Chegg Skills

I attended Thinkful's 6 months long UX/UI Design Flex bootcamp. My experience was amazing! I think what makes the program so unique is the mentorship you receive. I had an incredible mentor, Jonathan, who I met with weekly and who had 30+ years of experience within the industry. This really helped me receive real-world feedback on about 6 projects, my portfolio, and even advice on job search sites and my resume. After each major project, I had the opportunity to present my work to a random grader. This helped me gain confidence in presenting my work and gave me the opportunity to connect with and learn from even more designers in the field. By the time I graduated, I had a solid portfolio with unique projects & presentations, which helped me land a job within just 2 weeks of graduation! In addition to a mentor, I was also paired with an Academic Success Manager and a Career Coach, who helped me stay on track to graduate (even in the midst of life's chaos) and who helped me attend meetups, prep for interviews, and find jobs within my local area, respectively. Overall, I highly recommend Thinkful's UX/UI Design Bootcamp to anyone looking for a career change or to anyone, who is interested in pursuing UX/UI Design. 

Overall what I was taught at Thinkful got me my current role, and I learned a lot. If you are not a fast learner and can not handle fast-paced/slightly stressful workloads DO NOT go into the full-time software engineering Bootcamp, go the Flex route. I think I would have been hired faster if I went through the part-time Bootcamp. It's a lot to grasp in a short amount of time. 

Pros:
- You get a mentor who can be your saving grace 
- You learn industry best practices
- You have a lot of support 
- You will walk away a better Developer going through this program

Cons:
- Getting help after hours can be time-consuming because of how busy some of the Technical Assistants get and they are only allowed to help you through a messaging app, no zoom calls or phone calls which may make helping others faster

- My mentor quit, the mentor that replaced him was not nearly as helpful. Mentors are an important part of the Bootcamp because they help fill in the gaps/clarify obscure topics.

- VERY DENSE READING. You read most of what you learn and code along with directions in the readings. They aren't presented in the best way. Meaning its a lot of paragraphs with code snippets in between can be intimidating if you aren't a quick reader.

- Node isn't the most useful Backend Language for the NY/Metropolitan area

I definitely recommend Thinkful, it is without a doubt one of the best boot camps if not the best boot camp you can go through. The full-time boot camps are not for the faint of heart or those who lack motivation.  

The curriculum is as-advertised, informative, concise, and illustrative. I was paired with an extremely knowledgeable mentor who assisted me through any issues that came up for me. That being said, the effort put in the back end of the experience was the most surprising, you will very likely not feel alone in the process of finding a job. Resources from applying to evaluating the best job offer for you. Flexibility in scheduling every step of the way, the consistent flow of new information to assist you when coaches cannot, I would describe it as a very well-rounded program.

This course was very comprehensive and accessible to different types of learners. It assumes you have no experience in yhe field and provides a solid foundation, slowly building on concepts. Be warned, the coursework is intense and I had no social life for 8 months while I did this course and worked my full time job. It's doable but you will need to make sacrifices to find time to complete your assignments thoroughly. The mentoring was decent at best and I don't know if it really tipped the scales for me. After graduating, I had a hard time getting any interviews after sending dozens of applications, but ended up taking a promotion at my existing company because of the skills I learned at Thinkful. Overall I'm glad I did it and found it to be quality education.  

The best decision I have made! I completely changed careers and it all started with Thinkful. It took me a little over 6 months to receive my first job offer, I am now a business analyst and very happy with my job. The curriculum was incredible, instructors had a lot of knowledge and always helped one on one of you didn’t understand something. Meeting with a mentor was really cool too, you learn so much in so little time, and after the program I had an excellent career coach Kate, she went over the top to help you, I really recommend this program and the tools it will provide you

 Thinkful’s Engineering Flex course has the potential to deliver you into a new career as a web developer -- but that’s largely dependent on you and your background. It is an excellent opportunity to learn a JavaScript web development stack for someone with a drive to learn, that wants to solve challenging problems, and who is able to dedicate at least 25 hours a week to it. Like with many worthwhile endeavors, just showing up and pushing out mediocre work that satisfies requirements will yield mediocre results; you should be deeply invested in learning, working to always go above and beyond the curriculum, and writing code you wouldn’t hesitate to share with employers. 

Luckily, Thinkful’s mentor system supplements the curriculum and your mentor will extend your reach as a student, teaching you useful design patterns and best practices. In the Flex program, you meet with a senior developer twice a week for 45 minutes. You may have multiple mentors throughout the course (depending on their specialty and fit), but I had the same one throughout my time in the course and happily learned a ton from him. Be prepared to have a focus for each mentor session in order to get the most out of the experience, though it’s sometimes fine to have a more laid back session. 

I don’t mean to imply from the above, however, that the curriculum is deficient. It is well written (excluding some early modules that must have been hastily updated), has clear, functional code samples, and plenty of projects along the way where you are guided to implement the majority (if not all) of the solution. Most of the curriculum is text-based with not a ton of video, but I prefer that mode of learning. Your knowledge and ability will be tested periodically as you complete modules through mock interviews with senior developers and graded projects. These will include at least three “capstone” projects that will be developed 100% through your own efforts and act as a snapshot of your expertise in the technologies you’ve been learning. Capstone projects are an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your skill and are the meat of the course -- they will push your boundaries as a developer and will become a major component employers will use to evaluate you for jobs. 

Another element of the course worth mentioning is the on-demand help that you can get through Thinkful’s Slack workspace and its in-curriculum ThinkChat application. The former includes the entire Thinkful community, so questions you have (or those you want to answer in order to give back) may be answered by students or other mentors. ThinkChat connects you to dedicated technical coaches that will help you get unstuck and is a fairly new feature (introduced about half-way through my time in the course). 

Finally, I should stress that it is worth qualifying for graduation (finishing on-time and in good standing), as the job leads, alumni network, and advice provided by Thinkful and its career coaches will help you get interviews and persevere in the job search. 

Did the DM Flex program w/ Thinkful over the pandemic. I was looking to pivot my career. The course itself was fine, but I think the real value was in the mentor and career coach that you get alongside the program. The mentor is a person who is actively working in the field and you meet with them once a week at least to answer any questions and go over your projects. Then after you graduate you get a career coach who helps you with resumes, interviews, and the job search as a whole. Admittedly there were a lot of rejection letters in my job search, but I did get a couple of interviews, including one with a fairly large nonprofit where I ended up going through 3 rounds of interviews (they ended up choosing someone else, unfortunately). That kept my motivation up to continue applying until I finally found something. Overall I would recommend.

I was enrolled in the data analytics flex course through Thinkful from November 2020 to June 2021. If you are wanting to change careers and get into the technology space, this is a great program to help you do that! I will leave my review on a few factors: 

• Curriculum
• Course format
• Mentorship
• Career support
• Cost
• Return on investment

Curriculum |
If you do the work, ask good questions, and utilize the many resources here is what you can expect to learn:

• Excel | The essential formulas for an advanced excel user. You will be able to create new datasets and calculations from a raw data set, conduct basic statistical analyses, clean data, create visually appealing dashboards in excel. I started the program knowing nothing about Excel and after Thinkful I passed the LinkedIn skill assessment within the 90th percentile and got hired for a job that required advanced Excel proficiency.
• Business skills | I greatly appreciate that throughout the course you learn what may be expected of you on the job and the practical use cases for data analysis skills. You learn the type of employers you can work for and the pros and cons of private, public company employment as well as government employment. I knew I was not entering a new job but a new career and Thinkful's course structure helps you get oriented to that world very well.
• Storytelling with Data | You learn how to make good presentations and will be challenged to present your work to others. This is excellent practice!! I did not expect to learn design principles in this course that is just one way that it is clear Thinkful's instructors think through a lot.
• SQL | You will be proficient in basic SQL skills leaving you job ready to expand your skills and take your work to the next level. The practical knowledge combined with the understanding of how databases work will prepare you to manipulate relationships within data visualization software such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.
• Tableau | You will learn to make dashboards using Tableau and get exposure to creating data visualizations and the logic behind them. At work, I use Power BI and even though they aren't the same, Thinkful's Tableau instruction helped me become a better Power BI user. 
• Statistics | Thinkful gives you a helpful introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics. A very valuable skillset for data analysts. I underestimated howi mportant it is and am very glad that Thinkful's course teaches this. 
• Python | You will gain an introduction to Python that prepares you for more advanced data analytics work. From data cleaning to collection to visualization - you can now do that in python and can explore more of its applications beyond such as automation.

Course Format |

I think the curriculum is very well designed. I have found multiple times that what I learned early on prepared me for the more complex coursework. In some cases Tableau and SQL felt easy to learn  and understand after I learned Excel and I think it is by design.
The graduation plan is a very good tool to help you stay on track and know how much time you need to plan on Thinkful every day.
They also enable you to chat with an instructor so if you ever get stuck you can get help from expert instructors. I have used this more than once and it is truly a great feature.

My only suggestion for change is that most of the content is written out and requires you to read and follow along (you also have the help of GIFs showing you what to do). There are also video recaps of what you learned at the end of some checkpoints. In my opinion, I think creating more video-based content and adding it to what is already written would be an excellent addition. This is because for those of us who may be more visual learners it will help a lot and also because a lot of other learning platforms such as Udemy courses are video-based and show you what to do while explaining it.

Mentorship |
This is one of the best features of Thinkful. I had a very excellent mentor for the first couple of months and then she actually left to pursue another opportunity. Thinkful promptly got me a new mentor and I think his particular style was not helpful for me so I asked my academic success manager and she paired me with my other mentor who gave me the support and accountability I needed to finish the course successfully. Know this, Thinkful cares about student success and will work with you to achieve your goals. Having a mentor is great because they have the expertise to tell you what is ahead for you professionally as well as being a great resource to ask questions you cannot really find an answer for online. That is a huge benefit when you can talk to somebody about the non-technical things too.

Career Support |
The career modules are very helpful. I worked for a religious non-profit for my first four years after college and my BA was not a STEM degree (Arabic language). Having not interviewed for four years I almost felt like I never interviewed since college so in a weird way this felt like my first job since graduating in 2016. I was nervous about the job search especially for a technical role and was filled with doubt about doing well and even trying to explain the change between two very different industries. Thinkful's career support helps you with everything from how to find a job to building a great LinkedIn profile and resume and preparing for interviews. I actually was directed to my current job from someone in my network and Thinkful's career modules and the coursework  prepared me enough to land the job only months into the program! I know this doesn't happen for everyone but in my current situation Thinkful's coursework gave me enough experience and practice to answer specific questions in interviews and helped to make me a strong candidate. The careers team is excellent and this is one of the most valuable aspects of the program.

Cost |

The programs cost is significantly higher if you do it full-time so I chose the part-time flex course. This was affordable for me both cost and time wise. I was able to work hard for 6 months while working in order to prepare for my new career. It does cost money but I would also add that it does cost you in time. To succeed you need to be all-in and committ to studying after work or waking up before work. I struggled for a little bit in the middle of the course and fell behind but Thinkful's team helped me create a plan to get back on track. Just be ready to put in the extra time and scale back your other commitments to the essential priorities for a time. The more disciplined you are the faster the course will be.

Return on Investment |
While the program cost was about $4,000 for me with the part-time course, the return on investment was fantastic. While you could probably find enough resources to get into this field through platforms like Udemy or Coursera, Thinkful is a very strong option due to its career support and professional mentorship. You are meeting with real people every week to ask questions, learn, and be held accountable to your goals which makes this program have a higher chance of success. The whole program is oriented toward helping you land a role in data analytics so for anyone wanting to change careers this is an excellent choice to do that. When I think about my own situation, I paid $4,000 to learn the skills that helped me get a job that paid me more than 12 times that amount every year. This is a great return on investment considering I have a foundation to build on not just for a job but a career with even higher earning potential. Very much worth it!!!!

Advice for new students |

Here are a few words of advice from my experience:

1. Stick with the learning process. You will get frustrated and totally confused, by continually going back to the material and using the resources at your disposal you can learn! 
2. Work as hard as you can to get ahead of your grad plan early on. Getting momentum early will prepare you for the Capstone projects you will get to show potential employers. I found these to take much longer and you may want to put in extra time and effort on them. The more margin you have for yourself the better!
3. Don't take long breaks in the week-consistently work on the program every day. This builds good habits and helps you stay on track and not have to spend time relearning things once you forget your spot. 
4. Get involved in the Thinkful Slack community and other resources. I did not take do this enough so I would in retrospect recommend it!

I enrolled in Thinkful's 5 month Engineering Immersion Program at the beginning 2021. It was a great decision. I came in with a basic understanding of coding principals (most of this prior knowledge having been acquired from the admission prep course necessary to pass to get into the full time program) and came out with not only a deep knowledge base but also a huge scope of experience. My course provided me with about three times more information than I expected from the course and far exceeded all of my expectations. I was surprised to find that a lot of my fellow students did not make it through as the weeks progressed. This was a little daunting because I really was not sure if I would be able to make it through my self. When I finally reached the end it occurred to me how carefully Thinkful accredits their students. It is clear that they hone their certification's validity and do not graduate folks who do not meet their standards. While this is a harsh practice (seeing students fail after investing time and money really pulls at your heart strings) it ensures that the accreditation given by Thinkful is of the highest quality. This not only increases the benefit of certification it also creates a positive feed back loop where certified alumni have what it takes to further improve Thinkful's reputation. All of this is even more impressive in light of the fact that student's who are eliminated stop paying their tuition. To me this indicates that Thinkful's reputation is more important to them than their profit. 
I got so much from this course and met so many wonderful people, from peers to instructors, TAs and mentors, that the networking was nearly as valuable to me as the course content. I feel like I have the skills and confidence to seek and gain employment in this field. 
I would finally reiterate that Thinkful's course was truly impressive in scope, depth and pace. It is no cakewalk but I believe anyone prepared to do the work can make it through with a great education and confidence in their own ability.