Chegg Skills

A summing up of my experience with the Front-End Developer track:

• Wonderful curriculum rich with information that is otherwise hard to find
• Curriculum is meaningful, fun, and fast-paced. No fluff or information you could quickly google.
• Very practical information that I could use
• Lessons flowed logically and reviewed previous content
• Tons of outside resources and references to modern tooling
• Mentorship was the best part. I got a mentor that fit my needs very well. Got decent feedback and answers to questions.
• Mentorship sessions were very much led by me and how much coding I got done that week. If I did have a lot of questions prepared the lesson wouldn't be as rewarding. 
• Curriculum was project-based. No useless certifications. Only real results I could show an employer and that would prepare me for real-world projects. Final project was a portolfio website that showcases all of my projects. 
• Workshops were frequent and were mostly great. Some workshops didn't reallty touch on a lot of content. Others had my notebook filled with great tips.

This experience really jump-started my web development career and I got a job within 3 months of graduating. Strongly recommended!

Note: Edited to add background and note at end

I graduated from the Full-Time Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp in the beginning of April. I'm now 2 weeks into the job search. 

Background:

I joined Thinkful after an 18 month stint in the banking industry in NYC. That was my first job after graduating college. Prior to taking the course, I took a 4 week bootcamp prep course offered by another bootcamp institution.  In addition, I completed the Javascript track on Codecademy. Other than that, I had never been exposed to programming in any meaningful way.

Overall Experience:

I could not be more happy with my experience at Thinkful. Thinkful provides a comprehensive suite of services to their students from day 1 to the day you land your first job (and beyond). The instructors, the TAs, the mentors, the program director and the career services advisers share one common trait: they care deeply about your success. This is what drives the entire process at Thinkful and it's what makes their program stand out from the rest.

Instructors:

The instructors at Thinkful are top notch. They are tremendously knowledgeable and passionate about what they do. Joe and Ben were extremely responsive to our questions and they were always willing to clarify and expand on topics when necessary. The TA's (who join the class for several hours every day) were excellent at explaining difficult topics, guiding students through bugs, and suggesting improvements to code. Every weeknight, students meet 1 on 1 with Mentors who are there to answer questions related to coding, technology, languages, frameworks, jobs etc. I looked forward to my meetings with my Mentor every single day. Finally, Thinkful offers several live Q&A sessions every evening where subject matter experts are on hand to answer questions related to all things programming. 

Curriculum:

The skills taught at Thinkful are highly relevant in the job market today. The primary stack is MongoDB, Express, React and Node.js. This seems to be the most commonly desired stack among employers in early 2017. I feel like I'm well-prepared to contribute to a development team. With that said, the curriculum at Thinkful is very flexible. When technologies change, Thinkful adjusts quickly. Furthermore, Thinkful also reserves the right to make adjustments to the curriculum on a daily basis in order to address difficulties that the class might be having as a whole.

Job Assistance:

I am still early in the job search process, but Thinkful has been very helpful so far. They take it upon themselves to connect you with employers. Not only that, but they provide you with resources such as career coaching, interview prep, portfolio review, resume editing and more. Even though I "graduated" a few weeks ago, I feel like Thinkful is as involved as ever. 

I recently finished the full-time web dev bootcamp. Highlights: strong course material, helpful online community, and lots of in-depth, student-driven projects that I had a lot of fun with — and they look great in a portfolio. Lows: Mentors are hit or miss, and the daily in-person lectures are often just repetition of the course material and also are limited by the online format, so they're not super engaging or interactive. The lectures in particular are a casualty of the online format, but overall, if you're looking specifically for a remote bootcamp, I'd recommend Thinkful.

I have switched 3 mentors, and it's a common situation. If you could be assigned  a mentor who is responsible, willing to help you, lead you, I'd say you are super lucky.

My second mentor spent 2 whole sessions to debug a typo, refused to take a look at my code, and told me that was not his responsibility to take a look at students' code :) Funny

My third mentor was much smarter than the last one, however he ignored my messages for most of the time, when you get stuck and nobody could help you out, the feeling is fantastic:) 

Then I started my career service. They have this strict rule says if students don't show up in the session for twice, they will lose the 6- month job guarantee. So be careful and read the email once the career service send to you , don't act like me chose to take it as an automatically assigning email and ignore it, because nobody will tell you that unless you break the rules. 

The funniest thing was, my career coach forgot to send me invitations which include session link and time each week( they have the rule that mentors and coaches have to send out invitations each week to remind students). And I totally forgot about our meetings because I have a very small brain :). Although I was sitting in the front of computer thinking about my life, and one single slack message could remind me of this meeting, however my career coach chose not to, instead sending me very caring and considering  emails 3 hrs later after the sessions were over, told me I lost my job guarantee. Here is the funniest part, I explained to career service manager and my program manager that my coach never sent me the invitations, and she suddenly realized she made this mistake and changed the date information of my first agreed invitation, screenshot to the managers. So now I'm not only a irresponsible person but also a lair :). I cried for whole day, and explained everything to my program manager, I asked the receipt emails of agreed invitations to prove myself, he ignored me, and after I was reassigned a new career coach, the last one started sending out the invitations LOL. Such a unforgettable experience.                                                                            

Overall, you are on your own for 90% of time and efforts, so work extremely hard.

I'll start by saying this, I never thought in three months I will be able to build a static web application using multiple API's (Google Places/Yahoo Weather..). This course is really suited my style of learning. I first wanted to learn the Front end portion (HTML/CSS/JS..APIs) and see how I perform before taking a bigger leap forward and get the Backend dev knowledge. Thinkful program really helped me to make that choice and i am definetely going to move forward and learn the backend portion of it too. My mentor Sara, was really great..we had a really friendly relation and she was always there whenever I had any concerns. Generally, I use to write down my concerns and send it to her prior to our weekly sessions so that she can review them.

Overall, this course was great and if you are looking to learn some good stuff! GO AHEAD! 

I recently went throughthe Python Programming course. Although my experience prior was in databases (Microsoft and Oracle), I had never ventured into programming in Python. Right from the start I really enjoyed the content that Thinkful provides. I am a serial Udemy user and have taken a ton of courses in C#, however Thinkful condenses information very well. My mentor was very helpful and attentive even for the smallest of questions. I found the mentorship to be the best part of the experience because they provide a ton of information beyond the course content itself. I would definitely recommend Thinkful to any beginner or intermediate tech professional. 

Coming from a computer science degree, we did not get a lot of coding in. So I thought it would be beneficial to me in my field. I chose the Web Development online course. The chat board is always busy full of helpful people and often mentors too. Since I chose the frontend web developement course I had a mentor once a week. This part was a little shaky for me but Thinkful made it all better. I had one mentor for a while I really liked but had to leave one personal reasons and  then one I was not working well with. So I emailed my thoughts and what I was looking in a mentor to thinkful and they set me up with a wonderful, mentor exactly who I was looking for to excel in the course and in my field. Like all the bootcamp style courses, you truly get what you put in. but this one was there for all the hard times. And when you finish you get to stay in the slack channel, and be able to review the course work, which you can modify or leaveas is for your protfolio.

It was a was a good experience and one I am glad I took.

As I wanted to switch my career from Marketing to UX design, I decided to take on the UX design course at Thinkful. It was a great experience, with a great curriculum.The weekly 1 to 1's with your personal mentor are really helpful, as you discuss your coursework and you get an industry professionals feedback and insights about your work. The online course itself is also good, exercises are fun and insightful. Thinkful's UX design course is great because you also work on a couple of projects which you can actually use for your portfolio, which is one of the main reasons why I decided to go with Thinkful. Additionally, I thought the 'student service' was great: If you have any questions about payment, curriculum or anything else, they are quick to reply and help you the best they can. All in all a great learning experience!

I took Thinkful and was very excited to start. My first mentor call was challenging, at first she asked me questions to get to know me better and once I told her where I was from. She then took up the majority of the call telling me about how she lived in the same state and all the places she visited and aswesome things she did. At first it was nice but then she never moved on. I'm a school teacher and learn quickly but the course material was not user friendly. I noted to my mentor on my second call how words were mispelled on the weekly lessons and all they provided was steps and did not explain the purpose on why the material was provided. It was like insert code here, insert code in this other area but you never knew the reasoning behind it. My mentor again dominated the call with her weekend and didn't seem to want to discuss my coding fears. She advised that she was teaching a course at a college and was only the night before trying to get a lesson together. I was like huh?!? After the third call and her dominating the conversation with trivial facts, it was like we spent the entire call talking about her and she had the worse internet signal. In the end, I was paying for the course and she wasn't helpful at all so I requested another mentor. The second mentor was awesome and explained the lessons way better but still the course material that we worked on weekly did not provide any helpful instructions. I shouldn't have to wait until my phone call to get clarification. My mentor was great but I ended up leaving the program. I felt it was more of a code cash meal. I work in education and know when something has been poorly created and executed. I have a MS in Instructional Design and technology and create core content. They really need to retool the outdated resources on their website and at least provide instruction. Telling someone to go find the answer on the internet without even providing an explanation makes no sense. How about you give me a plausible solution and tell me to check the internet if I need further clarification. If you need a program that's gonna start ground up and build, this is not the program but if you have a basic coding background, this may work for you. I did not get to the job assistance art