Make School

 An extended bootcamp with an Accredited Bachelor's Degree.  Curriculum:  The project-based curriculum is laid out very well, with almost no time wasted. You’ll be learning a fundamental CS topic in the morning and you’ll be putting it to use on another project in another language in the afternoon.  Turning a four year degree into two years means things move fast. Terms are seven weeks long. It’s manageable but expect 50+ hour weeks if you’re a quick learner. 70+ if you want to really stand out. You will also take a few science, product development and liberal arts classes like in a traditional degree. At the end of each term there are mandatory hackathons (called Intensives) which you can use to build portfolio ready projects.  Make sure to bring your own motivation. The classes do cover all the fundamentals but don't expect to be among the best by only doing the assigned work. Self directed learning and side projects are highly encouraged and the school does offer a lot of support but you will only get as much out of the program as you put in.  Culture:  The culture at the school is one of the best I’ve ever experienced in higher education. There is a lot of support from the school. It feels like a real community and everyone is out to help one another. You get weekly 1v1 coaching sessions with Instructors, lots of open office hours, multiple co-working sessions with TA’s and helpful students and a Slack channel that is widely used by both students and instructors and staff.     TL;DR: Highly recommended to the right type of highly motivated person that wants a real project based education in the shortest amount of time possible. Instructors are great. Lots of support. Modern curriculum. Cool students. Bachelor’s degree in 2 years. 

Starting Experience:
I chose to attend make school because I wanted to get a degree, but learn in a way that showcased my work instead of just giving a grade. I enjoyed visiting the school, taking a tour of the dorms, visiting classrooms, and most importantly sitting in on a lesson. Talking to other students about their experience here, and why they chose the school was important for my choice. After talking to them it felt good being surrounded by like-minded individuals.

Instructors:
All of my instructors have been supportive. Each one taking the time in class to offer their minds and makes sure we are learning. Each class has its own pace but each instructor makes sure we have time to ask our questions. Zoom has been difficult for people mentally, but the school is doing its best to make the zoom rooms engaging. Alongside our teachers, we also have a ton of student support from our classmates, and our TA's. Another cool thing about Make School is the amount of feedback we give. After you finish a course or go to a meeting they want feedback. The school is growing constantly and they are trying to make this space one for everyone.

Support:
I think support is something make school is pushing for. You get a coach and they are another person you can talk to, learn from, and as more professional questions. There are also tons of student and faculty lead groups where you can talk about being a BIPOC, or talk about life hacks. I know my professors have pushed mental health and most teachers encourage taking some time away from the computer to enjoy the world (safely). The faculty also make sure to check-in with students to make sure we are enjoying classes, and that we are okay mentally.

Overall:
I enjoy my classes, and I enjoy how this school makes me feel about myself. I like being supported in my own way, and I like the readiness that I am being prepared for. Make School has given me the chance to get where I want in my professional life, and if you're looking to take the next step consider coming here.

The project-based learning approach that Make School provides is unquestionably the best way to both prepare you for the workforce and give you things worth showing when applying to jobs. This is the kind of thing that I wish existed when I'd first graduated high school, so I hadn't wasted so much time getting a traditional degree.

Pros:
- Incredible community of passionate and amicable people who all want to see you succeed and are just genuinely pleasant to interact with.
- School's income is entirely dependent on your success whether you take the ISA route or take out loans with income-based repayment.
- Project-based learning means you'll have a whole lot to show for the time you put in, which is exactly what you need when applying to jobs.
- Accelerated pace means you won't be wasting any time, yet you'll still get an accredited bachelor's degree.

Cons:
- Be prepared to work HARD. 4 years' worth of schooling crammed into 2 means you will be spending the majority of your waking hours in class or working on homework/projects. There is not a lot of wiggle room if you fall behind.
- Could stand to have better housing accommodations. 

Overall, I've never been busier, but I've also never felt more optimistic about my future. I'm going to recommend this school to pretty much everyone I know.

I applied to Make School looking for a computer science education after dropping out of a business college.  With coding, students get the most returns when they put in the hours coding in front of their computers.  Make School provided the best community for me to encourage me to put in these hours.  The instructors are from diverse backgrounds in tech from founders to data scientists and really care about the future of the industry in the form of their students.  I was a complete beginner to software engineering and Make School has been a big support for me in my learning journey.

Overall Experience: Just started the journey of Make School this summer, and I'd say the experience is much better than the previous school. Make school is a cohesive community, so whenever you have a problem, you can always shoot a message to your instructors or the TAs. Also, they care about your well-being, and they do want you to succeed. Thus, they will pair you with mentors to help you out.
Instructors & Courses: Some of the instructors are very experienced, and you will learn a lot in their classes. Also, I like the software product development class a lot because the materials are super helpful and can equip you with the skillset to work with others, and furthermore creating your own startup. 

If you are expecting to become a programming Guru by simply applying to Make School, you are going to get disappointed. Make school can provide you the knowledge, community, industrial tips and tricks, and job assistance. However, studying CS requires you to put some effort and time into it. If you do make good use of everything they offer to you, the journey here is going to be amazing!

The lie of saving you from student loan debt: The founder will harp on about how they are trying to give students zero debt, but the ISA (Income Shared Agreement loan) is $200,000 tuition which lasts 5 years + $100,000 housing loan which lasts 10 years loan for 2 YEARS OF EDUCATION. During the Corona Virus, they got approved to give out student loans instead. Which goes against their company's value of "reforming the student loan system". SHADY STUFF One of the founders is a total salesmen being your best friend before you enrolled, and then when you are enrolled he wants nothing to do with you. Additionally, He told us we would be guaranteed housing for two years for all incoming students, and then went back on it 8 months later saying we would have no guaranteed student housing in one of the highest rent cities in the room where a room averages $3000 a month. People debated suing, and a lot of the students were debating dropping out. They caved and tried to find housing for us out of fear of the bad reputation. In addition, the dean will tell you no to pretty much any request you ask them to make. I personally wanted to test out of intro classes, and she refused my request even though before I enrolled I was told multiple times I could do it only telling me after I already was fully enrolled that it wasn't possible. She came up with many excuses for not letting me even going as far as saying "it's against our school's integrity". She really makes the place a harder place to attend and makes the student body angrier almost every announcement. A common trend at Make School was whenever they go back on something they promised, they would use the dean to give us the bad news over slack. CURRICULUM They use GitHub for basically all their class syllabuses, and a lot of FREE OPEN SOURCE material for the work that you could easily find yourself without spending $90,000. That being said it isn't that bad to use it, but it isn't for beginners to read the online DEVELOPER DOCUMENTATION, which followed to a lot of dropouts. The curriculum is out of date leading to many problems slowing down the whole class. JOB SUPPORT This is probably the best thing they have going for them. The students that go here have a slingshot into big companies like Google, Microsoft, and Lyft. However, they do usually have other college experience or went to the ivy league, UC BERKELEY (TIED with MIT, Stanford), or basically degree and work experience in the cs field who get the jobs. Some other students get to use it if they devote their full time the first year to their portfolio, and go above and beyond working on their skills. Should you go to Make School? They have some brilliant instructors that teach frontend, backend, mobile, and data science. Probably the best part of the school is instructors, and how they help you build a portfolio. If you want to be a developer at the end of the day for a big company like google, and know nothing I would go there, but you are going to take a lot of debt when you could go somewhere else. If you know a lot about coding then I would maybe reconsider and go somewhere else cheaper, and teach yourself how to do practical work. If you can understand and implement c++ then you can do anything in the industry with ease.
Final Thoughts   I really believed in this school when I first got there and thought it was going to be the school that would get me ready to work at a top company. unfortunately, I was scammed and denied a proper education for no good reason other than to keep me there for two years in order to get me to have a $300,000 loan to pay back. I wasted my time the first year having to work on side projects to learn anything with the second-year students. Lastly, the one thing I did learn from Make School was self-teaching, since the fact, I had to teach myself almost everything............

To start, I am writing this because I wish I would have done more research before attending Make School. I did not plan to ever finish the 2 year program to receive the degree in applied computer science, I just wanted to learn some cs and how to code. I'll start with the pro's and con's and then give my recommendations on what I think someone thinking of attending Make School might want to do:

Pros:

    - CS instructor is amazing, has a great way of explaining concepts and is passionate about teaching.

    - The community is great, everyone is passionate about learning and excited about cs.

Cons:

    - Curriculum outside of cs is just not there yet.

    - So EXPENSIVE. From my research, any state college in the nation is cheaper than Make School.

Recommendations:

if you're thinking of attending, I would highly suggest going to a community college for a year or two first. A local community college is really cheap and in some states free. After that, apply to some traditional computer science programs and look into other options. If you have no other options, I would say go to Make School as a last resort.

The Price Scheme:

They charge 20% of your salary for 5 years and if you take the living stipend they tack on another 5% for 5 years and then another 7% for an additional 5 years. It definitely seems appealing when they tell you no tuition up-front, but think about the future in this case. This contract doesn't go away unless you make under 60k per year for 8 years. The extra 5% and 7% are owed whenever you make more than 40k per year.

Say you make 90k per year after graduating, after they take their money and then taxes (29% from federal and state if in California) are taken, you get left with $48,600 per year for the first 5 years.

I want to leave a very honest review of my time at Make School so that other people can be informed when deciding to join. To give some background, I joined the full stack web track before the school introduced the bachelors in Applied Computer Science.

The school was broken up into three parts. Computer Science, your chosen track ( my case full stack web ) and core. I am going to give my review on each of the three sections.

Computer Science:

Overall I was very happy with the CS classes. They were taught by a very knowledgeable instructor. I really liked his method of teaching because it was aimed at making sure students learned in depth the fundamentals of CS. He was also very good at breaking down complicated topics and made sure to draw diagrams and visual examples which made data structures and algorithms simpler to understand.

Full Stack Web:

The topics that were taught were current and applicable to getting a job but HOW they were taught wasn't up to par with the CS classes. For many of my classes we were just assigned some online tutorials and not once did we do code review or go over the tutorial to see what students did right or wrong. Me and other students were upset because we felt like there wasn't a structure to the classes. I was very dissapointing because I was spending a lot of money just to read some tutorial online. I can say I learned a lot more buying a $10 course on Udemy than from that class.

Core:

The purpose was to make you prepared to get a job and an effective employee. We did exercises such as:

  * Mock interviews

  * How to find and approach engineers from top tech companies to learn from them and potentially have a mentor

  * How to write professional emails

  * A bunch of other useful stuff

The instructor was good and I can say he helped me a lot in my soft skills specially how to answer tough behavioral questions.

Overall the school was good at teaching relevant skills and I can say that if you work hard enough you can definitely end up at a great company making a lot of money. Although, the lessons were great, Make School isn't teaching magic. You can learn and become a software engineer without spending tens of thousands of dollars. Many people have done it. In fact, I met someone who was a senior engineer at a top tech company who was entirely self taught.

There are so MANY free or cheap courses online that are very high quality. MIT has free CS courses so does Harvard. Heck you could buy a few $10 courses on Udemy and get pretty much the same value ( From a technical side ). If I could do it all over again I wouldn't have gone to Make School and my wallet would be very happy but hindsight is 20/20.

In conclusion, you will learn relevant skills but the school is EXTREMELY expensive and I don't know if I can justify the price for what I learned. For that reason, I don't recommend it.

When I transferred to Make School after spending a year in the mid-west, I was frustrated by how irrelevant and out-of-touch university-level computer science education had become from the aspirations of new-age software engineers. Make School offered a project-based learning curriculum, industry software engineers at leading tech companies as teachers, and more importantly I felt like everyone from the staff was rooting for every student to succeed.
The term-based tuition system as opposed to the credit-based tuition system can also be used to your advantage. I took an extra class or two every term and so I didn't have to spend the summer semester of the second year at school - which saves you $10k in tuition fees alone - and helped me graduate in about ~20 months(Aug'19-Mar'21).
Overall it was a great experience and I am glad I met some people I will stay in touch with.

MAKESchool has an excellent curriculum and not only prepares you for "code" but also for what employers and large companies are looking for in competitive candidates. The experience and network you gain at MAKEschool with industry leaders is incomparable and they have bridged the gap between a degree and actually securing a lucrative position. In addition, I have had unexpected health issues that impacted my ability to fully attend school initially and make school was amazing at accommodating my needs and well as helping me get back on track. The only con is the dorm situation for many students after COVID which I wish Make School had handled better. I am optimistic to see how they alleviate the issues for students in dorms moving forward. Otherwise, my experience with make school so far has been pleasant and I expect to gain irreplaceable skills and experience.