Chegg Skills

After getting a good grasp of the Python programming language, I don't know where I could start learning about the Data Science due to its broadly immense field of study. Not until I found Thinkful. I enrolled in Data Science in Python, because I thought it would introduce me to this field and have a better idea on the scope and analytics commonly used.

I got more than what I bargained for as the curricula goes through teaching data import and extraction from numerous sources, and once that is done, delves right into the many, many analytical methods which honestly took a bulk of my time to learn and understand. I did wish I get to learn more. My mentor, Rowan Copley, is a quirky yet awesome individual that is always available for help both during and not during mentoring sessions. He also provides great books to read or up-to-date news on this field to keep me motivated throughout the course.

However, in the end, I get to build up a great looking repository of my journey. So thanks Thinkful!

After getting a good grasp of the Python programming language, I don't know where I could start learning about the Data Science due to its broadly immense field of study. Not until I found Thinkful. I enrolled in Data Science in Python, because I thought it would introduce me to this field and have a better idea on the scope and analytics commonly used.

I got more than what I bargained for as the curricula goes through teaching data import and extraction from numerous sources, and once that is done, delves right into the many, many analytical methods which honestly took a bulk of my time to learn and understand. I did wish I get to learn more. My mentor, Rowan Copley, is a quirky yet awesome individual that is always available for help both during and not during mentoring sessions. He also provides great books to read or up-to-date news on this field to keep me motivated throughout the course.

However, in the end, I get to build up a great looking repository of my journey. So thanks Thinkful!

I'm about a month through the web development career path and I could not be any more satisfied with my experience. My mentor, Alex Cumbo, is a great teacher and has guided me through the material by breaking down concepts at a very detailed level and by keeping me interested in learning more. I really like the way the curriculum is structured as it introduces a certain topic and then provides an opportunity to complete fun excerices that help reinforce the concepts. 

I am excited to progress further into the course and will provide an update once I complete the curriculum. 

I took the Front End Web Development course about a year ago and decided to sign up for the the Angular course in February. The FEWD course about a year ago wasn't perfect, but I got through it and learned a lot. I learned enough to coast through the front end part of my brick and mortar Java boot camp. That's why I decided to go with Thinkful again and take the Angular course. 

I'm about half way through it and I'm much happier with the quality of the content. It's written much more clearly and understandably these days. The projects that we do are great because we build on the same few projects the whole class. And, of course, the mentorship is what makes it great. My mentor has helped me get unstuck many times. It helps keep me motivated. Were I learning by myself, I'm afraid that getting stuck without help might decrease my motivation. That's why the mentorship at Thinkful is worth so much.

I was happy with the FEWD class and I'm happy with this one, too. I'll probably end up taking more as well. It's a worthwhile investment.

I've had a great experience using the Thinkful Web Development Career Path.  You must be disciplined enough to spend time working through challenges on your own, but the great thing about the program is access to the wealth of knowledge through your mentor and Slack community.  Thinkful provides fun challenges to work through each new concept.  Combining that with access to people with real world experience really makes the learning process flow wonderfully. 

I'm looking forward to continuing towards my career goals with the Thinkful team.

I've had an extremely positive experience taking the Web Development Career Path course through Thinkful. I had taken all the self-paced online courses in HTML, CSS, and JS via Codecademy and was ready to take what I learned to the next level. They definitely helped me do that.

Thinkful does a great job of teaching you about a subject, and having you apply it to an actual project. All the little exercises that courses like Codecademy give are helpful for understanding syntax and the general language; it is, in my experience, very difficult to take a basic understanding of a language and build something with it. They also helped me do that.

Thinkful did a great job introducing me to several technologies and libraries that are critical to becoming a competitive job candidate in today's developer job market (Webpack, React, Node, Redux, etc.).

Thinkful's cream of the crop is its mentor sessions. I was matched with an experienced developer who understands the ins and outs of what one needs to know to become a professional developer. He's done a really good job of teaching me the latest and greatest technologies (listed above), which I can easily take with me to a proffesional setting. He's also been available to me as a resource throughout the week if I ever get stuck on a bug or confused on a subject matter. It's kind of like having your own personal tutor who's always available to help you out. It's pretty great.

The other cool part of Thinkful is it's Slack group and daily office hours sessions. If for whatever reason your mentor isn't available, Thinkful has a giant group chat of fellow students and mentors that are more than happy to help you out if you get stuck on something. 

Overall, I pretty much avoided paying $19k for a full-time bootcamp, worked part-time while I studied, and gained all the necessary skills I needed to get a job as a developer. It's a pretty sweet deal.

The best thing about Thinkful are the mentors and access to a large number of engineers via Slack. I took the Full-Stack Rails class, and it was incredable. You'll have to be disciplined as the first 2 sections show basic techniques for development. Most of your time will be spent understanding how things work and applying concepts to your own projects. This is where mentors help out a great deal. The last section of the Rails course was a bit more difficult, there were several typos which led me to believe it hasn't been reviewed recently. This is the only flaw I found with the course, I spent several hours going down a rabbit hole with typos and wrong concepts that weren't edited correctly. In the end, after 3 months of instense study, I'm now doing small Rails projects as side work. It also helped me with becoming a better problem solver and using programming as a skill-set. 

This review is for the course "Programming in Python" (part-time; 3 months; $500 a month). It took me 2 months to complete the standard course material and a month to finish my capstone project.

I have previous programming experience in Java, JavaScript, and C. At the time of enrollment in this course, I was already working at a tech company as a technical account manager, coding in JavaScript on a daily basis. No prior Python experience, though!

There are dozens of free online Python courses (some better than Thinkful's), but that's not what you're paying for when you sign up for one of Thinkful's courses. What you're paying for is direct access to a community of developers who have years of experience working in their industry. My mentor, Tudor, was an invaluable asset, steering me in the right direction and saving me countless hours of what surely would have been fruitless internet searching. Tudor always knew multiple different tools, libraries, and methods I could explore to accomplish my tasks.

All of this isn't to say that the course curriculum isn't valuable. It certainly is. The material focuses on breadth rather than depth, though, meaning that you'll touch upon every aspect of developing and deploying a web app that a fullstack developer might. There's the bread and butter Python, but that leads into some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; configuring and using databases; web frameworks like Flask and Django (for the adventurous); unit and component testing; Heroku deployment; continuous integration; and more. My only disappointment was that there weren't more lessons on the Python language itself, so I ended up purchasing a dedicated Python book to supplement the course which I found extremely useful. 

With this course and my mentor Tudor's help, I was able to create a web app that I will use as part of my portfolio when applying for a developer position. More immediately, however, I have been able to apply the Python skills I learned to build numerous tools for my coworkers at my current job to help them automate their more tedious tasks.

Ultimately, this course was valuable to me for two reasons: 1) because I already had experience in a few programming languages, but didn't understand how the development cycle of modern web apps all fit together; and 2) because having a mentor was motivating and a much better use of my time than scrounging the internet for answers.

I hope this review helps you find the right course for your needs! Good luck! 

Disclaimer: Thinkful offered me a t-shirt for this review. But, if it makes you feel any better I have other t-shirts so it's not like I had to write this review.