BrainStation

Guys, I am the kind of guys who reads and writes a lot of reviews because I think they are the key to continuous improvement.

Wyncode is one of the best experiences I have ever had in my life, I think mostly because of the human quality of the team. You are dedicated to us the students and we can see that everyday. 

The program is accurate and complete. I've worked in IT for the past ten years and I can tell that you guys are putting us in the right path in this competitive field.

The school is modern and it welcomes you to learn and do your thing!

Andy is one of the best teachers I've ever had as well. He is a natural for teaching and coding. 

Would do it again in a heartbeat!

 

I was looking for a change in my life and an improvement in my work quality of life. I was recommended to go to Wyncode by a former graduate and I have been best friends with software developers, I took the chance and came to Wyncode...I do not regret it for 1 second! I learned so much in 10 weeks, Andy is an amazing teacher, the support system at Wyncode is amazing from teacher assistants to the job support and everyone that helps build your personal soft skills. I will warn anyone that tries to make the change and take the Wyncode leap... you need to give it 110% of your attention and focus, you will get what you put in. I came to Wyncode with about 3 months of prior self-learning with code, mostly Javascript and some other front end languages, that head start helped a ton, try not to come in completely unprepared. There is a lot of good support for new students and they will guide you but you need to put as much extra effort on your end as you can! I would spend 10-12 hrs a day at school and would spend my weekend either at school or at home coding or researching what we were learning at the time. It can all payout at the end if you really give your all, it's only for 10 weeks, time will fly by! I cannot recommend Wyncode enough, if you are on the fence, let this review be a push in the right direction!

I just finished the User Experience Design course at Brainstation. I decided to pursue this course beause after 5 years of working in the digital marketing sector, I was ready to learn new skills that could lead to new career opportunities. I had heard good things from friends and colleagues who had studied at Brainstation- so I decided to take the plunge!

I signed up to take the course online part-time, so I could study outside of my full-time job. The course was short but intense, and I learned a lot. From designing a sites information architecture, to wireframing, prototyping and user testing- I now feel ready to explore the job market with the skills I learned in this course.

This might have been one of the more intense learning environments I have encountered. Having said that, I appreciate how immersive and all-encompassing the curriculum was. There may have been a bit too much content in a small period of time. But it gave me a chance to see how the wide industry looks, works and how it will affect my life. Now I am utilizing the tools given to create an insightful plan of attack.
The course allowed me to showcase my strengths and make a realistic plan for where I aim to guide my career. The faculty and course instructors, as well, were very sensitive to where I had difficulty and supported me throughout the program in order to finish successfully.

BrainStation was one of the best experiences of my life. It introduced me to the tech industry in such a fantastic way. I hit the ground running and have been set on an incredibly positive trajectory of which I never before thought possible.

A bit of background on me: I took the full time User Experience Design Course at BrainStation Vancouver back in June 2018. Leading up to the course I was working as a photographer, lost at where my career was heading and flirting with the idea of moving into the tech industry. I wanted to stay creative so UX seemed a logical option and the appeal of launching a new career from a fast paced bootcamp was huge. Too good to be true surely? For traditional teaching methods, sure. For the educational wizards at BrainStation, no they’ve got it nailed. The moment I first walked into BrainStation I knew it was the place for me - I attended their intro to UX workshop which helped me understand what UX was and if it would be something of interest to me. I also experiencing a Demo Day to see how previous students managed (highly recommend!) and seeing what is possible in 10 weeks was astounding. The professional nature of the students, educators and environment helped me confirm my decision that BrainStation was the one.

So I started the course. I had no prior design experience and we didn’t ease into things, diving into the deep end on the first week with a design sprint. Incredibly challenging, incredibly rewarding the growth and progress I saw in a week 1 was noticeable. This continued week on week, with the syllabus combining learning new material in lectures and applying it immediately in design challenges and week long projects. Oh and we were introduced to the mother of all projects - Capstone. Capstone would be the pinnacle of all we learnt during the course, allowing us to show future employers what we’re capable of. During the 10 weeks I felt myself moving from sketching anxiety to being confident in calling myself a designer. The course content has clearly been iterated upon multiple times to give students the perfect platform for a successful career in UX, whether it’s hard or soft skills for post bootcamp life and this really shows. In summary the full time UX programme at BrainStation has prepared me incredibly well for real life UX work. I feel like I even have more current UX knowledge than some of my now colleagues that have been in the industry for years. 

The people of BrainStation are the main reason for making the whole experience so memorable. They exude positivity and do everything in their power to get you on the best track possible. I was fortunate enough to have Brad and Uzi as my educators and they really are perfect examples of an educator, tech or otherwise. Their enthusiasm is infectious and they were so knowledgeable and supportive during the entire experience. The post course support is also great and the team is always there to help with any queries in the period after - shout out to Teddy for that one! 

So where am I now? Since finishing the course I moved back to the UK and I set about building my portfolio and getting my first UX role. 2 months after the course finished I landed my first role in a tech startup and I now have 6 months of experience. A rapid transformation especially compared to traditional education methods. A role won’t fall into your lap though - listen hard and do everything you can during the course and after to make yourself employable as possible. It’s not an easy role to break into with a lot of juniors out there looking for first jobs so do everything to make yourself stand out.

I haven’t gone into specifics too much in this review, so please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions regarding anything BrainStation or UX and I’d be more than happy to help.

Pro tip: don’t overthink Demo Day. Just go out there, do your thing and have fun!

After graduating with a degree in Kinesiology in 2017, I decided to make a career change working for a Vancouver tech startup in Customer Service. Making the transition from Personal Trainer into the tech industry was hard, and I found myself longing for ways to upgrade my skills so that I could feel like an asset to the company I was working for. I started looking into bootcamps as time was of the essence to me. I wanted to get involved in a more meaninful career fast and equip myself with a set of skills, that I could be confident to put to use.

After sifting through some of the bootcamp options in Vancouver, I decided that Brainstation was the school for me. The campus had an inviting feel and seeing students both hard at work and having fun exemplified to me that this was a place I could establish a valuable new skillset along with a new network of friends and co-workers. Upon graduating Brainstation after my 12 weeks, I have to say that it exceeded my expectations in all of these realms.

The instructors have seemingly unlimited patients and an incredible empathy that allows you to push yourself through this tough 12 weeks. I found the collaborative, hands-on teaching approach of day-to-day class allowed me to learn in 12 weeks what would have taken me six months to a year. 

Activities included: Multiple labs per day, codealongs with instructors and fellow classmates, a group hackathon, in-class exercises, and a weekly assignment.

Following my 12 weeks at Brainstation, I got a job working as a Customer Success Coach at Unbounce two weeks after finishing the course. While the job I got was not directly in Software Development, it has helped me join a great company with a clear path towards achieving that goal. While I will say the 12 weeks at Brainstation will be very tough, it will also be the most rewarding weeks of your life. 

Positives: 

• Payment plans for tuition
• An open campus that encourages going out and meeting your classmates as well as other full-time course          participants
• Career support during and after the program
• Discounts on meetups and workshops
• Tech tours that allow you to talk to industry professionals about what it's like to be a developer
• Access to the course material after the program for 6 months

  Negatives:   -Pricey, but as I mentioned above, Brainstation offers many flexible routes you can take to pay tuition off at your own pace     Remember, if a Personal Trainer can come into this Full-time Web Development program and come out on the other side with a fulfilling career in the Vancouver tech scene... then so can you!

I made a career switch from Commercial Real Estate Research to UX Design and I am so incredibly glad I chose BrainStation to guide me along the way.

Don't get me wrong, the program is INTENSE. 480 hours of class time over 12 weeks plus 20-40 hours/week outside of school requires focus, determination and self discipline. However, our educators and TAs make every effort to provide the support you need and ensure you're grasping each concept.

The curriculum structure is outstanding. A typical day in the UX program consists of morning lectures and afternoon labs. This ensures quick application of the knowledge you've learned just a few hours before, increasing your confidence in the content. With strong time management skills and the pride to be able to ask questions when you don't understand, you can be wildly successful in the program.

The most successful graduates continue learning post-program. BrainStation has newly implemented post-program content that provides graduates with content for 4-5 months after they walk out of the classroom. The Career Services Team is always available to assist in your career transformation and their guidance doesn't end when you graduate.

I highly recommend this program and field for anyone interested in design, solving complex programs and collaborating with a team to achieve incredible results.

Be prepared to be constantly working, learning and growing over those 12 weeks and beyond.

I knew for a while having been exposed to the tech industry that I wanted to be a web developer. Amongst all the boot camps in Vancouver, BrainStation stood out to me the most, because of how engaging, collaborative, and supportive the learning environment seemed. I can confidently say that all my positive assumptions were true. The instructors and program coordinators went above and beyond to ensure that this seemingly daunting experience as we transitioned into new careers went smoothly. 

The instructors really take the time to explain complex concepts in simple and easy-to-understand ways. They were always available for help and were extremely supportive and reassuring throughout the whole journey. The content taught at Brainstation was very applicable to job demands in the industry. Although we raced through the content quickly, weekly assignments and in-class exercises ensured that we were constantly practiced new topics. In-class codealongs -- in my opinion -- helped me really understand more complex topics.

Pros: 

- Payment plans for tuition

- A campus that offers lots of space to work, study and engage with other students. Very accessible via transit (and right above a coffee shop!)

- Career support after the program, 

- Discounts on job fairs and meetups

- Tech tours, and the change to talk to industry professionals about what it's like to be a developer

- Access to the course material after the program

Cons:

-None!

I can confidently say I'm so happy to be a BrainStation alumni. I really did enjoy the program, and all which I'd been able to gain over the past 12 weeks of learning. Can't wait to apply these skills in the future! 

It was less than three months from my immigration to Canada when I chose Brainstation to study in. I did a research about bootcamps in Vancouver and asked some people who were in Vancouver IT industry to help me to find the right place and Brainstation was their number one pick. Moreover I found their curriculum the best one amongst others and also the camp atmosphere was amazing!

The content they provided for the Web Development program was truly a complete full-stack which gave me a big picture of the whole cycle of web development. Though the main program focus was on React and front-end development I learnt a lot about databases, middleware, REST and etc.

We would start the day with a lecture from our knowledgable teacher Jonathan Bluks and then would get our hands dirty by coding and practicing those concepts in real challenges. Beside 10 project assignments and one final project! we also had a hackathon experience which was one of my best coding experiences ever.

I would recommend this course to anyone who is serious about learning web development.

It’s been 8 months since I graduated from BrainStation full-time UX design bootcamp. It was an amazing experience which turned me to a designer as I wished. I’m now a UI/UX designer in a development agency and having fun. I got the job offer in week 9 - big shoutout to my instructor Brad who helped me with the performance check during the interview process as well as my TA Uzair who helped refurbish my resume and cover letter completely.

A bit of my background: Before joining the program, I was working as a 3D artist in a VR studio, then quit coz it’s crap. Then I was home tutoring high-school kids for half a year, then stopped coz it’s frustrating (I was making good money out of it but not my thing). I wanted to be a designer doing some cool shit, but never had a job opportunity to get started. I sent my resume and portfolio to a bunch of companies in Vancouver, got responses, got tests, got interviews, but never got the position. I realized leaving the industry for a couple of months (when I was tutoring) made my sense dull and skills rusty - I need a place where I could sharpen everything again and get my thunder back.

I’m gonna share some reasons I joined BrainStation and how the results ended up. If you have a similar situation and consider whether to join the program or not, my story may help you.

I’m a layman. I need a place to teach me both practices and theories. I tried counting on myself to learn the skillset and toolkit of UX design, but it was frustrating coz I literally didn’t know where to start! To learn software first? Or read books? Or do a small project? UX is such a giant shit blackhole and could almost suck everything in: business analysis, research, information architecture, UI design, interaction design, visual design, content writing, or even front-end if you wanna be entitled as ‘full-stack designer’ (fascinating) - whatever you can possibly associate with product development. Yeah UX design is such a sugarcoated beast, sounds high-end, easy-going, user-friendly, but in reality quite intimidating and could bite your head off - if you dive in blindly without fair guidance. As a 3D modeler before, I did know Adobe Suite, but in terms of the current tools of UI/UX design such as Sketch, InVision, Principle, etc., I’m a total outsider. Fortunately, during the pre-course, I learned the essentials of Sketch and InVision from the step-by-step tutorials; then throughout the next 10 weeks, I was improving my hard skills considerably by working on the weekly homework and capstone project. The instructor and TA would teach us tips every now and then to quicken our speed of work. As for theories, I did know user-centered design and some relevant approaches such as user stories, usability testing, but they were too scattered in my mind and never systematically came into shape as a ‘UX tree’ or ‘UX umbrella’. What BrainStation does is breaking down the whole UX topic to 10 smaller ones - each topic per week. Each week we focused on one topic and did homework around it to deepen our understanding. Meanwhile, we could update our capstone project by adopting the new stuff learned this week. The weekly basis is fast indeed, even crazy (using one week to investigate UI design, are you kidding, that’s even a job title!), but come on, this is a bootcamp and we only have 10 weeks. This curriculum is brilliant in my opinion (and PPT is well-done): it takes care of all epics of UX design such as research, IA, UI design, etc. - which should be mastered more or less as a UX-er; but in reality, we could (and should) leverage our advantages and choose to specialize in one or a few directions. Taking myself as an example, I’m more interested and better at visual stuff than research, IA or business whatever, so I actually put more weight on the chapters of UI and visual design but honestly much less on certain sections (I got 55/100 once in one of my assignments, shame… ).

I’m lazy. Yes if nobody pulls me up, I could stay in bed for whole day. I tried saving money and studied on my own - and wonderfully, I slept in till 11 am, opened my laptop reluctantly, and lost morale in one hour. You know what’s so good after I joined the program? I COULDN’T SLACK OFF! Yeah I was busy like shit: class from 9 to 5, homework stacking up, capstone project crying for feed, workshops awaiting, portfolio pending - gosh, don’t ever underestimate ‘FULL-TIME’ training (this is not a joke). Frankly, the workload is immense - I was working in the evening, during the weekend, sometimes burning night oil. It’s not only because I myself wanted to work harder, but once I saw my classmates working their asses off, how could I sit still and enjoy the couch potato time? Most importantly, we paid to learn, so the only way not wasting the money is - work hard!! It’s painstaking, but it will pay off. Everyone in my cohort was progressing so much - I’ve seen people who made stunning interfaces in the end even having zero design background at the very beginning.  

I’m an introvert. I bet you all know socializing is as important as swimming when you’re in the job-hunting vortex. Sadly, I’m afraid of socializing and terrible at selling stuff. ESL is a reason but it’s more about my personality. I desperately needed a community at that moment where I could find a comfort zone with like-minded people. And yes BrainStation is like that for me. Amazingly, our cohort had 12 folks, and we teamed up differently for multiple projects, so everyone had a chance to work with each other. Every Friday, we went to a bar to grab beers after class. At the night of graduation, we barbecued and sang karaoke like a bunch of weirdos! People are professional at school but could be so wild afterward! The instructors are also super approaching (yeah they joined our beer too) and other staff are quite helpful (just ask them if you need a favor.) Besides, we have tech-talks, workshops, and presentations every week, so don’t worry, you’ll be pushed under the spotlight and try your best to entertain the audience! In summary, if you’re like me, not good at networking, then at least you will have your cohort and the staff, which will become your own community and, it’s still growing.

Last but not least, I bet the tuition is a big concern to most of us and I admit it’s not a small amount indeed. I was jobless and broke from the moment I gave up on tutoring, so yeah I thought about this a lot. So I tried two options to make it less unaffordable: firstly, applying for the scholarship. Do ask the staff what kind of scholarship you are eligible for; secondly, there’s an installment option to pay off the debt in 12 months (and I chose this). Good news is you can use the tuition for tax return, yeah! And once you land on a new job after graduation, I suppose you won’t mind this educational investment. (The common salary of junior UI/UX designer in BC is 40k-50k)

In conclusion, this was my happiest training experience, maybe because I finally found what I like to do. I hope my story could help you in any way. Good luck and keep it up!

I switched from Architecture to UX Design only knowing the basics about the field. Like many others, I had my skepticism about being able to learn about everything in UX Design within 12 weeks time. After completing the program, I can say that BrainStation genuinely cares about teaching you relative and applicable skills to do a full career change. It is dense, fast-paced and full of excitement every day.

Pros:
- Our instructors, Alex and Ann-Marie, always provide a full understanding on why we are learning the material. They also answer any questions we throw at them without hesitation.
- The BrainStation team is very approachable and are constantly seeking for feedback to make your experience better
- The guest lecturers that visited and the tech tours gave us industry insight on the current practice and allowed us to compare and validate the importance of the course content
- Demo Day helped me successfully engage in deep conversations with industry partners and reaffirmed my understanding of the design process
- Career support post graduation
- The one day Hackathon that allowed us to work alongside Web Dev and Data Science students

Improvement Opportunities:
- We had a good amount of open studio for our capstone project in the last few weeks, but it felt like there can be more structure to guide the students on their projects during those times.

Overall, I feel very confident committing to the career change with what I learned. You will still have to keep learning about certain concepts (and they stress that learning doesn’t end after 12 weeks) as you can definitely start to deep dive into UX concepts. I find that those who succeeded from the program are the ones who: fully prioritized school, empathized, asked many questions, and is always learning outside of class. Be prepared.