Chegg Skills

As a old school designer of the early 2000's, and marketing grad I enrolled in the Thinkful UX / UI FT Immersive that started 10/12.  I was really optimistic and ready to learn the new technology of today to better assist my future clients. (I'm a known figure in my city so inventors and businesses are excited to collab with me to change the world for the better once I'm all up to speed).  I chose the living stipend as a single mom trying to rebuild after an unfair divorce. I initially found it appealing to work the FT immersive while earning a little to focus on my studies even though I saw more benefit to paying thousands less for the program with other financial options, but I needed that crutch of the stipend in my case of having been out of work.  

The problem is I found this school to be hypocritical in the fact that they preach how important human experience and empathy is key to UX without actually caring about their students or displaying those traits themselves. For ex in orientation they had it seem like there was all this support for you, but if you had one issue come up, even if it wasn't your doing such as a technical glitch they will put blame on you and count it against you to weed you the user /student out of their system.  I never got to meet my mentor today for our first check in meeting because I was automatically locked out of the program by her before that, while completing an assignment.  She emailed me never meeting me saying she didn't have record of my attendance even when I emailed the roster of confirmation to everyone I had on my list. 

I was a day and half in and counted as absent even though I attended, chatted, interacted in zoom calls, and communicated in every way I could with my team about minor tech issues about the video chat and needing a link to a tutorial to further my understanding of Notion platform to use it. Nothing really keeping me from class to count me out?!

Coming into the program only 1.5 days in knowing myself, and my years of experience in business and corporate allowed me to see the glitches in their platform and staff immediately. All staff were amateur's who felt threatened by sweet little me, it seemed which I feel is the problem. They put less experienced staff who lack in social skills on the front lines who have the power to do whatever to keep the influx of people away.  This all was a red flag as a pro and thankfully I was within my 2 days refund period to exit gracefully. 

The error or deliberate action of my team leaders blackballing and counting me out caused my ASM to kick me out of the program and the earnings I was expecting next week per our contract after 2 weeks of waiting to start the program. The things that need to change in the world are programs like this and the type of people who run them. Choose wisely! 

The Thinkful curriculum is great! I took the Software Engineering Flex and truly enjoyed every minute. The course is very challenging. Before coming into the course I had some experience in Computer Programming. But if you are passionate about learning new things you will be totally fine.

I was lucky enough to get a Web Developer position by a friend. Although I cannot talk much about Job Assistance, the curriculum did a great job fixing up my resume, cover letters, and LinkedIn.

 Poor curriculum. Mentors are not guaranteed to be knowledgeable or to have industry experience.

The worst part was seeing a data analytics mentor take advantage of students from other courses to make projects for his company - UNPAID. A few students asked why it was unpaid and he prioritized his personal company profits over the students time and dedication when they could be applying to jobs. He even claimed that one of the students who did projects for his company got a job one month afterwards and began selling it as an apprenticeship opportunity SEPARATE FROM THINKFUL'S BOOTCAMP AND JOB AND CAREER SERVICES. Maybe this is the "jobs" that their graduates are getting and reporting to CIRR?

In summary, you go into debt with loans in order to get the privilege of working for free and maybe getting a good mentor if you're lucky. 

So bear with me for a few minutes as I go through this. Thinkful is a glorified loan company that offers a sub-par program as a guise for their ridiculously high-interest loans. I was interested in the engineering immersion class, with the ISA and stipend. I'm 44. Single. My job bit the dust with the plague, and I've had zero phone calls in over 3 months for new jobs, in any field. I cooked for most of life, and for the last year I've done wedding decor and coordination. 

I have 8 years experience in LPC, which is a dead language now and a sub-branch of C. I had never even looked at HTML, CSS, or JS before I started the prep course. I went through the entire prep course in 4 days and knocked it out of the park. Their timeline is a little over 3 weeks. I was done and approved before I ever spoke to my mentor for the first time. My first call from admissions was rescheduled by email 5 minutes after the call was supposed to come through. When I did finally receive the call a week later, I could tell immediately I was talking to a salesman, not an admissions officer. He did little more than send me what he called as an application, but it was simply a a permission form for a credit check. Nothing more. 

It's notable to mention that up to this point, after having finished the prep course so easily and so quickly, both my mentor and this saleman were very eager to extol all the wonderful things about Thinkful and kept alluding to the prep course being some sort of os scholastic-type test for potential students, and also to make sure all students started with the same basic knowledge. This was utter horse crap all around, but I'll get into the curriculum itself momentarily. After having hyped me up about how great they are and making me think my performance on the prep course actually mattered, they denied me the ISA and stipend both within 24 hours. 

Your eligibility is based solely on that credit score and current employment. Nothing else. NOTHING. Leaving me wondering why the hell I was given any work to do at all before they ran my credit score. I busted my butt and excelled in every way, even with the poor materials they provide. In reality, the ISA is nothing more than a $16,000 loan, and the stipend is just adding $7,500 to that loan, bringing the total loan up to $23,500. If you couldn't go out to a bank and get a loan for this amount, you won't qualify for the ISA or the stipend. The payback price is $40,000 at 25% of your gross income for 4 years or until paid. That's close to double, and any bank could do better.

I received a call from my salesman again within 15 minutes of being denied, urging me to apply for the 6 month course instead of the 5 month with stipend, which still costs 16k and takes even longer, and I would still have not been eligible for. Jobless, almost no credit history, no debt to speak of. I don't even own one single credit card. I've always lived with what I have and never borrowed. When I tried to just tell this guy to forget it, he started in with the sales pitch again, and when I didn't bite he actually accused me of trying to just scam the school out of the $7500 stipend. As if that was a lot of a money and even worth the hit to my already crappy credit score. He was quite rude once he realized I wasn't going to take anything less than what I signed up for, or I was going elsewhere. When I tried to find an avenue of complaint over his behavior, I met nothing but dead ends. I emailed the one link in my course material that goes to someone vaguely official and got no reply.

So if you thought ISA was some kind of helpful service you end up paying out the butt for, you're wrong. There is zero interest in your ability, aptitude, or state of need. This company would rather have a double digit IQ and high credit score than a potentially amazing coder with a low credit score. There is zero interest in helping you, only in putting you in debt. I also got the impression that if I simply paid the 16k up front and didn't owe them anything, I would be placed at the very bottom of the list on helping me find a job after the course. Since there is no certification of any kind given after the course is complete, you would be out 16k with nothing but a few simple projects to show for it, while Thinkful steadily places all the graduates who owe them 40k into a job.

The curriculum was no better. The three week course covers what would amount to your first two classes in a tech school. It is stressed up front that an actual programmer knows how to find the information they need without help from outside resources. Which is totally true, except in this case it's a way of covering their repeated mistakes in code and the various pieces of misinformation you are given. I'll give a few examples.

In the demo on assigning multiple classes to one element, they create a class called "bold" in the CSS, and then use "heavy", which is undefined, in the HTML, making the demo worthless. The examples don't show properly. The video and instructions on how to properly publish a web page on Github are incorrect and result in a fail. You are plainly shown wrong instructions and neglected being told that your repo name has to be created in a specific way or the site can't find the files. This was huge for me, because this isn't even coding, and it's a necessary step in completing your final assignment. Then, on the final assignment, if you place the CSS normalization link in the head that they literally recommend you use, it causes the test to fail and have to be resubmitted. The link is good, the grading code is bad.

Those are just a few of the various mistakes and pieces of false info I found. And this is the PREP COURSE designed to draw people in. It's awful, and for the same price you can easily go to a technical institute for a degree and actual job placement help. This is a scam.

PLEASE READ IN FULL BEFORE COMMITTING TO THIS “PROGRAM”!!!! This is long, but I REALLY wish I had read a similar review before committing to Thinkful. I am not a quitter, and am now VERY happy in a bootcamp with General Assembly:
If you don’t read this entire review, I will start with this in the hopes that this statement sticks: Thinkful is not a bootcamp. I repeat, Thinkful is not a bootcamp! It is equivalent to buying a “Software Engineering for Dummies” guide (where you can also submit your random projects for review). The curriculum is horribly written, the order in which it’s written makes no sense, and it is all reading based. It is essentially like paying a couple thousand for a guide that tells you in which order to search things on MDN and w3 Schools. There is ZERO instruction. You are reading, doing projects (none of which are real or based on anything you’d see in the workforce as they are entirely up to you and your imagination and individual, with vague, minimal guidelines). There is zero teamwork on projects or paired programming throughout the entire program. 
The program boasts “office hours” for additional learning and asking questions. The office hours are mostly offered in the evenings, so if you don’t have a “traditional” schedule, you are out of luck (I worked as a restaurant manager at the time). Additionally, 95% of the office hours are on basic, repeated topics (for new students, I’m assuming, as the program is rolling admissions and THERE ARE NO CLASSES AND YOU ARE TEACHING YOURSELF). If you have an advanced question, better hope you have a great mentor. The premise given by Thinkful is that your mentor will be like your “instructor” or at least a provider of individualized office hours. I went through THREE mentors while enrolled with Thinkful for 5 months. I thought the first one was “tough” as whenever I would ask him a question he would say “You have to figure it out yourself”. He was clearly miserable, and ultimately left for a full-time job.
My second mentor, while very nice and more helpful, wasn’t a good match personality wise and seemed as if he was learning with me. My third mentor was an extremely kind human, but simply could not help me in the way an expert should be able to. It was to the point where even when we would Google things together it would be to no avail, and he often told me that I was teaching him new things. Essentially, it got to the point where I fell majorly behind on projects due to the fact that he couldn’t help me to figure out something I needed in order to move on to another part of the project. He would also make jokes and completely change the subject, or show me whatever it was he was working on, when I asked him tough questions. 
Eventually, I realized I was paying Thinkful a lot of money to help guide me through searching Google and “grade” my projects aka make sure they complied with their basic checklist. Once I shared my grievances, and the fact that I didn’t believe I received the services I paid for, I was told that because I hadn’t mentioned being dissatisfied enough times before making the major life decision to leave the program. After investing countless hours and $11,000 dollars, administrators informed me that there was nothing they could do other than offer me a new, fourth mentor. 
Despite feeling like I gained little knowledge and am out of thousands of dollars due to Thinkful being a tough pill to swallow, one silver lining is that I realized I definitely still want to pursue a career in tech. I am now happily enrolled in a UX/UI bootcamp with General Assembly. I knew it would be better from the start. For starters, they are not a money hungry company and are an actual school. I could tell this by the interview process being more informative and less about simply making sure you have a computer and can afford to pay them (Thinkful’s admission process was one, 15 min “interview” and reviewing financing options). With GA I had to do an initial phone screening, an admissions project, and a virtual interview in which I had to present my project. There are several financing options to choose from, with financing companies that boast working with GA solely due to their confidence in the company's reputation. 
I learned more than I learned from Thinkful in the GA pre-course work alone and the environment is a much more positive and learning (not memorizing or regurgitating) oriented environment. If you are still with me, I am begging you, STAY AWAY FROM THINKFUL!  

I saw glowing reviews and spoke to a graduate but I feel ripped off. First, their mentors vary in quality. Some of them should not even be mentoring at all because of how unprofessional they are. I requested mentor changes but was told it was unlikely to work out because not a lot of them were available. I went two weeks without a mentor AND it was deducted from my time in the program. I lost two weeks because they were unable to match me with a mentor. It gets worse the deeper in the curriculum you go because there are less mentors who know how to work with the technology. 

The job assistance is fine but I would not recommend it. You do most of the work yourself and there are plenty of free resources out there to guide you. I don't see any reason why I had to pay for this. Some of their advice is outdated and dare I say, unethical/fraudulent. I didn't like being told that I needed to lie on my resume.

This was not worth the money. I'd pay maybe a hundred dollars after how I was treated and constantly blamed by the company for having any negative feedback. It's feedback. Use it to improve the program!

I completed Thinkful's Engineering Flex program in November 2019. Before the program, I had done some freeCodeCamp lessons and completed a few projects, but I was still a novice. It took me about 7 months to complete the program, and while I was a student the company went through some changes that probably affect the current accuracy of this review. With that caveat in mind, here's some thoughts:

Mentor Program (Great)
Thinkful has a one-on-one mentorship program that was immensely helpful. I met with my mentor twice a week and she gave me complete attention and specific assistance on things I needed help with. This individualized attention to each student's learning needs is what attracted me to Thinkful in the first place. I was lucky to be paired with a mentor who synced with my learning style, but had it been a bad match I would have had the opportunity to request a transfer. I also had a great Program Manager (they're called something else now) who helped me keep track of my progress.

The Curriculum (Not-so-great)
My biggest complaint about the program was the core curriculum. I think they have begun to revise and update it, but I experienced poorly designed instruction, insufficient tutorials, incomplete explanations, and no videos. Pretty much the entirety of the curriculum for me was text-based, and this text was poorly written. It contained countless grammatical/mechanical errors, confusing syntax, and faulty metaphors. Thinkful needs to standardize their instructional design according to pedagogical best practices and they desperately need to hire a copy editor. With all that said, I've heard they are revising and updating the curriculum, and adding videos to supplement the text. So--this might be an outdated criticism.

Assessments (Great)
The program was project-based, so I graduated with a portfolio of work to help me get hired. This was so so so valuable. The grading team was thorough in making sure my projects were portfolio-ready and followed industry standards. Thinkful also used "mock interviews" to assess my advancement through the curriculum. These helped in preparing me for the job search, but also in bolstering my ability to execute my new skills under pressure, and sharpened my ability to articulate technical concepts. The mock interviews and capstone projects were great.

Additional Learning Resources (Great)
Beyond the mentor meetings, Thinkful offered a bunch of additional resources for extra help. I regularly used the live Q&A sessions as well as the technical help through Slack. These helped me almost every day. Throughout the program I had constant access to additional help and support. Loved it.

Career Coach (Great)
After graduation, I was assigned a career coach who helped with the job search. Thinkful's career team is an excellent group who really know what they're doing. My career coach made my transition from student to graduate smooth and steady, and I couldn't have been more supported through the job search. Not only was my career coach effective and helpful, but she was also super friendly and made me feel confident and sure-footed during a nervous and stressful process. Throughout the program, the career support department was noticeably on-point.

Price (Depends on the buyer)
There's no denying that this is an expensive product. I would recommend any prospective students to carefully evaluate their financial situations before making a decision. Thinkful offers financing, which is a nice option for people without a chunk of cash, but any way you slice it, it's a fat price tag. Thinkful offers a tuition reimbursement guarantee, but this is conditional on the graduate meeting a list of requirements that, to me, seemed near-impossible. This ended up not mattering because I got a job, hence the guarantee.  

Meetups (Good)
The Thinkful meetups I attended were fun and a great way to humanize the experience, but I did not attend more than a couple.

Culture (Great)
The people I interacted with were friendly, knowledgeable, and encouraging, and I always felt like they were devoted to my success. I always felt supported and never had a bad interaction with anyone.

Pacing (A doozy)
While I was a student at Thinkful, I had a full-time job and a toddler at home. This. was. hard. I thought I would be able to devote 3-4 hours a day to coding but ended up spending considerably more time on it. The pace was FAST, which has its benefits, but sometimes I struggled to retain information. They offered several weeks of "pause time," which I used, but I still spent most of the program behind the projected schedule. This pacing made the experience more stressful than it probably needed to be -- however, by the end of the program I felt confident in my grasp of the material and I had several projects to show off my work. So, maybe it boils down to this: it's difficult, sometimes VERY difficult, but doable if you are committed. The fast pace would be much more tolerable if they revised the core curriculum. 

Final Takeaways 
Not every learning platform is perfect. While Thinkful's core curriculum could use some deep revisions, the overall program was an excellent experience for me, and well-worth the money and time. It was difficult, but it delivered on what it promised: within 3 months of graduating I had my first job offer. I recommend this program to people who are self-motivated and ready to challenge themselves on a daily basis. You learn web fundamentals, JavaScript fundamentals, React (with context), Node/Express, PostgreSQL, JWT authentication, and some of the common data structures and algorithms you'll likely see in a technical interview. You learn how to present yourself to the industry and how to successfully position yourself in the job market. I do have a few suggestions for improvement, but regardless, I am a very satisfied customer.

The program is light on the ground theory behind most data science algorithms and techniques. Much of the curriculum needs to be substituted with outside material. The outlines as to how the assignments are graded is nonexistent. Also much of the examples are not well chosen. Other than that you do gain a lot of exposure to the data science as a whole so there is breath but not depth to the materials in the program. Hopefully the job placement portion of the program will aid in developing contacts and landing a data science position