Springboard

The Springboard UX Career Track was an excellent program and a great experience. I came out of it with a well-rounded, high-level education in UX best practices, and a decent portfolio with three case studies. The content is well-curated, and all the mentors I worked with were high-caliber experts in the field. The online community is helpful and students are very open to helping one another. I would highly recommended this program.

However, there were a few downsides:

• The program is advertised to be 350+ hours. I spent over 900 hours and 7 months, so plan your time wisely. Most people I know also put in this much time, not just me.
• Weekly mentor calls are short and therefore rushed. Mentors don't have time to review your work before you submit it. Yes, you technically have "unlimited" mentor calls, but those are with a different mentor who is not up to speed on your project, and they are also limited to 30 minutes. Hour-long calls would have been sufficient.
• If you do not have a background in visual design, you may struggle with this program as there is little training in visual design, however, I know Springboard now has a UX/UI career track, which I'd recommend if you need help with visual design. 
• They do not help with job placement, but do provide career coaching for 6 months after you're done the program.

I had an amazing experience with the Data Science Career Track. The 1:1 weekly mentor calls really helped me stay on track with course materials as well as help with any questions I had with anything related to data science and applying for jobs. I received help with resume review, cover letters, job search, and interview questions, on top of Capstone Project help. 

One slight negative I experienced was the career coaches. I would have preferred to have the same career coach throughout my Springboard experience, but the first coach I signed up with ended up getting transferred to a different career track. So I signed up for a second career coach, and she ended up getting transferred as well. The third career coach I signed up for ended up being my favorite of the three anyway, so things worked out. 

Finally, I was on the deferred tuition plan with a job guarantee, which means I paid nothing until I landed a job. Which Springboard helped me with! In under a year, I was able to switch professions and land a role as a Data Analyst in a tech start up.

The Data Science Career Track program at Springboard provides an in depth curriculum to gain conceptual and practical understanding of tackling data science problems. Each unit provides interactive and lecture based content that helps teach the necessary tools and topics for each step in a data science process. In addition, mentorship is provided as you will get to take lead of two capstone projects to use the skills from the curriculum, which is a huge plus for your portfolio.  Career based resources are provided throughout the program, such as resume/cover letter building, networking, and interview prep which was a huge help in the job seeking process. Overall, the program will help students understand and confidently approach all sorts of data science problems and challenges, as well as, prepare you to get a data science or analyst position. 

I was initially very nervous when I started the UX Career Track because it was so new, but the job guarantee and price made it very appealing comapred to other bootcamps. I jumped in and was incredibly surprised by the challenging coursework. 

This course leads you through creating a capstone project of your choosing, which is great because I've heard of other bootcamps giving every student the same projects (doesn't make for very interesting portfolios). They even match students up with a real company to gain some industry experience working in UX. 

Besides the great curriculum that helped me go from not fully understanding what UX is to feeling confident I can do well in a UX position, Springboard provided me with an outstanding mentor who will continue to be a helpful resource for me. They also continue to provide career support after you complete the program, so you're not just left to figure it out on your own. Overall, I think completing this Springboard course was the best thing I could have done to jumpstart my UX career and I can't wait to start my job search. 

I entered the Springboard program (DS career track) in early 2019 after struggling to get a decent job in data science after graduating from college in the spring of 2018, despite having a statistics degree from a reputable university. After graduating from Springboard, I found an extremely satisfying job within a month. The difference in my job hunt pre- and post-Springboard was pretty much that, while this program certainly didn't transform me into a 10X data scientist, I was exposed to so many aspects of the data science world that I not only built a solid foundation in data science but I was able to "speak the language" pretty well when I was interviewing afterword. You obviously could try and learn everything on your own, but the great thing about Springboard for me was the mentor they pair you with. Reading a textbook/website is one thing, but having someone help you develop an intuition for solving data-centric problems is something else. Completely. 

I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but the mentor I was paired with, AJ Sanchez, was worth the price of admission alone. Throughout the many months I was in this program, there wasn't a single question he couldn't answer. Not only that, but he's extremely personable, he's a role model both as a person and a data scientist, and speaking with him was something I looked forward to every week. You'd think someone as smart as him would be intimidating or impatient, but that was not the case whatsoever.

My only issue with Springboard was that I frequently found myself needed to reference many materials and textbooks that weren't in the curriculm. However, I've also needed to do this in pretty much every other math-related class I've ever taken, so this 'issue' I guess isn't really an issue with Springboard at all because it just was not reasonable to expect them to somehow predict and curate the best curriculm for me before the fact. You obviously have to put the work in, and for me that meant doing a little extra digging on concepts that weren't immediately intuitive to me based on the provided materials. 

Anyway, I hope this helps for whoever is reading. I assume you're also doing research on other data science academys/bootcamps, like I did, and while I can only talk about Springboard, I was not disappointed with my choice. Definitley wouldn't have taken the time to write this out if I didn't think it would help someone else.

I had an amazing experience with springboard. I had a rocky stary because I didn't match well with my mentor and it was causing some issues. Springboard took care of everything in a really professional and compassionate manner. They rematched me with a mentor that was a much better fit and I loved my experience from then on! I really enjoyed everyone that I interacted with, from the advisors to the career coaches and the mentors! I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a bootcamp!