UNC-Chapel Hill Boot Camps

UNC Chapel Hill's Coding Bootcamp was an excellent learning experience. The instructors were highly knowledgable and the course curriculum was build well, with students learning new things every week and continual building on the week before. By the end of it, we were creating applications of near professional quality.

The Career Services also helps this program stand out from others. After graduating, you will have the option to continue to receive one-on-one guidance and have access to networking events with employers. You'll be working on your resume and interview skills as well and be better prepared for the job hunt.

If there are any issues, it's only that the policy for remote attendence was changed mid-course and made things confusing for a while. Ideally you don't NEED to be remote often (this course specifically requires your attendance in the class room as much as possible) but only having 4 days of remote attendence can make your 5th sick day rather tense. As someone who commuted pretty far to the class, confusion around the policy made things difficult, but the student success manager was willing to work with me and address my needs.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this course and feel that I stand a better chance of succeeding than I did before.

Going into this bootcamp, I had some doubts if it was going to be as good as some of the well known bootcamps like Hack Reactor, Flatiron School, etc. You can be rest assured that is as good as all of them. I was lucky enough to have an amazing instructor and TAs throughhout this class. 

I went into this class not knowing anything and I am coming out of this class in 3-4 weeks fully confident that I can get a Jr Developer job anywhere. This confidence did not come without having some ups and downs. This class is fast and slow. It's fast when the syntax is unfamiliar, but slow when it's builiding on a foundation of existing knowledge (that you will learn). 

I quit my full time job to pursue the 24-week program and I have absolutely no regrets. I don't think that I could've done this with a full time job in all honestly. Because I had so much time on my hands, I had more time to undertstand everything, learn additional skills from Udemy/TeamTreehouse, and polish every homework assignment I was given.

My biggest advice to newcomers is to really focus on polishing every homework assignment you get. Your HW assignments are the deciding factor of landing your first job, so it's a big deal. You will be a stronger front-end developer than a back-end developer because you start learning front-end development first, so you have about 33% more exposure to it all throughout the bootcamp.

I did not use the career services side of this bootcamp at all because I felt the HW and new concepts each week kept me way too busy to divert any attention away. But I don't feel like I missed out. If you're getting overwhelmed, at least make every attempt to do the very last career milestone HW before you graduate. I thought my portfolio, Github, LinkedIn, and resume were on point until their feedback opened my eyes. 

So in closing, this class is for anyone of zero experience wanting to learn how to code. This class will give you a superpower. 

Now that I have taken this class, I can honestly say that I could not have done this on my own. I needed the push. The HW deadlines. The clutch of TAs. After having gone through this class, I feel like I can learn any additional new skill on my own.

Good luck!

I graduated from the Coding Bootcamp at UNC Chapel-HIll as a part of the November 2018 cohort. Putting aside my own work ethic and willingness to succeed, I was blessed with instructors, Alper and Randy. Each class it could be seen that that each of their passions for software development was only exceeded by their love of teaching it to others. It was with their dedication that I learned how to approach learning new technologies. I believe this is one of the most important aspects of the bootcamp that I like to share with potential new students. Alot will becoming at you, from noSQL/SQL databases to jQuery and React, and you may not understand it at the first go around. That's ok. You'll have ample opportunites through projects to gain deeper insights. However, the consistent theme that is being reinforced is "Are you showing progress to where you can work within a language, a library, a framework that you haven't been exposed to in the bootcamp and succeed for the employer or client that's asking for it to be a part of the end result?" 

I can say '100%' that the bootcamp has done this for me. I'm currently continuing to build my skills. In December I became an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and I'm working towards the Developer certification. I'm diving deeply into React, Next.js, and Amazon Aurora (SQL database). All of these skills and opportunites have opened up for me due to the bootcamp. I owe a great many "thank you"s to my awesome TA's Tim, Zach, and Noah as well. I couldn't have done it without them. 

For you, the reader, my advice is invest in yourself by enrolling in the bootcamp and having a singular focus. It is tough, but most things that are rewarding are. 

Peace.  

This program is rigorous! The first week covers fundamentals of HTML & CSS and the following week requires you to apply and incorporate them in the foundations of a personal portfolio. Frameworks and languages change frequently, often per homework assignment. Assignments are cumulative, so expect to continuously apply what you’ve learned from to week to week. . The pace of the curriculum steadily increases, and will challenge you both physically and mentally.

However, there is an immense amount of support available not only from the instructor and TAs, but the Student Success Coach and the Career Service Counselor. The instructional support team welcomes questions and feedback, and will walkthrough the material at your request. The team strives to be available in-person before and after classes, and via Slack.

By the end of the course, you will have had the opportunity to build your portfolio, making it responsive and mobile-ready with Bootstrap; demonstrating JavaScript and jQuery interactivity; utilizing database architecture with both structured SQL and non-relational noSQL types, like Mongo, and eventually incorporating cutting-edge frameworks like React. Instructors will help you ensure your portfolio demonstrates the breadth of knowledge gained from this course as well as incorporate your own style.

How much you want to learn and apply is entirely up to you. You can do the basics or you can push yourself by taking advantage of tutorials and choosing the more challenging homeworks over the basic requirements. Creativity and teamwork play important roles in this course.  While homework assignments are independent, you’re encouraged to discuss concepts with your classmates. Unlike homeworks, projects are completed as a team--consisting of 3-5 classmates. With that being said, teamwork also requires a great deal of scheduling and time management. With the challenges this course presents, it’s best to take initiative and ask for help early from the instructors or your classmates.  Overall, this course is super challenging, but super worth it. After this course, you’ll come away with a ton of new knowledge and skills and a portfolio that shows it. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll make a few friends along the way.

Ultimately with this course you can develop your proficiency and growth, and cultivate a team-oriented mindset as well.

Challenging yourself is the key with this bootcamp. I wholeheartedly recommend this course to all skill levels from novice to intermediate, or anyone looking to build a full-stack web application from scratch for your portfolio.

I couldn't be happier to have gone through this program. It was grueling but I had so much fun that the intensity hardly mattered at all. 

To go from only the most basic html and css knowledge to building complex full stack applications with polished UIs, easy to consume API endpoints, fully functional databases, etc in less than six months is something I hardly believed I'd be able to do. However, the teaching staff and curriculum of this program got me there.

I'd recommend this program to anyone serious about learning to write software. I'd also recommend it to anyone willing to work as hard as they've probably ever worked in the span of 6 months to learn really cool technology. 

The program was one of the best investments I've ever made in myself. I have the utmost respect and appreciation for the people who went through it with me and the teaching/support staff that got me through it.

I applied to the Coding Boot Camp at UNC after about two years of deliberating whether this was the path for me and researching various programs around the country. My introduction to programming came in 2013, when I took CompSci 101 during my senior year of college. Between then and starting this program, I had done zero actual programming. This course helped take my coding skills from zero to highly competent and fully capable in a matter of months. 

The in-person instruction, the extended timeframe, the namebrand recognition, and the varied curriculum attracted me to this program, and I was not disappointed. I couldn't recommend it any more highly to someone considering a full-stack web development boot camp. 

In my opinion, the most significant takeaway is a broad and strong foundation in several technologies, which has been established by your instructors and your newfound ability to self-teach complex topics and tackle new challenges through a programmatic lense.

After completing this camp, I feel like I can take myself from total noob to capable coder in whatever technology I need to accomplish an objective. On top of that, I've got a sizable portfolio of work and a hunger to build all kinds of cool things with code. 

Big thanks to everyone involved in my cohort's admininstration!

UNC Coding Bootcamp has taught me so much, I went from not knowing HTML to learning and building a full React app. It was challenging at first but I stuck it out and pushed through it. I signed up for a tutor and forced myself to stay consistent every week. The instructional team was wonderful and very supportive. Lisa, our student success manager was wonderful, she was always there if you needed to talk. If I could change one thing about my experience I would commit to working closely with career services early on. Since graduating, I am now working with my profile coach to update my resume and portfolio to help me land my dream job.

This program was one of the most rewarding educational experiences I have ever gone through. The course is fast paced and challenging, but if you are looking to understand how to build a web application from the ground up, this program will give you the tools.  

The instructional team was knowledgeable and friendly.  They did a great job of breaking down complicated concepts into understandable pieces.  Additionally, I appreciated that they would thoroughly review your code to provide feedback and encourage best practices.  

The course does a great job of giving students the knowledge needed to succeed in building actual applications.  How far you take those applications though will be on you.  Their goal is to give you the building blocks upon which you can establish a successful developing skillset.  

The course will not teach you every programming language.  However, it does teach you how to approach learning new skills, implementing tools, and understanding other documentation.  It is very much the "teach you how to fish" model. 

If you are looking to learn how to build an actual web application and are willing to put in the work, I would highly recommend this program.  

I had an excellent experience with the UNC Full Stack Flex program.

After 8 years in a career pushing paper for the government, I decided I couldn't live that mundane cubicle life any longer. I had no previous coding experience outside a couple Codecademy tutorials before the session started, and the Monday following graduation I started a new position at a local software development company as a Software Engineer.

I put in many (many... many... many...) hours of study and practice during those 6 months, and I'd bet that just about anyone who put in that level of extraordinary effort is highly likely to get extraordinary results as well.

My instructor was outstanding! He had an unbelievable ability to explain new concepts as if I was 5, as well as illustrate high level programming paradigms in a way that I could process. 

What I consider to be the best feature of this bootcamp is the curriculum. Some would argue that coding bootcamps can't teach you anything you couldn't learn on your own freely. Although I respect that opinion, I believe it to only be true in theory.

This bootcamp hit all of the essential highlights for the skills required of employable developers today -- in a time frame and at a skill level that I (and I'd say others) wouldn't be able to achieve on their own.

I wouldn't say that everyone should be a developer... but if you do want to be a developer, this bootcamp can certainly be the roadmap to a new career in the least possible amount of time. 

I attended The Coding Boot Camp at UNC-Chapel Hill beginning May 2018 and ending Nov 2018.  I enjoyed this experience tremendously; however to me it was very tough.  I had been a programmer for 20 years, but then got laid off and knew that I needed some extra training on newer technologies for the future.  I did the "Full Stack Developer" track.  My recommendation is that if you pick up on things very fast, this will go well for you.  If you have a background coding in IT, that will help.  I struggled because I'm a "smart" normal person (not a genius), and I needed a little more time working with the technologies in order to get good at them.  But of course, we only had 6 months.  The instructor was very nice and very knowledgeable about everything.  He did speak with an accent, but it was not too difficult to understand (he is from Turkey).  I thought the price was very reasonable compared with some I had checked into.  But if you decide to do this, make sure that you GET A TUTOR, especially for the back-end.  You will probably need it.  I spent as much time and more than a full-time job doing this.  The frustration was when I got stuck on something and needed help.  Usually the TAs will help out before, during, and after class, but on slack it was hard to find someone who could help.  And I lived over an hour away.

Overall, WOW! What an experience. I literally changed my life! Trilogy has been awesome and everyone in the process is so supportive. You NEED TO PUT THE WORK IN! This course is FAST, HARD, INTENSE, and IN DEPTH! But, if you are willing to put the hours in every single week (30 - 40+) you will succeed and be on the way to new levels of personal and career success and opportunity. I just finished the boot camp and would totally do it again! In fact, I loved it so much I begin TA'ing for the program next week! If you want to take a chance at a better life and want to push yourself to put the work in and learn the technologies presented in class the decision to take the boot camp is a no brainer! 

I just graduated from the UNC Coding Bootcamp about a week ago and it's one of the best things I've ever done for myself. The class was HARD, no joke, when they tell you the pace is fast, believe them...it's FAST!

However, if you hold on for the ride and just embrace it, you will come out at the end with a huge foundation of knowledge. I've talked to several developer friends who are very impressed with the material I've learned (the volume and also the fact that the material is actually relevant and currently in high demand within the industry).

My instructor was great...personable, knowledgable, funny, easy to talk to, he was always available to answer questions or re-explain a concept. He really made the class fun...I always looked forward to it. Plus, we had two TA's in our class, and I had a personal tutor I met with on Zoom every week (included in the program). I also really loved the connections I made with my fellow students, we bonded quickly and were always helping each other out as well. Plenty of resources were made available when we needed extra help.

I am not yet an expert (I had zero experience with web dev when I started), but I have a really solid foundation now. There are concepts I need to review again, I need to keep learning, but there's A LOT that I know how to do and that feels amazing!

This experience will be what you make of it...you will need to put in a lot of work outside of class time. Everyone is different, but I would have had a very difficult time keeping up with class if I had been working full time. Do yourself a favor and get a head start with webistes like W3Schools.com and freecodecamp.org...especially if you're a newbie. That is something I wish I would have done, it would have really helped to atleast be familiar with terms and concepts before day one. 

The only not great experience for me was career services...but again, this is what you make of it. We never got a chance to meet the career people in person and that doesn't work with my personality. I felt they were removed and not really a part of the whole experience. Because of this, I didn't participate fully in this aspect of the class. I'm sure if I had tried harder, I would have gotten more out of it...but I just never felt a connection with those folks, so it wasn't all that helpful to me.

Overall, I am 100% glad I took this class, zero regrets. I have gained SO much knowledge, met so many great people and I know that I have the skills I need to get a job I love and earn a great living!