Chegg Skills

Overall, I can genuinely say that I had a great time while enrolled at Thinkful (Bloc was acquired). I used to be in Customer Success/Experience with early-stage startups and although I've been exposed to working in tech, there was still so much to learn about UX/UI Design. 

Curriculum: Bloc/Thinkful had won me over with its reasonable price and robust curriculum. A lot of other bootcamps during the time that I was researching didn't offer to teach frontend fundamentals and Thinkful did. In addition to this, I liked the idea of it being self-paced which meant that I could finish earlier than the ideal time frame (they gave me a 12-month timeframe but I completed the program in 6 months). 

The reading materials are easy to understand and follow. They also provide video for some of the modules which was perfect for me since I learned by following. Links to external resources have also been great to have (and I still find myself referring back to some of them) and are plenty. 

You'll also receive guidance throughout the program in the form of a mentor. I think that this was incredibly important toward my growth as a designer. Luckily, I had 1 mentor, Mike Dekker, from start to finish (I've heard horror stories from others that they've had to switch or weren't happy with the ones they've been assigned with). Mike's someone who I thought was so inspiring and incredibly helpful - I mean, the guy's got around 14-16 years of UX/UI and illustration experience so it was great to have him teach me neat tricks and learn about the "real world" through his stories. 

That being said, the program is not a walk in the park and you really have to put in the work. If you're the type of person who relies heavily on collaboration and hand holding, this program may not be for you. Although I did have a wonderful mentor, our meetings were limited to 30 minutes per week. Though Thinkful offers design critique sessions, workshops and technical coaches, I know for a fact that I still had to do a lot of self-study and research. Again, there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn from a teacher you see regularly and having content/instructions handed to you but it's crucial to know what you're getting into at Thinkful and if it fits your learning style. 

Career Support: Just like the curriculum, I hit the jackpot again when I got Elyse Yarnell as a career coach. She taught me additional things that the job hunt portion of the curriculum didn't tackle and was really supportive through the entire job hunt process. I feel that Los Angeles is a tougher environment for junior designers so it meant a lot to me to feel like I had someone cheering me on and giving me advice. 

Areas of Opportunity: I think that the experience would've been even better if Thinkful can find away for future graduates to be a part of some sort of remote internship since I feel that this would increase the student's chance of gaining employment faster after graduating. Tech coaches and graders could definitely improve by maintaining consistency in the way they grade projects/assignments and answer students through the Slack channel (I've found that some are on it and points me the right direction and others just question me and go around in circles). Last but not the least, I think that they should set expectations for students. I've found that a lot of students drop out because they aren't aware that the program mimics what is out there in the real world (no one really holds your hand and you have to seek answers for yourself). If this expectation is set clearly, it'll help filter students who are willing to put in the work and self-study and drive students who aren't willing to do so to another bootcamp that offers in-person teaching and immediate assistance.

Wrap-up: It took a while for me to get a job since I had several hiccups (personal reasons + the pandemic) but I recently accepted a position as a UX/UI Designer. We're going through such strange times that it feels odd to feel ecstatic but I don't feel guilty for saying this - I'm so happy to have gone through this experience with Thinkful and owe so much to my mentor, graders and coach for getting me to where I am today. 

I just finished the Data Science Flex course and recommend it for any motivated person who wants to update their analytics skill set in a remote learning environment. The operative term is MOTIVATED. You have to self-discipline and motivation to get through the program because you are not learning in a class where you can ask instructors questions in real time and it’s much easier to fall of the face of the Earth in an online format. If you aren’t a self-starter and have the will power to keep yourself on task, you won’t make it through.
As a former college professor who has taught both in person and online, I have been on the both sides of the learning experience and prefer in person courses because they are more conducive to higher quality learning. But, I was not in a position to enroll in a bootcamp in person nor was I in a position to take a full time course for 12 weeks. Thinkful was appealing for three reasons: it provided you with a mentor who was a senior data scientist and you would meet twice a week during the course, it provided a lot of other online support like virtual office hours with other senior data scientists and Slack channels with technical coaching support, and it was part-time with a flexible schedule. 
On balance, I had a great experience and learned a ton. The mentor program is its strongest feature because with a good mentor you have someone whom you can regularly ask questions about anything related to what you are doing in the course (including career advice). Your mentor also keep you on schedule for two reasons: 1) you don’t want to waste their time, and 2) they can help get out of ruts when you are struggling with projects. My mentor was outstanding and helped me a lot. My biggest problem was often with syntax and python basics that I would forget and they always provided helpful code. 
The material is text-based with examples and walkthroughs. They don’t provide lectures or seminars. You must be someone who learns by reading and doing to master the material. I am one of those people, but you may not be. If you prefer video instruction, you may not get as much out of the program. I, along with other students I was in touch with throughout the course went to YouTube for extra guidance or alternative explanations to help clarify some things. Be prepared, however, to do extra reading on your own on a regular basis. I think that you’ll probably do that in any bootcamp course you take. 
You pay around $8,000 for six months in the program with 42 days of pause time. Once you sign up, you get a customized schedule with deadlines to help keep you on pace. Pause time allows you to temporarily stop the schedule for a period of time and push your deadlines back in case you are behind, work gets crazy, or you need to break to clear your head. 
 Other strengths:

• Most of the material (80-85%) was accessible and focused on showing you how to apply what you’re learning. They provided enough theoretical and conceptual material so you got the big idea, but the highest quality materials made code accessible to newbies.
• Technical coaching support was always great. Coaches are patient and stick with you until the problem is solved, regardless of how long it takes to figure things out.
• Online office hours and other support: Mentors holding office hours were always outstanding and very helpful. 
• “Pause time”: they give you 42 days of “pause time,” where you can pause your timeline and get deadlines pushed back. You might get behind at some point and this is your option to 
• Administration: you get an Academic Success Manager who acts like a counselor throughout the course and is there for help related to anything but data-science specific issues. ASMs were always pretty good about supporting you through tough times that were outside of your control. For example, people got extra pause time during the pandemic. 
• You choose a specialty at the end where you dig a little deeper on a topic of your interest and that serves as the basis for your final capstone project. This is something for you and your mentor to figure out together. 
• Career Support: You get six months with a career coach to help you find a job, but they require a lot of work. I can’t say more since I am just entering that phase. 

Weaknesses

• Some of the material was not so clear. You would occasionally come across a subsection where the concept was not broken down very well or the code explanation was glib and you needed to do a lot of outside reading to figure things out. Or, the explanations about the concept and code were both pretty shallow yet there was a big leap between that and what you were required to do for the accompanying assignment. That didn’t happen often, but did so occasionally. Unfortunately for me, I specialized in NLP and the material was incomplete, requiring me to do read a lot of extra material to bring me up to speed. This caused me to take longer than I wanted to for the final project. It worked out OK in the end, but this was pretty frustrating. From my own discussions with other students, this does was not the case with other specialization modules, thankfully.

I was hesitant to start a bootcamp when there were many indications that the field was saturated with bootcamp grads, yet I went through with it and can say that it was well worth it. The Thinkful bootcamp was great and informative and I learned a lot. There were times when it got rough and I lost focus but my mentor and my academic success manager helped me through it and I got to where I am today with their help. The community is great as a whole and I've made a few peer connections that I hope will help as I go about my coding journey. They have so many great resources and people there to help you out that I didn't for once think about withdrawing. I'm starting the next phase, the job search, and they have even more resources available to help me with that. If you are looking at bootcamps, I would highly recommend giving Thinkful a shot.

I researched which boot camp to choose for months, overall I chose Thinkful primarily for two reasons:
1) If you complete the within 7 months (6 is the standard) and you do not get a job 6 months after that, your tuition will be reimbursed.
2) The mentorship.

After beginning Thinkful, getting ahead in the course, then falling way, way, way behind in the course, to finally finishing it by the grace of God. I will say that there are many more pros than I originally expected.

Pros:

1) The curriculum is amazing! I wish my textbooks in school were written with the simple, easy to understand, and straight forward style of Thinkful's curriculum. Some assignments are graded, which is awesome because it's helpful to get feedback on what you're doing wrong and when you're doing something right.

2) The mentor sessions were really helpful, being obligated to meet with a mentor twice a week holds you accountable and having an experienced developer who can answer your questions is also helpful and a great source of support. Also, if you don't like your mentor you can switch mentors, and they are very flexible with their schedules, I work an 11 am - 8 pm shift and surprisingly they were able to accommodate that with two separate mentors.

3) The structure of the course, this ties in with point number 1, but I have to stress this. I attended a university and was majoring in computer science, I know many types of developers and had been programming for years (Python, Java, C++, aka nothing related to web dev) before entering this course. One of the main reasons why I decided to go the route of "boot camp" instead of "self-taught" is because I had no clue about what stack I should learn, what exactly about these frameworks do I need to focus on, how to use git and just other simple facets of developing that they don't teach you in school and really isn't too important when you're doing things on your own. However, now looking back, Thinkful taught me all the tech and concepts that I needed. They set me on the right path and gave me strong foundations. No boot camp will take you from zero to Junior level, but Thinkful really put me in a spot to succeed! From the ordering of the curriculum that they teach you to the capstones (projects) that they have you complete and add to your portfolio. Everything that Thinkful has you do in the course to build your resume or your skills/understanding. There is no pointless/wasted time. 

4) Program managers, along with mentors, program managers really help shed light on your progress in the course and will level with you on what you need to do to be successful in it. This was especially crucial for me since I fell far behind in the course (not because the content was difficult).

5) Pause time, Thinkful has a very generous amount of pause time (over a month worth of pause time I believe), not to mention the free Holiday pause time that will be given out. 

6) Technical support, Thinkful provides support 7 days a week on slack. You can ask any web dev related questions and the technical support group will help you solve any issues with your code (installing software, issues with understanding a data structure, or help you deploy your website).

7) At the end of the course you have a professional portfolio (with projects), resume, LinkedIn page, GitHub with almost 30 repositories, and continued support from the careers coaches.


Cons:

1) The price, it's not cheap, although you get what you pay for. If you can dedicate the time, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to finish the course before 6 months is up (the sooner you complete the less money you pay).

I chose Thinkful/Bloc because of their self-paced program. I had a lot of things coming up and knew that I could not commit to the very strict schedule of a traditional bootcamp. I needed the flexibility to be able to not miss out on any schooling when things interrupted my schedule.

I did the Full Stack Web Developer Track through Bloc (which was acquired by Thinkful right after I started). 

I enjoyed my time with Thinkful. The curriculum was great. They taught me up-to-date technologies that are currently being used in the industry. While I was going through the course, I noticed that they were continuously updating and improving the curriculum.

My mentor was fantastic. He cared a lot about my understanding of the material and helped me understand the areas that I struggled with. He also made sure that I wrote professional code that would hold up in a real-world application. I can't say enough about how great my mentor was.

I was able find and start a job 2 weeks after completing the course (I started looking for jobs after I was about 3/4 done with the course, so about a 2 month job search). I got my job because of the skills that I got from my course at Thinkful. 

During my first month, I was supposed to be paired with a mentor. I got paired with two mentors that never bothered to show up and meet. I was working for an entire month by myself. It wasn't too hard because the curriculum was covering some pretty basic introductions to JavaScript, HTML, and CSS that were easy enough to learn on my own without getting stuck. I reached out to the student success team and they actually credited an entire month of learning to my account for my trouble of not having a mentor. Once I got paired up with my mentor, things went fantastic.

Their student success (customer support) team was always super helpful. Throughout the course, you have mock interviews that are supposed to mimic real interviews that you are going to have when you start your job search. One time the interviewer never showed up, I told student success and they credited me some more learning time to my account because of the wasted time.

Their customer support is great and responsive. Every time I had an issue (not too many times) they always solved my problem quickly and in a professional way. I could tell that their support team does their best to help their customers.

They also have some slack channels set up for students to get extra help if they get stuck with anything in the curriculum and don't have time to wait to meet with their mentor. The support agents in the slack channels are super helpful and quick to help students solve trouble that they're having with the curriculum or personal projects.

I really enjoyed the whole structure of the program that Thinkful/Bloc set up. It really starts you on learning basics and fundamentals of Web development overall, and gives you tools and advice to branch out into other aspects. Web development is an incredibly broad topic and has so many different language's, frameworks and tools that it'd be it impossible to fit everything into one program. This program really outlines things that you should learn to start out and then expand on those skills you've learned.

I really enjoyed being paired with a senior developer as well and I felt that was a big part of learning. My mentor was able to walk me through certain things that I wasn't able to understand. The mock interviews held were also great help in preparing me for the real world interviews.

Overall I really enjoyed the boot camp and its curriculum. The one thing that I would suggest is that it to go more into using vanilla JavaScript for DOM Manipulation. They go more into using jQuery and I feel learning how to JavaScript in its vanilla form would help more in comprehending the language just a bit more. Other than that, a great experience and landed me a job that I'm very excited to be at!

The program all in all is great if you put the effort in. The curriculum is great and you learn a modern stack. There are a few things I wish they would teach (React Hooks & Touch on TypeScript). So going back to effort being put in the offer you so many resources to help you succeed you just have to utilize them, for example, you will have access to a 1:1 mentor, teacher assistants, teacher, and there's also office hours at different times of the day. The only actual complaint I have is a lack of visual aids in the curriculum.  Once you graduate you will be matched with a career services member that will send you tons of job leads for you to act on and they will help you with the interviewing process. So all in all if you are the person that actually loves coding and genuinely interested in it I would highly recommend Thinkful just don't expect to do the classwork and be done with your day you will have to put the time in outside of class.

 I was approved to start the program immediately (Part-time, flex). I did not do any pre-work for the boot camp, was just thrown in.   Later found out people did pre-boot camp course work, which no one suggested I do that first.
 I hope you get a good program advisor that cares about you instead of being a number to fill their quota or don't do the part-time flex since they don't know you exist until you supposedly hit a point in the program. which  they (program managers)
if i had to do it over again,  I would not go here 

I mean what else can I say... They changed my life. To save time if you don't want to read all of this I'll quickly say 2 things: 
1. This program is not for the faint of heart. Prepare to be challenged, and feel completely lost the whole time.
2. If you're up to the challenge then take this program. The curriculum is amazing, the projects you build are amazing, the mentors and people you meet are so supportive, and the amount of knowledge you learn in the time allotted is astounding.

Now, to dive deeper. I'm going to layout 3 of the biggest things that Thinkful impressed upon me.
1. The Mentor and Program Manager support team -- This is such an amazing aspect of the program that a lot of others don't have and something you'd never get self-teaching. These counselors help you with anything and everything you need and work with your schedule. The program managers are personable and are there to make sure you're doing okay mentally with the curriculum and that you're following the pace you want to follow in the program. The mentors are highly intelligent and experienced programmers that make time for meetings and can teach you easier ways to do things. Greatly thankful for the support I had during the program.
2. The projects and capstones are as amazing as you want -- I came out of the program with 4 working, functional, and well-designed projects that helped me get my job. The amount of learning you do while working on these projects is insane. Towards the end of the program, you're kind of given free rein to build whatever you'd like which is really cool and allows you to become passionate about what you're building. My advice is to take time on the projects. They're your biggest leg up in the job market and can push you to learn more. 
3. The curriculum -- This is sort of negative and positive. To put it plainly, the curriculum is vastly dense and can be difficult to follow at times. This results in a disconnect when assignments come up asking you to do something you feel like you've never seen before. That being said... That's the life of a programmer. The best skill you can learn is problem-solving, and the curriculum, being the way it is, inherently makes you get better and better at that. So, it ends up being a necessary evil that you're kind of thankful for by the end of the program. 

To sum it all up if you're hard-working, self-driven, organized, and have good time management you'll be fine during the program. I recommend anyone who is interested in programming to take the introductory webinar and spend a couple of weeks in the introductory material they provide for free. If you find you really like programming take the Thinkful course. It's an amazing opportunity and will change your life. They're the best of the best!