Fullstack Academy

I recently finished Fullstack Prep in July 2018, a part time course designed to help students get their feet wet learning Javascript and also to get a feeling for what attending the full time bootcamp might be like.  Prior to the course I'd worked in completely unrelated jobs, had meager self-taught experience with coding languages, and had found the process of learning code daunting.  Making progress this way is difficult!  I really can't recommend taking Prep highly enough if you are curious about the subject matter or are considering applying to the immersive program. 

The program's design is very good, they've put a great deal of work into the content and the philosophy behind it.  I always felt like the resources and tools on offer gave many options for study and were enough to keep you occupied and learning well.  Our teachers were stellar!  They were always diligent.  If you have trouble with a concept they'll walk you through examples step-by-step or mock up a problem on a whiteboard; all very helpful!  I also appreciated the staff's honest opinions about if a bootcamp is the right choice for you, they were always forthright about exactly what Fullstack offers. 

If you have any burning questions about the school I'd recommend attending one of the informational sessions.  They hold them about once a month, in person, at the school.

I have a background as a professional musician and I made websites throughout my music career. I decided to go all-in and teach myself computer science fundamentals. I fell in love with programming and eventually decided that I wanted to learn web development as fast as possible. I did a lot of research and decided to attend Fullstack Academy. (I also considered the Hack Reactor remote program.) I was hesitant to attend any bootcamp - they're expensive, especially considering you won't be working during and after the program while you search for a job. It wound up exceeding my expectations and I'm so happy that I attended!

I've written a handful of posts about my experiences before, at, and after attending Fullstack Academy here: https://scraggo.github.io/

In a nutshell:

- You learn SO MUCH in a short period of time. I recommend doing a "Hello World" in all the technologies before attending. That way you come in already having gone through a first-touch.

- Time FLIES by! After 3 months, you'll be amazed at the projects you've built.

- My confidence went from a 2 to an 8. You'll be a real full stack developer with the confidence to learn anything new that you need.

- If you worked hard in the program, you'll really be job-ready. It's a monumental task to get an offer for a junior developer, but stick with it. I took an offer just under 3 months after graduating.

Feel free to contact me through my website if you have any questions: https://scraggo.github.io/

I graduated from Fullstack Academy in May 2018.  It took me less than two months to find a position after graduating.

I have a CS degree - but I never learned how to write a piece of software in school.  I had to go to Fullstack to learn this.  Fullstack also got me to finally build a portfolio and learn how to interview.  I never learned any of these things while earning my degree.  I am sure that both my degree and bootcamp experience contributed to a successful job search.  However, I didn't feel confident in my coding abilities until after I completed Fullstack

I am a believer.

Definitely the biggest pro about Fullstack Academy is its flexibility.  They offer flex programs, immersive programs, and a remote version.  Throughout all these programs, they use the same curriculum and the same standards for admission.  They even offer a deferred tuition option for women enrolled in the Grace Hopper program.

They also offer a lot of flexibility in terms of how to grow as a developer.  For my cohort, they allowed us to explore project ideas on our own because the biggest skill they wanted us to hone was using each other as a team to make the best decisions from start to finish.  There was also no restriction on what type of project we could build.  And we received A LOT of support from every instructor.  Kate and Ashi were there to back our team up with answers to our technical questions no matter what we decided for our project.  And even when the first half of the program ended, Karen and Dan, our junior instructors who prepared so well for the project phase were there available to cheer us on and only an elevator away for further advice.  My teaching fellows were also the best!  Biggest thanks to Christine, Luisa, Liz, and Aria!

A bit of nitpick from me would be that the job support on the technical side wasn't the best right after I came out of Grace Hopper.  Because I had no idea how to prepare for technical interviews...and honestly, this was my first official job hunt ever.  Luckily, after 6 months of searching,  Ceren started this Mentor-Mentee program and I was seriously lucky to have Wenson Tsai as my  mentor (a volunteer mentor too, bless those Fullstack alumni's souls who volunteered).  Coming from an physics background with only 3-4 semesters of CS-related classes and no formal job experience in tech (or any formal job really), I was not up to date with the jargon in the tech field and Wenson helped me present myself as a confident developer.  He pointed out weaknesses to me in System Design and helped me work on my communicating my projects better.   One of the useful things he pointed out to me is that I should use declarative language when solving problems during JS technical interviews. 
 

Fullstack also assigned me another career counselor to help me on the behavioral side.  That person was Natalie Giuliano.  I had no idea what a job hunt was supposed to be like, and I had a lot of phone interviews already before she was assigned as my counselor.  So she made sure to help me practice answering those hard behavioral questions and helped me come up with better answers.  She also helped me with a lot of job hunt etiquette that I didn't even know.

The biggest thing I like about Fullstack is that they really listen to feedback and offer plenty of support in return.  And thanks to all of this support, I've now accomplished my overdue dream of wanting to make an immediate impact as a software engineer :)

I did the Grace Hopper program, which is the same as Fullstack Academy but has deferred tuition. The curriculum is STRONG!!!! Before you get to campus and during your very first week, you will coding and learning very advanced computer science topics. They truly ensure that every student knows their stuff and is prepared for the job search ahead including whiteboard interviews. I never had a doubt throughout the program that I would have any trouble finding a job because of what and how they were teaching. 

One of the great things Fullstack did was make sure from the beginning that students are ready and that everyone is on the same page. Just to get into the bootcamp, you need to know javascript and be able to solve somewhat diffucult problems as well as be familiar with recursion. However, they have a lot of great resources to get you accepted. Foundations covered some pretty advanced topics but they provided a mentor for each student and paced the prework over 5 weeks so that everyone could master it and there were some tests along the way to make sure everyone was learning the material. I learned so much before I even got to campus and I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to converse about code and solve quite challenges problems on the very first day.

I realize that talking about the material in the light of how advanced it is could scare some people away, but I just want to say that I found the program extremely friendly and not scary at all. They just want to make sure everyone is ready and on the same page, and they provide a lot of resources to get you there. If you ever feel like you are falling behind, they will not kick you out like some bootcamps will. Instead, they will get you the help that you need, and even allow you to repeat the first half of the program (junior phase) if you are struggling. Everything they do is to make sure you succeed. 

I also found they focus a good amount on soft skills, which was amazing to see. They make sure students learn to communicate about issues that arise during pair programming before these issues ever arise, they talk about unconscious bias, they have retrospectives to reflect on different parts of the program, make sure students are taking care of themselves emotionally, etc. I found that students are able to give feedback about the program and the feedback is taken seriously and changes are implemented almost immediately as a result of student feedback. 

The career success program is very strong as well. They don't just teach you how to code and build projects on this program. A big portion of the second half of the program was focused on getting students hireable. We had regular mandatory meetings with the career success team, practiced interviews (behavioral, technical, and whiteboarding), received feedback on resumes and linkedIn profiles, and so many presentations on job hunting. The career success team really sticks with you throughout the process and after you graduate to make sure you get hired. 

Overall, this program was amazing for me. I went to a different bootcamp before this program to turn around my career and I constantly felt anxious and unready to find a job. Fullstack Academy eased my worries and I never once doubted that I could find a job in the end. At first I was concerned because Fullstack teaches pure JavaScript instead of mixing in some of the other competing languages, but I truly believe that it served me well. I was able to learn really complex topics in depth and branch out past just web development. I also believe that now I can learn anything. In a nutshell, I learned amazing things, I built amazing projects including a mobile app and VR app with AI, I made amazing friendships with the women there, I constantly felt uplifted, and I had a job offer 10 days at the end of the program. 

You'll be amazed by what you'll be able to code by the end of the program. The lecture materials and workshops are very thoughtfully ordered to help you blaze through the most efficient learning path. Whatever you learned in the morning is just enough to lay a foundation for the afternoon. You concentrate mostly on skills you would actually use on the job, but there's also just enough theory to help you learn technologies not covered in the program. The pace is fairly challenging, but the instructors and fellows are super friendly and always there to help you.

I graduated in December 2017 as a part of the TTP Web Development Fellowship cohort. This was a slightly longer program in terms of on-site commitment, and about half of us did Bootcamp Prep together as well, but the Immersive Section was the same curriculum as the standard cohorts. I was lucky to go through this with an extremely smart and motivated group that was also 100% supportive of each other at every turn. 

The only programming experience I had coming in was working through some online courses and basic Comp Sci books, mostly Unity related and Harvard's CS50. This course will demand all of your time, your mental space, and your former social life. It's often exhausting. The first positive thing I have to say is that our instructors were super engaging, and even when things were difficult, even confusing, or I was really tired, the teaching style kept me fully present. They described the pace of the Junior phase as "like drinking from a fire hose" and I'd have to agree. They'll tell you to trust the process, and you should. There were times I had to move on from something new feeling like I really hadn't fully conquered the previous topic but things had a way of sinking in over time. I think that's a credit to their pedagogical design. Things build on top of each other very well. I'd echo the review of one of my cohort-mates and agree that the instructors are great teachers but also just great all around communicators.

The first half of the Immersive is workshop based, the second is project based. This semed to work really well and I found the balance good. 

The curriculum is kept very up to date with what's actually happening in the job market: React, Redux, ES6, etc. I think it's good that they teach relational DBs (Postgres with Sequelize for us), I found MongoDB pretty easy to pick up conceptually after the fact but I'm not sure it would have worked the same in reverse.

There's a solid emphasis on computer science fundamentals for a bootcamp: in early workshops, additional lectures, and the fact that you practice whiteboarding algorithm problems every morning for the entire Senior phase.  There are a lot of kind of "extracurriculars" that I really enjoyed, bonus lectures on functional programming, special guest presentations, some Agile training, teambuilding exercises, and occasionally just something extra one of the instructors were interested in (two memorable ones for me were a lecture on the lambda calculus and another on the Koa framework).

There were times where I found it somewhat difficult to get one on one time with instructors around checkpoint times but on the whole they are super available, intelligent, communicative, and willing to get into the reeds on any number of topics inside and outside the curriculum. Every cohort also has Fellows, which are kind of like TAs, recent graduates competitively selected to stay on in support of the instructors for the next cohort. Ours were excellent.

I'm not sure what to say about Career Services. It felt rushed and single-minded at times, and I didn't always like the tone it was delivered in. Sometimes the balance or timing of those tasks didn't feel well thought out in terms of what was going on in the main curriculum. But I think it's probably smart, you can't get too nuanced in something that's so highly variable, I think in the end they commit to this one-way-that-they-know-can-work-and-has. I have worked in other capacities at tech companies and have a lot of professional experience before making this decision to pursue software development, and when I try to imagine myself in the position of not having that experience I think their advice is extremely valuable for someone new to the job market in general or tech in particular. 

The hiring day at the end was a success for me, I met my current employer there and I'm super super happy with my job. I had other offers and onsite invitations come out of it as well. So like I said, even though I didn't always love it, the Career Services team delivered for me (and a number of others in my cohort who also got hired out of Hiring Day).

My instructors were excellent, the other instructors I was exposed to through other events were excellent, there is a ton of genune support for students throughout the whole process (they have a kind of experience counselor there for any and all things you might be going through), and I got a job. So I'll just wrap up by saying this program works, it's exhausting but ultimately enjoyable if you love code. And it can get you a great job.

    I only have good things to say about Fullstack. I can’t guarantee that everyone will have the same experience. The program worked well for me partly because of my learning style and also due to the type of job I got after graduating. The program favors self teachers which is probably the case for any coding bootcamp. That doesn’t mean they don’t do anything for you or provide structure because they certainly do. I found they did a good job of providing what you need as beginner but still encourage you to explore and learn on your own. A coding bootcamp would not be helpful if they explained and guided you through every little thing. The end goal is to get you a job as a software developer and as a developer you will be struggling through much harder problems with only online resources to help you.

    Another reason I say that the program was beneficial to me personally is because the technologies I use at my first programming job are highly related to the Fullstack curriculum. It’s likely that I was hired at this job because of the skills I was able to list rather then the overlap being a coincidence, however I have heard of graduates getting positions where they learn an entirely different stack or are required to code in a language other than Javascript. I can say that whatever you learn at Fullstack (curriculum is always in flux) will be highly relevant for many jobs. While you will still have a lot to learn after graduation it’s likely you will be ahead of the curve in some aspects as you have been trained in cutting edge concepts that those working in the field don’t have the time, desire, or even awareness of it’s existence necessary to learn.

    Another great thing about the program is the atmosphere and attitude exemplified by the administration and instructors. They have high expectations and push you very hard but are very understanding when you encounter difficulties (almost everyone does) and encourage you to open up. It is not a cut throat atmosphere (as I’ve heard some bootcamps are) where they try to get you to snap reality tv show style, so they can whittle down the field to only the most competitive and sleep deprived students. Instead they encourage you to take breaks, take care of yourself emotionally and physically, and most importantly (i.m.o) foster a sense of community with your peers and invite you to express yourself to a member of their staff if you’re not doing well. They even have someone dedicated to helping you deal with (non-technical) emotional/psychological difficulties. I can objectively say I was not the quickest to understand things in my cohort nor was I ever the first or even the fifth person to finish a test. The program is structured so that people who may not have the strongest raw programming ability, can do just as well as anyone else. Through pair programming and other systems students who are ahead can help students who are behind. The program also emphasizes the full range of skills necessary to becoming a software developer of which writing code is not the only one.

    The education and hands on experience of developing a project as a team at FS went beyond my expectations. I participated in their hiring day on graduation and got a follow up interview with two of the companies the next week. A week after my follow up interviews I was invited for a final on-site with one company and was offered a job at the other. Two weeks after graduating I already had a job that exceeded my expectations both in terms of salary and the type of work I wanted to do. In my case the timeline was a little quicker than usual but my level of satisfaction was not uncommon based on conversations I’ve had with peers and other grads. Much of this is due to their great curriculum and emphasis on mastering tough technical concepts. The rate of success is also do to the fact that they have a dedicated career success team that teaches you how to market yourself, job search, and interview both during and after the program. The school is also very well connected to many tech companies with a broad alumni network. There are probably around 10 FS grads at my company alone which only has a workforce of around 60.

    Main takeaways are as follows. Expect to work very hard including nights and often all weekend. If you put in the time and effort you will be rewarded exponentially. They only hire the most talented, knowledgeable, emotionally intelligent, and capable teachers. Expect to be well taken care of. Expect some tough times but if you want to be there, and want to learn, expect most of your time to be fun, positive, and exciting.

Preparing for Fullstack:

I attended Fullstack Academy after working for several years as an editor, and realizing I loved both the logic and creativity involved in coding (the little I was exposed to). I learned some HTML and CSS on the job, but JavaScript was new to me. I studied JavaScript for 5 months using online resources before applying to the Web Development Fellowship at Fullstack. At that point, I wouldn't say the admissions exam and interview were easy, but they were at a fair level and I was admitted into the program. Good communication seemed to be a key factor to admission as well.

Attending Fullstack:

I echo all the reviews here that mention Fullstack's great instructors and approach to teaching code. The curriculum builds on itself such that by the time you finish the program, you've gained a lot of depth in your JavaScript knowledge, and can apply that approach to learning anything new. You'll have several full-scale projects under your belt, too.

You don't need to have prior coding experience to do well at Fullstack, but being strong at problem-solving, logical thinking, or math would definitely help everything come easier to you. The instructors also do a great job of explaining the material in a digestible way.

Job Search:

Fullstack has great connections as far as companies in the industry. One of the companies that attended our hiring day hired 5 people in our cohort, me being one of them, and I wouldn't say this is the norm but I accepted a position as a software engineer a week after graduation. (I had factored in 3-4 months of job-searching in my plans, because for many companies the overall interview process takes 4-6 weeks).

The career services team at Fullstack are highly skilled at what they do and were incredibly helpful; however I got the impression they were juggling a lot and when dealing with our class as a whole they were not as effective/friendly as they were one-on-one. It's also important to note that Fullstack is there to help you during your job search, but obviously they won't do the work for you, so be ready for long hours of studying, networking, and coding even after graduation for the best results. I'd also advise to keep building apps, because job interviews are easier when you can back up your answers with real examples.

On the job:

I've now been working full time as a software engineer in NYC for 3 months, and though I haven't been working with the exact same stack that Fullstack taught us (don't expect to), picking up the new technology went very smoothly, and I've been able to tackle everything thrown my way so far. On top of that, my managers have been very impressed with how fast us Fullstack grads caught on (to their stack, code base, and projects) and how soon we've been making valuable contributions to the code base. I can definitely say Fullstack prepares you well.

Final thoughts:

If you're debating between Fullstack and other programs in the city, I think what sets Fullstack apart from the rest is their culture and curriculum. I have friends who attended other coding bootcamps in NY, and the culture at Fullstack tops them all in terms of professionalism and a supportive, friendly atmosphere. We had a lot of fun in our cohort, but also were all driven and hard-working. Many bootcamps can seem really fun because of how much they party, but if you're serious about changing careers, I believe it's best to focus and put yourself in an environment that reflects being on the job. I've also found that my friends from other programs have had a harder time getting job-ready, because their programs taught them a wide breadth of technology, frameworks, and libraries, but nothing in too much depth.

Fullstack won't disappoint, especially if you're motivated and ready to work hard!