is the mentors. You get twice weekly meetings with a mentor who has a successful background in bringing web applications to market. They guide your through tough to understand content, trouble shoot with you while you are stuck and help you build and refine your projects. I looked forward to my meetings with my mentor because he could always help me get unstuck, explain important concepts and clear up misicues with patience and understanding. He also helped keep me accountable and pushed me to try more challenging things and be a better programmer. Additionally, when you aren't working one-on-one with your mentor, you have access to other mentors in multiple daily Q+A sessions on all sorts of topics, live Family Dinner events with students and local mentors/program managers and a Slack channel. 

At the end of your time at Thinkful, you will have a personal portfolio website with at least 3 polished web applications that you built from the ground up. You'll be able to speak about your experience designing apps from the back of a cocktail napkin all the way to deployment with continuous integration. The experience is powerful and much more inline with professional experience than just doing online tutorials. 

Finally, Thinkful offers career services that go into deep detail - whether it be updating your resume and cover letter to networking strategies. Additionally, they push you to try new strategies that you might not  have thought of or otherwise do to help you secure a job. At the end of each unit, Thinkful has you do live mock technical interviews to help you practice for the real thing. They definately do not feature push over questions- you are expected to know your stuff and perform underpressure. As someone whose only gone through standard interviews in the past, exposure to what a technical interview could be like was an extremely important part of the developer job search.  

Thinkful is awesome! I had a great experience. Everyone at Thinkful is dedicated to student's success and the ultimate goal of getting a job as a developer. There is always someone available to help, whether it is your mentor, another mentor via a Q & A session or a mentor or another student through the Thinkful Slack community. As an example, I was having an issue with my first capstone project late at night so I jumped on Slack and asked a question. Within seconds a mentor replied and as we chatted back and forth he realized it was a quick fix kind of problem. We ended up doing a video chat and he helped me for 2 hours (we didn't finish until 2 am his time). That is how dedicated everyone is to helping the students succeed. 

Throughout my time at Thinkful I had 4 mentors. This was due to a scheduling conflict with one of my mentors. Thinkful is great about finding the right mentor for you if request a new mentor. 

As far as time commitment goes in the Flex program I probably spent on average about 30+ hours working on the curriculum while working part-time. I will be honest, it is not easy and if you are working at the same time you won't have much of a social life. It is 100% worth it. I love what I do and I am really glad that I chose Thinkful.
 
Thinkful gives you the tools you need to get a job as a developer and the skills to learn technologies quickly and efficiently. The industry changes very quickly and that is a vital skill as a developer. Overall I would 100% recommend Thinkful to anyone who is passionate about becoming a Web Developer. 

Overall the Thinkful experience has been pleasant. I really enjoy my 1-on-1 meetings with my mentor. The feedback, guidance, and challenges my mentor present have made the program worth while. 

The curriculum is decent, but I sometimes get lost in the assigments and reading material. I do wish it was laid out a bit differently, I think there is room for improvement in that regard. Another thing I've noticed is that you really need to pay attention to the recommended resources at the end of each lesson. Those additional resources are super hepful in driving the topic home (at least for me :) ). The additional resources are well curated, but this student wishes some of those items were integrated into the native curriculum. Chasing down external links and keeping track of all of them can be a bit tedius. 

Thinkful offers a student Slack environment which is occasionally helpful, but you've got to be patient due to the sheer number of participants. Another very helpful 'community' type research are the open-sessions held by various mentors and Thinkful instructors. I've found that the instructors genuinely want to help you learn and aren't afraid to answer questions. I find the mentor sessions and open-sessions to be very helpful.

I believe Thinkful is better geared towards individuals with a strong sense of self-motivation and resourcefulness. There are often times where you need to refer to various documentation and the program definetely rewards those who can find answers on their own. There is a lot of reading, which can be a bit monotonous. For me personally, I do wish there were a few video lectures sprinkled through the reading material. I think that would help tremendously - seeing things demonstrated live (or recorded) and hearing someone explain what they're demonstrating is very helpful for some learners. 

On the whole, I've enjoyed my Thinkful experience and have seen a marked improvement and progress towards my goal. I still have a little bit left to go in the program, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to individuals looking to jump start their software development education.

I tried to study by myself, i tried to study with tons of free resources out there ... but it did not work for me. Conceptually with Thinkful you are still learning by yourself, but with one huge difference, there are always either mentors or/and Q&A sessions available for you when you need them. This makes learning process less stressful and demotivating when you stuck. This lets you move forward and not to procrastinate. Thinkful model is very good fit for those who works full time, has family and other things in their life at the same time and also wants to learn Full Stack :). Go for it! you won't regret it.

I started off with basically no coding experience at all and was a little nervous starting from scratch - but from day one everyone at Thinkful alleviated those concerns! It starts right from the basics and builds on top so even a beginner can do it if they work at it hard enough. My program manager helped introduce me to the way the course works and is always checking in to see how I'm doing, and my mentor is invaluable in helping me along with the technical side of things. I would definitely reccomend this course to other people like me who are looking for an alternative to college or for anyone wanting a change in careers.

The biggest obstacles to my decision to learn coding, statistics, and data science had been lack of a functional curriculum and access to knowledgeable staff who can guide, counsel, and assist when I get lost or stuck. Thinkful's Data Science program has provided both. 

The curriculum is well structured. Not only does it offer easy to understand examples of every lesson along the way. But it also increases the complexity of those examples and slowly introduces concepts into the code that you as a student have to go figure out for yourself, which as it turns out is a critical component of surviving in the tech industry. 

Having access to regular Q&A sessions online augments the bi-weekly hour long mentor sessions that keep my on track and progressing toward each milestone. Perhaps in time, the Data Science program will have more industry professionals who can give more Q&A sessions like is present for Full Stack students. 

If you want to learn but simply lack the infrastructure in which to learn, this "boot camp" is a solid move. Its cost is reasonable and will likely pay for itself in the first year alone. The community is full of hopeful, intelligent students who are all just trying to break into a growing, lucrative industry. And the lessons themselves are very challenging while keeping you near to guidance that has kept me going when I thought I would never be able to grasp some of the concepts and code. 

This has been a very good experience in pushing me to take a step out of my comfort zone. Along with going to Meetups to meet up with other fellow coders, I also get good practice mock interviews with those experienced in the field. The assignments themselves point you in the right direction and it's built step by step. 

Some issues is that parts of the course may be out of date or recommended resources link broken/out of date. Though, I find the next couple days that a new lecture is added to cement more of the concepts. 

Instructors are very knowledgeable and tend to know a lot of tips and tricks. I had two instructors, one that is newer, but had a lot of zeal for teaching which I enjoyed. After the introduction phase, was introduced to an older instructor where I have a little more trouble associating with. 

Currently still taking the course and working on my serverside capstone project.