UCF Boot Camps

I attended this last year for one of the sessions at the Orlando campus. It was a horrible experience. They do a tremendous job marketing this as a life changing experience for those with little to no coding experience, but realistically it's a disaster if you have no previous coding experience.

I had signed for one of the courses that had classes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons along with Saturday morning with an instructor (Bob) and it was a fiasco. He has no previous teaching experience, so he's not a very good instructor. He knows how to code, but he doesn't know how to teach to code.

The TA's weren't that helpful, as there's a ton of students and there's only a handful of TA's (about 2-3 max per course).

The worst part is that they'll give you excercise and expect you to learn in 5 minutes before they continue along and if you get lost, then hey, you get lost. It doesn't matter to them as they already have your $8,000 (if you sign up early) or $9,500 if you sign up later.

There were people in class with previous coding backgrounds, so they knew a lot, so the instructor would pace the class around them, which as a mess for those of us without that much previous experience.

I got visibly frustrated a lot and one of the instructor (Bob) one day noticed and told me if I felt uncomfortable, to get up and go home if I wanted to as it was only going to get harder... Really?!?! That's the best advice you can give someone who's paid their hard earned money to attend this disaster?

I continually kept in contact with the organizer (Ricky Cuellar) as my reviews of the course continued being negative. Once I informed him I wouldn't be attending anymore, he just sent me the links to the YouTube videos with the excercises and I never heard back from them again, plus I couldn't get a refund as I had already stayed a month hoping I could catch along, but it was impossible the mess they had already made.

Overall, one of the worst experiences of my life. I totally regret handing over $9K of my hard earned money to these people. Avoid at all cost.

My experience with UCF Boot Camps - Full Stack Web Development has been nothing short of fantastic! This course built on my fundamental understandings and supplied critical information that has significantly supplemented my frontend, backend and database skills. The course specifically provides real world challenges to complete that greatly assist in the learners journey to becoming an effective problem solver with the MERN technology stack. Working with the instructors, TA's and tutors has also been a wonderful experience. The instructor continuously supplied high value discussions, examples, real world scenarios and demonstrations that clearly and efficiently impacted the learning process in a significant way. With access to TA's and tutors that were knowledgeable and experienced, difficult topics were elucidated quickly in a way that kept me on track for success and provided the necessary support to allow for a high rate of information retention. Overall between the course material, instructor and student support I highly recommend this course for anyone looking to move into engineering in the web development space for end to end solutions with light weight but highly effective technology stack.  

Completing the Data Analytics and Visualization Bootcamp was truly transformative, exceeding my expectations. The program's hands-on approach equipped me with comprehensive skills, from data cleaning to advanced visualization, providing a strong foundation for the dynamic field of data analytics.

The well-structured curriculum, led by knowledgeable instructors, simplified complex concepts with real-world examples. The emphasis on industry-standard tools allowed me to apply my skills immediately, and the collaborative learning environment enhanced the overall experience.

The support from teaching assistants and the program's community was exceptional, fostering a supportive atmosphere. The program also contributed to my confidence in applying my newfound skills in my current job.

In conclusion, this program not only broadened my skill set but also laid the groundwork for my successful career in data analytics. Highly recommended for those seeking a comprehensive and practical learning experience.

This review will be long and easy to dismiss after the first couple of sentences for lack of time, but I promise that this will be the rawest and most truthful review you will read on this page.

After a lifetime of trauma, pain, and abusing alcohol I went into rehab in South Dakota to treat my alcoholism and start a new life. Upon graduating from the rehabilitation program I pursued my lifelong dream of moving to Florida. There, I met my husband, and together we brought my beautiful, intelligent, spicey daughter into the world. My previous education and passion had brought me into the world of Veterinary medicine as a Veterinary Technician where I found myself exhausted and overwhelmed, unable to enjoy time with family. I quickly realized that to enjoy watching my daughter grow I needed a change. A passing, "What if?" brought me to the homepage of the University of Central Florida as I read about these "boot camps" I had been hearing about. Before the end of the day, I was on the phone giggling and swapping stories with an admissions counselor for the University. An important thing to note, I have severe clinical social anxiety and it's very hard for me to hold a conversation longer than 10 minutes; I had signed up for a phone call with this counselor, chickened out, and canceled. By the end of the hour, my phone rang with a call from this counselor, eager to bring me into the wonderful world of the University of Central Florida's full-stack coding boot camp. Without her, this story would have ended here. I thank God every day now for that woman.

If you're still with me, you might be asking if I'm ever going to get to the review of the boot camp itself. We're there, folks- thanks for hanging in there. My boot camp began with the pre-work. This was a class to prepare me for the boot camp itself. I was crying by the end of it. My submission comment for the last activity in the boot camp was, "I have no idea what I'm doing :(". I walked into the boot camp on day one defeated, broken, and pessimistic about my capabilities. But I was coming up on 9 months of sobriety at that point and knew that if I committed to believing in myself, I could get through this. Within minutes, we were off to the races. We met our Student Success Manager, Barbara Murphy. She radiated confidence- I could see in the webcam of each of my classmates that we were scooting closer and closer to the computer as Barbara prepared us for greatness. Then, she passed us off to our professor, JW Dinsmore.

Professor Dinsmore can be best described as the King of Hype. As royalty myself, being the Queen of Pessimism and Self Doubt, I was excited within seconds of him talking to get started. I can't discredit his ability to be realistic, however. He cautioned us that this would be the hardest thing we would do in our lives, and he wasn't wrong. I was hesitant at first about how one professor could handle teaching a two-year degree in three months, especially with approximately 55 other students. John came well equipped, though, with some amazing developers at his side in the form of teacher's assistants. Seth Wooten, Ross McWey, Donaldson Roessling, and Mark Elliott took us under their wing and guided us through the program's highs and lows with all the faith in the world that each of us could come out of this boot camp as complete rockstars and ready to jump into the industry of full stack developing. And we did.

While attending the bootcamp I experienced a number of hardships. I lost my home, moved across the state, was hit by two hurricanes, developed a seizure disorder, gone to the hospital and multiple occassions, and only have a roof over my family's head because of the selflessness of my in-laws. All of my belongings are currently in a storage unit and we're living out of a suitcase. Internet access has been difficult to maintain and I fell extremely behind in my coursework. Through all of this, my professor, TA's, and student success manager have supported me as I raced like The Flash through my coursework to catch up. With my social anxiety, I was finding it difficult to ask for help and they noticed me falling behind and suffering in silence and proactively sought to help me. Finding that kind of help in continuing education over remote learning is critical, essential, and life changing. Without their support and the help of my fellow classmates, this life changing opportunity would have fallen through my fingers and I would have had to return to the long suffering business of Veterinary Medicine. (Off topic, folks, but please be kind to your veterinary professionals. The suicide rate in that industry is the number one in the world and seven times the rate of it's succeeder for a reason. If you're still reading at this point, thank you, and please consider sending those amazing people flowers, healthy food, and caffeine.)

I truly can't describe the transition each of my classmates and I went through from day one at the boot camp to now, a week before the presentation day of our final projects. A day one activity, for example, was changing the main header to read, "Student Bio". I'm now working on building my react portfolio and trying to add the game "Duck Hunt" to it. We're all sharing our portfolios with each other and amazed at the creativity, skill, and talent that shows in each portfolio. As God is a witness because I've said it in my prayers for their success if I had Elon Musk's fortune to build a programming company I would hire every single one of my classmates. There aren't enough adjectives in the English language to describe them. They're artists, engineers, teachers, postal workers, Uber drivers, anime enthusiasts, comedians, and family. Our cohort is strong and laced with friendship, respect, and comradery. And now they can add one more adjective to them- developers. God bless, classmates. This was a wild, exciting ride and I'm so grateful I got to do it with all of you as Knights from the University of Central Florida.

Originally, I was a little skeptical when i signed up for this bootcamp. I'd been reading reviews and researching online to find out what exactly I would gain from this program, and there seemed to be a 50/50 split between those who said it help and those who felt it was a waste. People told me that I would be about to teach myself everything that i would learn in the program, and at little to no cost when compared to the tuition that I would have to pay to attend (I can promise that is not the case). Since you're reading this review, you can tell i obviously went through with the program (the full-time cohort), and i can confidently say that it was the best decision i've ever made. The amount of material that was covered was astounding, and the help that you were able to receive from the staff if you were stuck was second to none. They refused to allow you to quit or fall behind because despite what other people had wrote, they want to see you succeed more than anyone else. That being said, you still need to work your butt off and it is still one of the most challenging things you will ever do. In the end though, it makes you realize just how much you are capable of if you take the time to really dedicate yourself.

John Dinsmore was the instructor for my cohort, and is one of the most capable and competent individuals i've ever met in the software development field. His knowledge of Full-Stack Development and Web Development is so extensive, its hard to image how one person could know so much. He also has had so many experiences in so many different fields that he can pretty comfortably talk about just about anything with confidents. He showed up every day with a smile ready to tackle whatever the subject was that day, and easily handled any problems we threw his at him. He never quit or gave up once he started on an issue, and always saw it through until the end.

Dan Rosenbaum was out TA for the class and was one of the best resources that we had at our disposal. He pushed us when we thought we were never going to succeed and kept us going when we became frustrated with a topic. He made sure that we stuck with it and that we believed in ourselves as much as him and John believed in us. He made sure that we knew that with practice and dedication we would make it through and could become awesome developers.  Dan was a big part of my success in this course, and i cant say enough how lucky we were to have him with us during that time.

Gemini Sanford was our SSM (Student Success Manager) during this time, and she was constantly checking in on us to make sure that we were doing well and had all the tools we needed to succeed. She was available day and night, and never turned away a student who needed help. She cheered us on every week, and put us in contact with individuals to help us grow as we went through the program. She truly loves her job and is a huge asset for this program.

The last thing i will say is this program is a huge time commitment and the full-time program should not be taken if you intend to also work while doing it, so take the 6-month program if that is what you want. The program is not for those looking for an easy track to big money and YOU GET OUT WHAT YOU PUT IN. You are given everything you need to succeed, but it is up to you to use it. You CAN NOT slack off and you need to put in the work. You NEED to make connections and you NEED to be there for the right reasons. If you go in half hearted then things will not end well. My experience was great because i knew this is what i wanted to do and i was surrounded by awesome individuals. I went in telling myself i would succeed.

We run a multi-million dollar business and struggle with social media marketing. We were considering hiring a social media manager but came across an ad for the Digital Marketing Boot Camp and jumped on it. We are at the halfway point of the class and haven't even begun the Social Media unit, but I have already learned so much and have applied what I have learned. My favorite aspect so far has been learning how SEO works and Google Analytics. It really helped me understand the improvements we need to make to our website. 
My advice for anyone looking to take this class would be to be dedicated to the program. The boot camp style is fast and packed with information so you will need to spend time outside of class working on homework and projects. Try to be present for office hours so you can review subjects you need more help with. There is tutoring available if you need more help. Be present and interact during class. This program is a great jumping spot to you your feet in the digital marketing world. 

I signed up for the first part-time Data bootcamp in September 2018. I think this was the best opportunity for me, as I prefer in-class to online learning. It was a great learning experience and we had a good group of students for group project. We had different strengths and helped us work well as a team.

Sondra as an instructor was engaging and friendly and helpful. The skills learnt eventually helped me to make the career switch I wanted. It was hard work as I stayed up for late nights for projects. It was all worth it at the end. All the TA's and career services were also helpful, and I hope the job market improves in the Orlando area but things seem to be looking up. 

I think this is great for people in colleges to learn job-relevant skills and also for people like me who needed some different skills to switch role to my interest. I would highly recommend this Bootcamp to people looking for courses in this area.

This is a review on the online "Coding Bootcamp" from UCF. It really should be called "Web Development Bootcamp." It says "Web Development" on their website https://bootcamp.ce.ucf.edu/coding/ but I did not see this page when signing up for the class. This program was a referral to me from a family member and I talked with a recruiter for the class over the phone. I told her what I was looking for (mostly interested in C++ or other low-level programming) but she did not make it clear that it was a web development program. After a little over a month with the six-month program and realizing the direction of it, I wrote a dissatisifed email to the program director asking to be removed with a refund and was told I was not within the 2-week cancellation period so nothing could be done for a refund. I dropped the course still and tried to salvage my investment by speaking with the Career Director to see if I could use their Career Services (helping you set up self-marketing and networking to find work) for IT in general and was told "as a matter of policy, I am unable to work with students who do not complete the program." This was a complete waste of $10,000 which is especially crippling when I am still trying to even start a career.

As for the content of the course, it explains the basics of programming very nicely in the first several lessons where you are given coding challenges to try to solve basic and intermediate mathematical and logical problems within the Ruby language. After that, though, is the HTML section which is horrendously short for what is supposed to be a web development course. The HTML lessons are very rushed to get you into the Ruby on Rails section which is a large portion of the course. You start frequently seeing in the lessons "how this works isn't important" or "this will be explained later" ("later" often being a synonym for "never") which is honestly fine for teaching practices in very subtle moderation but when so much explaination of how Ruby on Rails and HTML works is skipped over and rushed to get you to the end of the class that it becomes so difficult to follow. I found myself looking up my own tutorials online and just clicking the next within the bootcamp website beacause the teaching material just was not there. I did not get far enough into the course to see how teaching Javascript was handled but it's good to see that it's included because Ruby on Rails is a very niche and not widely used framework whereas Javascript is a useful skill in many, many more jobs.

If you are looking to start in web development and make web pages this may be a good choice for you. Personally it's not what I wanted to do. The main reason for the low review is that the bootcamp staff seems to care more about taking your money and keeping it than they are concerned about helping you start a career. Now I have a $10,000 student debt and no job to pay it off. For this reason I will never recommend UCF's programs to anyone.

I've been working as an IT technician for my current company for over a year.  I was looking into growing with the company and I was told Web Development was the way to go.  I taught myself some CSS,HTML and JS, but I felt that I had to show I was serious about my growth I had to enroll in a boot camp.  My company offered me some tuition reimbursement and I signed up at UCF BootCamps. 

So far this has been a great help and experience.  The pace is fast and to the point, great instructors and assistance.  I've learned a lot and fast.  It has help me feel more confident when speaking about moving to the developing team at my company and they are already starting to give me projects while I continue to learn at the bootcamp.

If you arae planning to learn coding a bootcamp is a great choice but be aware that is a lot of work and fast paced environment.  Be ready to spend a lot of time coding and researching.  Time flies and you will have a valuable new skill. 

I attended UCF part-time web dev bootcamp. Although it is fast paced and challenging, I felt the material covered will help me to prepare for the future. I had an excellent intructors, and my TA's were top notch, and I truly believe that my success is because of how thorough and passionate they were about me understanding the material and succeeding. Through out the program carrer service has help get "job ready", and since graduating career service has been in constant contact to go over job option and make sure I am ready to interview.

I have been programming for more years than many of my classmates have been alive... I know this because I finished a final release of my first turn key application just before my son was born, and he is at the far end of the millennials.

Well, I love programming (I will disavow this while debugging at 3 a.m.) but my 'first language' is MS Visual FoxPro 9.0 by way of FoxPro, FoxPro for Mac, FoxBASE, and dBase III.  And now those languages rank with Sanskrit.  I wanted to learn the languages of the web.  I wanted to be able to build applications of the same complexity and usefulness there.  Lots of resources on line...lots of books in my library.  Maybe too many.  Where to begin? 

I attended a local meet up of Girls Do IT, and had a long conversation with a delightful young woman who was 2 weeks away from finishing the UCF Full-Stack Web Development Boot Camp. “It is intense,” she said, “but I’ve learned SO much.” 

I did some research and made the awesome commitment to sign away half a year (and  a  not insignificant amount of money) to attend.  I am now at the half-way point, and consider this to be the best investment in my skill set since I got my MS in Computer Information Systems at NSU.  I am confident that Trilogy has taken the pulse of the industry.  They are teaching the skills that local employers are looking for.  The course builds from front end to back end tools and crafts exercises that cement concepts and build muscle memory.  They don’t go too deep, but make sure you understand the place each tool holds.  The instructors I’ve had are in the industry and know that they are training employees they will want on their teams.

The pace is furious… Don’t miss a class.  Do every exercise.  Watch every video resource.  Do the tutorials.  Get a good study with your classmates.  Leave enough time – more time than you think – to do the homework.   But when you do, pieces begin to fall into place.  You may not realize it at the time, but when you see a tool or technique again (and you will) you’ll realize that you understand it.  And that will give  you confidence in your ability to learn the next new tool, and the next;  development is constantly evolving.

By the time I’ve completed the course, I am confident that I will be able to take my skills in analysis and design, and implement them on the web.  A new tool set,  a new platform, a new way to solve the puzzle.