Chegg Skills

Overall, this course was very challenging and took longer than anticipated, but ended up being worth it in the end!

** Before choosing any bootcamp course, I highly recommend reading the CIRR course outcomes report for that course!
According to the CIRR report for Thinkful's Engineering Flex program in 2019, 82.1% of students withdrew from the course, and the ones that graduated took a median of 247 days to do so. I'm not saying this to scare you away from taking the course, but I just want to warn you that it is very difficult and most people don't end up finishing it. And if you do enroll, don't beat yourself up if it takes you longer than the advertised 5-6 months to complete it.

That being said, I had a pretty positive experience overall, and ended up getting a Full Stack Software Engineering job a little over a month after graduating!

Overall Experience: 5/5
The course isn't perfect, and apparently some of the mentors are hit or miss, but I was paired with a pretty awesome mentor who made my experience much more manageable. In total it took me about 8 1/2 months to finish the course. I had a couple big personal events that happened during my course that delayed me a lot, but the Thinkful staff were very accommodating and gave me more time to finish. Another thing to note is that while I was enrolled, they added a feature to chat with an expert when you get stuck, which was (sometimes) helpful. They also created a Discord channel specifically for the Engineering Flex program, which was much more helpful in getting me unstuck. They're constantly adding features and tweaking things to help improve the student experience, which I appreciated.

Instructors: 4/5
Since this is the Flex program I didn't really have traditional instructors, so this review is for the Thinkchat "experts", my mentor, and the helpers/mentors on Slack and Discord. My mentor was great, but if you don't like your mentor you have the option to request a new one at any time which is nice. The helpers on Slack and Discord were also incredibly helpful and patient. I would see them on Discord answering people's questions all day long, so big shoutout to them! Thinkchat was very hit or miss, and in my experience was mostly a miss. Some of the "experts" I got paired with took 10 minutes to respond every time I said anything, and after an hour came to the conclusion that they didn't know how to help so they would transfer me to someone else. Very frustrating. However I know they're testing a video chat feature, and are trying to improve this.

Curriculum: 4.5/5
The curriculum was pretty thorough, and it's 100% text-based. This wasn't a huge problem for me, as I supplemented the curriculum with lots of Youtube videos, but could be an issue to some. My biggest gripe about the curriculum is that the estimated time to finish each segment was wildly inaccurate. Towards the second half of the course especially, a lot of the sections took 2-3 times longer than the time they give. This caused a lot of stress since I felt like I was always trying to keep up, and forced me to rush through some of the content. By the time I got to the capstones I had to spend a considerable amount of time going back and reteaching myself the previous content that I rushed through. Overall, they cram in a ton of content in a "5-6 month" course so like I said earlier, don't feel bad if it takes you longer than advertised.

Job Assistance: 5/5
I was paired with a really awesome professional advisor who was super supportive and gave me a ton of resources to help in my job search. She gave me great tips on how to approach the job application process, and was also constantly sharing job leads through Slack. I was also able to sign up for a free mock technical interview through Skilled which was awesome. Overall, the job hunt game is mostly about networking (I got my current job through Slack) and my advisor did a great job assisting me throughout the whole process.

The curriculum was pretty straight forward, much more so than lots of "learn-on-your-own" stuff (one of the main reasons that I chose Thinkful). The only curriculum issue is later on, when you have more complex topics (and therefore issues), the TAs can struggle to help. The instructors were pretty awesome. Some of them are less willing to deviate from their lesson plan structure to help students understand than others, but they do know their stuff. The job assistance was PHENOMENAL. They gave tips, had meetups online, and really gave their all to helping us get jobs.

It was July of 2020, two months after I had been released from my job as a result of a pandemic. I was awaiting adjudication for my unemployment benefits to be released and living, as best as I could, off of the living stipend I had stored in savings. It was about to run out and my future was unknown. 

The ad for Thinkful's Data Science Immersion course crossed my Facebook newsfeed and I was elated. I'm an expert in information technology, had been refused countless job opportunities over the course of four years, and spent the last two working as a grocery clerk. I had given up on IT, but the immersion course offered enough funds to cover my expenses during my five months of fast, hard learning and it included career services. Which is exactly what I knew I needed to get back into my industry.

I was assigned a mentor and had a couple instructors to teach, guide, and assist in my learning. The career servicing teams worked with me to build a resume and turn out a LinkedIn profile during my studies. I was encouraged and provided with meetups/events to attend and of the benefits of following up. With Thinkful, I was given the extra umph - the person to hold me accountable - to growing a network of professionals that could help me with acquiring a position. 

I learned a lot from this team and had a bit of fun doing it, too.  

This was the greatest learning experience I've ever had. I've gone to 3 universities and haven't had this type of hands on learning. The mentorship alone is worth the money. Every step of the way I felt completely supported. Our instructors were well versed and long time UX/UI designers from every top company, Amazon, Apple, etc. To have this type of skill based learning, with an organized online environment, paired with a mentor, in a fraction of the time is the future of education. You will not regret enrolling in Thinkful! It doesn't end when the course ends either. You have a TEAM of career coaches sending you jobs, reviewing your resume, LinkedIn and portfolio work. You are fully supported throughout and you can tell they are invested in your success. 

I recently graduated from Thinkful's Software Engineering Flex program and am very thankful for the experience. I was pared with amazing mentors and my Academic Support Coach and Career Coach were awesome! My favorite thing about the curriculum was building the two full-stack capstone projects. These two projects were huge learning experiences and have turned out to be great talking points during interviews. The most challenging part of the curriculum was learning by reading. There were coding examples but mainly lots of reading and I ended up supplementing with a few videos and courses that I found on my own. That said, my experience at Thinkful was very positive!

First, I wanna say I've written a review here on Course Report but it was never published. It seems fairly obvious to me that there's something fishy going on between Thinkful and Course Report.

Thinkful started out great, but once I started learning React, it was all downhill. The materials are bad - I mostly learned React and jQuery elsewhere, the support system changed and became laughably bad, and the lack of curriculum support for Windows was a real head scratcher. Once the TA system changed, it was almost impossible to get competent support. I have literally been given Wikipedia links as answers to my questions. They modified the curriculum while I was a student and certain lessons had incorrect links to the materials - for example, they'd have a link to a code snippet that they expected you to work on and follow along with, except the link was to already completed code.

They also gave me false information about my enrollment end date. I was told more than once that my end date was Feb 28th, but on Feb 11th, I was informed that my actual end date was Feb 12th. I had to scramble to finish the program on time.

Every other student I've talked to has had a bad experience. I firmly believe Thinkful is associated with certain review sites like this one and is able to dictate which reviews are published, hence the high scores on these sites while most students I interact with have had a negative experience.

Thinkful doesn't care about students, it's all about money. I'd recommend a different bootcamp. The only saving grace for me was my mentor.

Please Note: Because the course content and structure changed and updated after I started the cohort, my giving specific examples of material would be outdated... so here's a brief, overall "grains-of-salt" on my experience.

My experience with the Engineering Immersion cohort was unique from most. I entered into the program with "little-to-no actual experience" in programming, aside from watching a few freely available video tutorials. I also started the program at the beginning of the pandemic in the US, and had to delay my entry into the Engineering Immersion program to the next following cohort due to family/health issues.
 
And THEN my wife gave birth to our first child 3-months into the Engineering Immersion cohort...
SO I was dealing with A LOT on my plate...
and yet, I STILL managed to graduate from the cohort on my scheduled graduation date!

Not gonna lie to ya'll, not gonna sugar-coat this... it was STRESSFUL, it was very difficult at times (most times actually)…. BUT obviously I was able to do it, AND SO CAN YOU.

You gotta' put in the hours (long hours in my case, anywhere from 10 - 14 hours a day, 6-days a week studying/practicing while on top of my new daddy-duties).

The instructors were knowledgeable of their material, the TA's were helpful, and my mentor(s) were "let's be real about what to expect in the workforce" with me. I feel that they all greatly helped me push myself to get to this point now where I am not as intimidated by lines of code, and just beginning this new phase of my life and career.

So be prepared to work hard to get the most out of it, and hold yourself accountable and responsible for your own work, as well as YOUR OWN SUCCESS! 

I came into the program without much technical or professional experience. While I found the material easy to understand and was able to speed through a lot of it, I felt lost when I got to my capstones. This was because curriculum gives only a broad overview for some topics and you don't get to see any examples of real world projects. That being said, I think the most valuable part of this program is the people. If you make good use of mentor sessions/Q&A sessions, that can fill some of the gaps in the curriculum. And, feedback from presentation and mock interview evaluators was helpful for understanding practical things like job searching and expectations once you’re actually working. Many of these evaluators do want to see students succeed and are happy to help you out where they can. Overall, I would say you should be prepared to spend time doing your own research, especially if you want a strong portfolio, and be proactive about learning more to get the most out of the program.