Ironhack

In this review, I aim to provide an honest account of my experiences as a student in Ironhack’s April - June 2018 cohort in Miami, FL. I chose to wait until after I had been out of the course and in a job for a while before reflecting on my experience and evaluating how well Ironhack prepared me for what I am currently doing.   My Ironhack Experience:   Application:     I did a great deal of research within a small period of time before applying, going through the interview process and leaving my previous employer to join Ironhack. Like many other students, I decided on Ironhack because of the curriculum, the reputation of Brito as an Outcomes Manager, and the reputation of their lead instructor Nizar, however, when the cohort started I learned that we would have a new instructor, Nick, an Ironhack graduate. When I registered for this course many of my classmates and I was under the impression that Nizar would be our teacher who I understood was someone with years of real world experience and was the primary reason for all the great reviews about Ironhack. I decided about three weeks before the cohort started to join in April which was just enough time before it was too late. The coding challenges and pre-work used the same online portal which contained their learning modules. Once I got the learning material I had to get them done within the one week I had before the cohort started so I worked that week on the online material full time to get ready for the first week. I cannot stress how important it is for you to really focus on the pre-work and understand the meaning behind what it is that you are going to be learning and do further research when necessary. If at any point you find yourself questioning whether or not this is for you, take time away from the problems you are having and come back to it with a fresh perspective. This is a habit you should try to incorporate in your learning as you are working with abstract concepts you haven’t been exposed to yet or are re-learning. It's really easy to get frustrated when you are first starting out which causes some students to drop out of the cohort before it really has time to start.   Curriculum / Lectures / Projects:     The first week is spent developing a browser game which when I initially signed up sounded like a lot of fun, and at times it was, however, I do not feel that it fits the curriculum when considering how much better the time could be spent. I would recommend spending more time to focus on the fundamentals, working collaboratively (git-flow), and more time on coding challenges/interview prep.     Many of the examples within the modules when learning these new concepts were essentially the same which made it harder to grasp some of the concepts we were going over. A large portion of information, direction, and dependencies for the labs and lectures were out of date or not set up properly. Some learning modules were skipped altogether and a lot of time was wasted on bugs that can be avoided if the lecture notes and labs were updated or reviewed by the instructor before the lecture for the day began. I was also having a hard time grasping these concepts when I was encouraged to just copy paste what was in the modules to do my labs and my projects instead of thinking it though.     There was a sudden change the day before the final project weeks started where our cohort was preparing to put together their individual projects for our personal portfolios and then it was announced that we would be working in groups for the last project. We were not told from the beginning that we were to take into consideration that we would be working on the final project in pairs or groups of three. We were never taught best practices dealing with version control and how to go about working with multiple people on a project at the same time. The brief overview that we had on collaborative git practices lasted less than 30 minutes and didn't even cover how to deal with merge conflicts or common errors that would come up in collaborative scenarios.     Our instructor Nick was gone during the second to last week which was one of the most important weeks of our cohort. The majority of people in the course have been stuck on the same issue which dealt with having a login session persist across views in Angular. The only example we have to go off of was incomplete because of all of the bugs we ran into the week before Nick left and the TA’s were not able to figure out how to resolve the issue. If the Ironhack staff knew that he was going to be out during this important week that should have arranged for a substitute or have prepared the TAs to take over the curriculum for the week. The TAs would only be able to help to a certain extent until they are unsure of how to proceed due to their lack of experience and we're left to wait in line to be assisted by Nick, however that week we did not have the option so there was a great deal of lost time. My group members and I should not have been feeling the need to pay by the minute on tutoring websites like Hackhands and to make up for the lack of education we had received to get our project done in time.   Learning Environment:     I can’t speak for other cohorts, but the April 2018 cohort was fantastic. Everyone got along really well and we all still keep in touch with one another regularly post-graduation. Building.co is a fantastic workspace. Free beer, coffee, fruit, snacks, and there are plenty of good options for eating in the area. My only criticism is that Building.co can get a bit cramped at times as far as private areas for studying and meetings go, but that’s expected considering it’s a co-working space.  The TAs were incredibly helpful throughout the cohort. Shoutout to Sandra for always staying far later than she needed to help us with our projects throughout the cohort. I’m sure I speak for all of my classmates when I say that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve what we did without the support of the TAs. Brito also brought in some great guest speakers and organized a panel of alumni to come to talk to us about their post-graduate experiences.   Career Week:     Career Week is the most important week you will at Ironhack. The content during this week is crucial to your job search and should be followed to the letter if you plan on getting hired and will be applicable beyond entry-level job searches. If you haven’t heard of or really considered Career Week as a selling point for your investment in an experience at Ironhack I would highly encourage you to reconsider and look at some of the companies that Ironhack is partnered with and the companies that graduates like myself are currently working at. Career week is a fantastic opportunity where companies come to Ironhack in order to interview graduates in a "speed dating” fashion. You get to meet with many companies, and if you are inexperienced with interviewing like I was at the time, it may help you to get over the nervousness of being in an interview. If you've read any of the other reviews on this site or other sites about Ironhack Miami I'm sure that you have read or heard the name Daniel Brito or Brito for short. Brito is the Outcomes Manager, and it is his responsibility to work towards partnerships with companies and bring them in to meet potential graduates as candidates for entry-level jobs. He’s one of the most connected people in the Miami tech scene and has your best interests in mind. Ironhack would not be the same without his efforts. He was one of the most supportive people throughout the entire cohort and has continued to help me after graduation and reach out to me to see how my new job is going.    Post-Graduation / Job Search:     I received my job offer from CareCloud, one of the companies that came to our hiring fair, about a month and a half after the cohort ended. However, do not place all your bets on getting a job from one of the companies that come to career week, this would be a huge mistake. Brito will be there every step of your job search from interview to offer letter as long as you follow the guidelines and strategies that he goes into detail about throughout the week. Never stop coding during your search, it’s important to keep your committing to new projects and continuing your learning so that you have something to show employers what you’ve been doing with your time since graduation. If you lose your motivation to teach yourself after the cohort is over you’re going to have a very hard time finding a good job.   Overall, I would recommend Ironhack to someone looking to make a career change, however, I would also like to see many things improved as it continues to grow. I felt that my cohort was disorganized and that there was a serious lack of curriculum preparation. I did not see efforts made to improve the quality of our experience throughout the cohort's duration although we were giving them feedback every few weeks. I was not satisfied with how my education at Ironhack turned out at the time of graduation. I went through career week and then graduated lacking the confidence in my skill set necessary to get through a real technical interview. The weeks following graduation I spent all my time working on projects and learning React which I knew would help me stand out more when looking for a job while reinforcing JavaScript fundamentals and applying to jobs using Brito's advice.   I am currently writing up an accompanying article for this review that I hope will fill in any other gaps for those who are looking into or graduating from Ironhack and boot camps like it which will include helpful resources that I used before, during and after my boot camp experience that helped me get my new job at CareCloud.   Feel free to add me on LinkedIn or shoot me a message on the Ironhack Slack channel with any questions or comments that you may have.   Best, Ryan Martin 

I don't even know where to start describing the experience of the last 9 weeks in the IN-PERSONtial UX/UI design bootcamp at Ironhack Lisbon. The quality of the training program is unbeatable. The professionals who make up the teaching staff are of the highest level, both as teachers and as human beings. The kindness and closeness, as well as the positivism in the low moments of such an intense experience, have made that, time after, I still feel moved when I remember them. Moreover, the on-site experience of the course has been crucial for me. I could not imagine it in any other format. The quality of the transmission of the contents, as well as the coexistence with the teaching team and the rest of my classmates, both in my course and those of WebDev and Data Analysis, would not have been of such a high level and would not have exceeded my expectations if it had not been in a face-to-face format. I highly recommend this formula. It feels like a summer camp and you feel it when you leave, but in this case you don't just take friends for life, you change your professional life forever. I miss you all!

Hello everyone!
Before starting the bootcamp I was super scared that I wasn't going to be able to follow the classes and understand the content but it turned out to be way better in so many aspects than I could've ever imagined. From my fellow coleagues, to the professors and to the whole staff of Ironhack everyone helped each other out so much that made the whole bootcamp and the whole proccess of learning new things so much easier.
I want to give a special appreciation to Diogo Capitão, the PM on the Lisbon campus for making sure everyone had everything they needed and to attend to everyone's necessities makinhg sure everything went as smoothly as possaible.
On a last note I just want to say it was one of the best decisions I made recently and I highly reccoment it to everyone wanting to shift carreers to any of the bootcamps available.

Bootcamp very formative, which allows to feel confident in its ability to practice this profession quickly after the end of the latter.
Mostly focus on UX side of the work. You will learn to use tools like Figma but these are tools you can went up in skills by yourself. 
What's really nice with ironhack it's that the projects you're working on are done in collaboration with real companies or projects. This help to have your first network in this sector or even it's help to find your first job as a product designer (was my case :) ). 
The other students are your future colleagues because the sector is a small world don't forget that :)