Elium Academy

First, let me quickly introduce myself. I'm Bert, a CompSci student with an interest (and some experience) in nonprofits/startups.

I decided to participate in this course to acquire knowledge about web development, specifically in an entrepreneurial context which was exactly what I learned.

The curriculum of consists of a combination of (technical & start-up-related)lectures, exercises and project weeks where we needed to work together on a larger project which was a great introduction to software development in a working environment.

The instructors are really diverse in both the level and method they teach concepts so it is possible for both fast- and slow-paced students to follow the course.

An area in which the course really shines is the job assistance. They have quite a broad network and arrange meeting opportunities with a lot of business owners and managers.

In conclusion, Elium is a great way to start you journey in web development. If you want more information, feel free to contact me (bert.d.vl.schouwer@gmail.com).

After so many months of self-teaching how to write/read maintainable code, I realized there was a big problem standing in front of me and my ultimate goal of becoming a developer. When you don’t see evident progress in learning and understanding some programming language (preferably the one you choose yourself), even after countless hours staring in the computer screen….two reasons emerge. First one is that most of online tutorials/books are not good enough, and the second one is a teacher. That teacher was nobody else then myself! Yes, I was terrible teacher who needed to change his approach, and that’s how my programming story begins.

Learning to code without any technical background and starting from zero, but with big desire to learn just to mention, is very hard. Believe me I was there! So lets summarize...i was capable of teaching myself how to code until certain extent when the `learning curve` become so steep that started to resemble more like an enormous unclimbable wall. Again, in this situation there are two options, to continue by yourself and some day eventually become developer (if stubborn enough), or try to find someone who can help you learn more then basics in reasonable amount of time.

Decision was made, I fired teacher and started googling to find his substitute. “Programming bootcamps in Europe”, “JavaScript bootcamp in Europe” “Belgium coding bootcamps”…. AHA! I found interesting website (coursereport.com) giving me all necessary information’s to narrow down my choice. There were two options Ruby on Rails or Node.JS/Javascript. JS was something I always wanted to learn, so it was an easy decision. Elium Academy here I come.

13 weeks of learning Html, Css, Bootstrap, JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, React, Git, Github...with a very important soft skills sessions related to IT industries passed briefly. Amazing working space in the Brussels European quarter, with bunch of students from different backgrounds coming from different countries gave a special kind of touch to a first batch of `Elium Innovators` how they called us.

Just to be clear and honest from the beginning of my review, it was not easy for anybody. Students coming from different backgrounds with different knowledge in programming gave quite a headaches to teachers who were struggling to adapt curriculum to our needs, but still trying to cover all relevant topics in order for us to become full stack web developers. Did we become full stack web developers in `full capacity` in just a 13 weeks is a question for each one of us, but did we learned important things since the beginning of bootcamp and are we on the way of becoming very good developers with strong foundation?! Certainly yes, and there is no doubt about it!

Each start is difficult, Elium was too, mine the same, my fellow friends (Elium innovators) also...i know there were times of doubt in ourselves and personal capacities to learn, doubt in our teachers and their ability to transfer knowledge, doubt in idea of becoming a developer in general. But in one thing I am assured is that we all tried! In most of the cases this experience was completely new to all of us and that is completely ok. We all learned a lot, most of graduates already started get interviewed for developer positions in various start ups and companies, and Elium is getting prepared for its second batch of `Innovators`. Progress is evident.

So, if you are ready to step among developers and eventually be called `Innovator` and Elium alumni, this community welcomes you.

P.S. Do the pre-course material thoroughly, and if stuck...well call alumnus, we’ll be more then happy to help!

Hi I am Nyeem, I have done the full stack program in 2016.

First of all my point of vue on bootcamps : 
A bootcamp kickstart's you. It gives you the right tool, the right path to take. It encourages you, it pushes you. It gives you the desire to learn more. But in the end it's up to you. If you're not fully devoted(because that's how should be) you end up b*****ing about everything... At the end of the program you are supposed have solid grounds for starting your developer journey. You're not a developer yet. And for me, Elium is perfectly doing it's job now that the wheels are turning after having some troubles at the early weeks.

You have to look at the reality instead of lying to yourself beacause of whatever advertisement a Bootcamp made. You don't become a professional developer in 13 weeks when people are passing years in self-learning or in college for getting a degree.
Some beginner's mistakes were indeed made by Elium for organizing this first batch but I believe it is a good experience and it will be much better in the batches to come.

We learn from our mistakes, I'm sure Elium will do that too for the next batch. As an analogy, think of you at the beginning of your job seeker life. If everyone expects hiring people with experience and no one want to give a job to a non experienced persone how would you expect acquire that experience? For me the same applies to Elium. You can't make everything perfect from the first batch. Otherwise you pay also the price... ;)

Additionally, I want to talk about the mentors, they are not only very nice, supportive and knowledgeable of coding and entrepreneurship, but are also very complementary. During my time at Elium I not only stablish a relationship of student-mentor with them, but also of friend and I believe that for my personal development having people that advice me on every aspect I needed was a key aspect during the program.

-not a bot, neither an Elium intern :p

Started as a happy bootcamper with Elium,even though initially it looked bit tough with my lack of programming skills,I am indeed glad that I am making the learning through things gradually.

Even though there is a difference among the team members operating at different levels as each of us comes from different back grounds.I understood that it also helped us to share our individual expertise among us.The course is aimed to get out the best coding skills from us by constantly giving practise exercises and pushing us to traverse through them.I feel like I earned more knowledge after stepping into Elium Bootcamp than ever and this 3 months is worth every moment of my time spent.I can put up my questions over slack any time and I am sure they got answered promptly each time.The meet ups which Elium is organizing is providing me knowledge with more Technical aspects I am not aware of.

While most people dream of becoming a doctor, a policeman or a lawyer, when they are younger, I was dreaming of being an entrepreneur who worked in different sectors . When I started coding , I spent hours per week reading all sorts of books, articles, blogs and online courses to acquire the technical skills that I need to live my dream. I wanted to be able to understand the whys and wherefores

of the tech industry. After one year of self taught programming , I had a strong feeling that something was missing. Indeed, in order to fully understand this environment and feel ready to work as a junior developer, I needed to study the technical layer, needed to be able to code with a team or alone. Therefore, as usual, I naively began on my own by consulting articles to solve the mystery of startup’s products! I even at one point decided to browse resumes of emblematic characters of the Tech industry. I came to the conclusion that a significant portion of them have in their backgrounds technical skills.

Since I have a curious mind and I am always eager to learn new skills no matter how long or how hard the skill is , I decided in August to quit my job and enroll at Elium Academy. I will be graduating from Elium in one month, and it was the best jump forward I have ever done, certainly the most valuable decision for an entrepreneur who is passionate about Tech. My expectations were high concerning the Full stack Program.

I joined Elium with a very ambitious goals when it came to my skills and I am not disappointed unlike my colleagues.

THE BEST EXPERIENCE A NEWBIE PROGRAMMER COULD ASK FOR:

I have this saying “if you expect knowledge and techniques to be brought to you on a silver plate like the way thing are taught at school, you are delusional”

coding is about learning how to learn and google things. The Elium team do it with faultless functioning. They designed a program in a way to make learning more attractive and straightforward,

The range of resources and tools built in-house fit our needs and are always up to date.

The hard skills you learn are relevant and straightforward. You learn the core concepts of the web development with an approach that tends to reach an operational autonomy. You will be able to deal with API, frameworks, database, collaboration tool like Github and many other.

The learning speed is high and the time flies out when you are in front of your computer 10 hours per day, it can be disconcerting at first. For my part it wasn’t, but I have to warn you “ you become right away addict”. The funny thing is that the staff can be disconcerting too regarding their full beliefs and trust in the program. Their faith in your success comes from the program itself. And I had no doubt about that from the very first Skype call we had,

First of all, I think that one of the main strengths of Elium is their network in the Startup and Tech industry. Most of the people I met share a positive mindset, a sharing spirit with a contagious motivation. The mix of ages, backgrounds, and meet ups allow a real exchange between people. As a young junior developer , I learned every day from the sharing spirit of my colleagues, teachers and all the interesting people who are co-working @SmartWork.

The apprenticeship is not limited to learning technical skills with best practices because learning how to code is about developing your developer mindset. It is through this mindset that you reach a real operational autonomy. An important part of the pedagogy is learning how to google for the correct info, methods, techniques, services. This is a key to understand better coding culture and be able to make progress. Now when an idea comes through my mind or when I scroll the web, I immediately try to think in terms of components and technical issues, which makes me more pertinent and pragmatic. I discover a product driven way of thinking and tackling web products.

Elium paved the way for my career as an entrepreneur and developer, all the information you learn during the course can be reviewed and improved.

For that reason, the master word is practice makes permanent. So actually I try to improve what I have learned on a freelance projects or reading other developers code on github.

When you are stuck, you can count on the Elium community to always give you a reply no matter the time. The community is very active, alumnus, teachers constantly pull together to deal with code issues or to share quality information and resources. When I read the Slack of the community, I always feel the urge to go broad and develop my skills; there is a spreading emulation.

One word about Elium if you think the lack of tech skills is a barrier and it’s holding you back….Trust me your wrong it’s a strength.

I know that there is now a before and an after the Bootcamp, and I can already feel like nothing will ever be the same again. 

Here is my email incase you want to check this review : nadiaaime17@gmail.com this review  was inspired by another review i read online that inspired me

I applied in this school back in July having built Web apps with Meteor. When the course started (first batch) in September I d learnt python and used already the flask framework.

The first week, the first day in fact they taught functional programming(!) and they went as deep as map and reduce functions! The course was supposed to be for total beginners. The second week they tried to teach express (following an online CRUD tutorial). They tried to do that to people that didn t understand how to use arrays and objects to save data.

By that week, they admited that I was to advanced for this course because it was for entrepreneurs and not for programmers. So I quited. They seemed to be totally unprepared for the people that arrived there with different levels of programming experience.

The course was built on top of nothing basically - they were sharing only slides with the students. No material to read. Very few exercises and the weekend projects were only description on how to implement something. No test-driven development which in my opinion is necessary. Of course that way, people had very different solutions and they couldnt help you with the problems you might encounter.

I used the workspace for one more month by the end of which they admitted they couldnt teach a lot of people.

They have things on their curicculum that they wont touch at all (like postgresql). And finally as for the job assistance, Elium is a startup so they have other connections with startups which are very happy to offer internships.

All in all, I would strongly suggest to anyone interested to look elsewhere either an online paid course (there are some amazing ones) or a free online course and save money and time from this Elium course.

Curriculum:
The tech stack they were teaching (node.js/react/mongodb) is modern and highly in demand in the market right now, but they didn't really go in depth with explaining any of it. They just showed us some basics, gave us links to a bunch of online resources and each week they gave us some trivial projects to do on our own. We got to build a few small projects during the course, like a calculator, tic-tac-toes game and a basic CRUD interface but by the end of the course nobody had a fully finished webpage or portfolio to show to potential employers.

Instructors:
One of the instructors was pretty good, he tried his best to explain things in simple terms and guide everyone in the right direction to the best of his ability. The other one was useless.

Job Assistance:
None. You're on your own.

Overall:
The course was one of the cheapest bootcamps in Europe at the time and you get what you pay for.

I have chosen the Full Stack Web Development course of Elium due to all those good reviews this Academy received. The teachers were very friendly and also quite skillful, considering that none of them had any working experience in Web Development. The price of this bootcamp, compared to others, as i.e. General Assembly in London, Coding Academy in Barcelona or Spiced Academy in Berlin, seems very attractive. Hence my choice of this course.

However, after 3 months of course, no student in class graduated with a portfolio. A portfolio in IT is the essence of success during the application process that follows the bootcamp. Further, there was no job assistance or help in how to deal with future technical interviews (i.e. mock interviews would have been very helpful at this stage, to prepare students for those 'new' situations).

Also, the class never received any lectures on Facebooks' Framework 'React.js'. Considering, that it was listed in the Academys' Curriculum and that it is currently a desired and requested Framework by many potential employers, it is highly regrettable that it was never taught.

There are already quite a few Coding Bootcamps in Europe. Next time, I propably would choose for one that might be slightly more expensive, but that at least keeps what it promises.  

I am very happy I choose Elium. I learned about the beauty of Software development and its due to them that I decided to go deeper even deeper into programming by taking a job as software developer, that I got thanks to their help.
This choice was a bit of a revelation even to myself since I graduated from a prestigious business School in Belgium and I have been offered several well paying job in some large consulting companies. However the type of challenges that I was given at elium moved me towards choosing the hard and exciting rather than the easy.
I find that Elium is a work of passion and dedication; of love for technology, Pedro (Elium's CoFounder) is without doubt the emblems of this; of passion for education, both Patrick and Evan (Elium's Mentors) are great examples of deep commitment and humanity towards students and pure devotion towards entrepreneurship around which Juan (Elium'sCoFounders) has built is life.
I would like to remark  the incredible amount of hard work that elium's team have putted inside this bootcamp. I personally know that they give 200% so that every student could have as much support as they need.  From the slowest learners, to the faster learners, they always worked their ass off to support them with their time, effort and content. I find this ability unique and commendable and I do not believe any other school or bootcamp has every tried to take such a gigantic challenge. I also believe that decided to let some of the slowest students go was an admirable choice.
I do not expect that the next bootcamp will be just like ours but a new a new version of the constantly growing organism that its their Node Js bootcamp. To whoever is reading this I strongly suggest you to apply for elium. You will not be disappointed. The team will be fully honest to you about your progress and chances while at the same time they will support you will all their effort and honesty.