Devmountain

Here is what I would advise someone about to go through the program:
1. Don't start your cohort without finishing basecamp! I took this lightly and regret it. Everything included in basecamp will set you up for success throughout the program. If you are... Read More struggling with the content, don't be afraid to reach out to the school or your assigned mentor and ask for help.
2. Ask questions! Especially in the first 3 weeks, make a goal to ask at least 3 questions/day (even if you feel like you understand the concepts).
3. Complete all of the mini and afternoon projects. This might mean that you are spending a lot of time after hours. If you complete the projects and still feel fuzzy on the concepts, repeat them as many times as it takes. Expect to not have a social life during the program.
4. Have fun! Get to know the people in your cohort as early as you can so that you feel more comfortable asking questions and have resources outside of the DevMountain staff.

Other things to note:
1. 90% of the time you will be taught and mentored by people who have been through the program, NOT people who have actually worked in the industry. This is my one gripe about DevMountain. I thought they would at least have guest speakers come and speak to the cohorts but nope, just previous DM grads.
2. This program is CHALLENGING. Don't give up. There may be times in the beginning where you feel like you will never understand, but I promise you will if you stick with it.
3. Don't go into the program with the expectation of getting a job right after. Turns out it's actually really difficult to get your first job in the industry. The number of jr. developers is increasing with the rising popularity of bootcamps which means you will have a lot of competition.

I attended the same cohort for DevMountain as the original reviewer and I absolutely agree with everything mentioned, it was pretty spot on. I just wanted to add a couple tips and information, from my point of view, for prospective students. If you are... Read More considering joining, especially after reading mentioned review, the most important thing is that you are motivated, a hard-worker, and above everything else, persistent.
The program can be tough, there might be times where you question yourself, skip work because you are exhausted(the alternative or trying to do the work while exhausted rarely worked for me), and maybe even think about quitting. I never considered leaving the program, but certain projects and challenges during the cohort really made me wonder, "what's the point?" Forcing myself to push through and accomplishing challenges that seem near impossible was HUGE for me in so many way, I was resilient.
The program was absolutely one of the greatest things I have done in my life and I believe it can be the same for you. I also recommend joining the program without an ego and, maybe most important, try not to compare yourself to others. Everyone has their own pace, learn in different ways. It is absolutely pointless and has no merit when applying for jobs(in my opinion) and will end up hurting you more than helping. When you are in interviews, often all they care about is how much/how well you know your stuff, not where you started.
At the end of the day, I'd recommend DevMountain to anyone interested, I'm glad I went. Everything might not have been EXACTLY what I expected, I feel like a completely different(better) person and a solid coder. Considering where I started, it is a huge accomplishment for me.
By the way, when I first signed up I knew very little about coding(I had taken one very basic HTML/CSS class in college), and when I found out I'd be learning Javascript I thought, "Great I've always heard about Java, finally I get to see what it is all about!" The programming language Javascript is completely different from Java.
One last note, I personally feel that it is very important that you are joining for the right reasons, not just an easy avenue to a career where you can make a lot of money. You cannot fake passion and that is often what employers are looking for.

I had a great experience at DevMountain. I was able to polish the skills I already had as well as learn a ton of useful skills for the web industry. DevMountain focuses on relevant technologies and practices that are actually used in the industry. It... Read More is the best way to jump into making web apps. I highly recommend DevMountain to anyone interested in starting a career as a web developer.

When I enrolled in the DevMountain Web Immersive Bootcamp, I had less than 6-months of self-taught coding experience so I was pretty 'Green' walking in on my first day. In the beginning, it was information overload and difficult to stay-on-track. It required... Read More staying late, re-doing the afternoon projects for clarification and a bunch of questions. As the bootcamp moved forward through the first 6 weeks, we covered Javascript in-depth, React in-depth, Redux, Massive, Node, Express, HTML/CSS (briefly) and Axios for server-requests. After the first 6 weeks, there was an interim break week and we came back to starting our personal projects. There was solid rubric that described options and features to include in your project to get the necessary points. After the two weeks of personal projects, we presented and then began to get our hands dirty with actual CS theories, sorting methods and then spent a few days working on Angular. Then some down time for a week where it seemed the bootcamp didn't know what to cover so they just let us work or review the things that we wanted to individually. To finish the bootcamp, we had two weeks dedicated to group projects and the last week focused on career preparation (there were career prep materials that we covered throughout the full 12-weeks).

With the course curriculum laid out for you, you can see that the school covers a lot of relevant and useful programs that are extremely helpful to looking for jobs. Having said that, my personal experience found that the curriculum was great but the resources, at the time, weren't what I expected. We would go through the lecture but afterwards we were left on our own. Now, of course, we as future developers need to learn how to fend for ourselves but at the same time, paying over $10,000 made me feel like I should have been guided gracefully through all the material. There were multiple mentors that were great at helping out but it was extremely tough and stressful. At the end of the bootcamp, though, you realize that had you been gracefully guided, you would be a lot worse off when out in the real-world looking for a job. So at the end of the day, if you're thinking about going to DevMountain or any Bootcamp for that matter, you need to be prepared for a tough road. And I don't mean tough road because the Bootcamp isn't teaching you well, I mean a tough road because Web Development is not an easy industry to get into or be efficient in once you are. So overall, I think DevMountain was a great school. I highly recommend it.

Dev Mountain was fantastic. I appreciated the learning style, the pace and the staff. The facility alone is one to die for! I went from a computer science degree, to drop out to full time web developer in a matter of months once I decided I wanted to... Read More attend Dev Mountain. Thanks to them I was able to "Learn how to learn" and improve my skills in any way I wanted to. I continue to learn new things daily in my career thanks to the patterns and tools that Dev Mountain provided for me.

After two years of college, I began to realize that I wasn't progressing as fast as I would have liked. I wanted to find a way to jumpstart my career in the tech industry. While researching bootcamps, I came across DevMountain's Immersive Web Development... Read More program and was intrigued. I saw that all the reviews on every site I searched were great, so I quickly applied.

The application process was easy and fast. You have to fill out an application online that takes around 5 minutes, and then do a 5-10 minute phone interview with someone on their admissions team. After I did that, it was about a week before I was emailed my acceptance letter.

My cohort started in January 2017, in the middle of winter in Provo, Utah. DevMountain offers free housing as a perk to all of their immersive students, which I took advantage of despite only living an hour away. I'm glad I did. The extra two hours of study time every day really helped me succeed while at DevMountain.

The course was even better than I expected. The director of DevMountain's web program, Jeremy, is an incredibly smart man, and I learned a lot from him. He makes sure that the curriculum is always on top of current industry needs, and that only the best instructors and mentors are brought onto the team. The course starts pretty fast. Day 1 is mostly an introduction to how the next 12 weeks of your life are going to be, but Day 2 is time to hit the ground running.

The information is a lot to take in all at once, and I imagine it must be really hard for those who have had no prior development experience, but as long as you complete all of the required pre-course work, you should be fine. The only people who really struggled in my cohort were the ones who hadn't bothered with the pre-course work. The first couple weeks are mostly just diving deeper into CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, which is what you are expected to learn beforehand. This is why it's so critical to do the pre-course work, otherwise, you'll be weeks behind starting Day 1.

The second 3 weeks of the course focused on Learning Angular.js, Node.js, and SQL, although I recently heard they switched from teaching Angular.js to React. During these first 6 weeks, the mentors are always there to help you learn and guide you when you need it. Every class has 3-4 mentors for the students to take advantage of.

The last 6 weeks of the course are mostly spent building projects with your newly acquired skills, so you can better solidify what you learned in class. You will spend a couple weeks building your own personal project by yourself and with your mentors' help, and then another two weeks working with a group to build an even bigger project. The only real bad experience I had during DevMountain was during my group project. One of the guys I was grouped with had serious work ethic issues, and never really contributed to our project. It was clear to me that he hadn't really grasped much throughout the first 6 weeks of the course, and was just struggling to get by.

The good news coming from this is that DevMountain allows you to take longer than 12 weeks if you need. They have a program for people who are struggling through the course, where you can go to get help to better understand the concepts that you missed for a few weeks, and then rejoin normal classes again once you feel comfortable. The guy in my group's issue was that he hadn't really taken advantage of this, and instead had dropped the course entirely for a few weeks, and then came back.

Overall, I had an amazing experience at DevMountain and I'm very glad that I went. After graduating, I was actually offered a job working for the company. Don't let that information change your judgment though. I now have my dream job, making a decent amount of money.

Conclusion: If you know you can put your life down for 3 months, you're headstrong, hard-working, and determined, DevMountain can do great things for you.
If you know you have too much going on to completely focus on this and nothing else, or you have poor work ethics, it will be harder for you to make it through the course. It may not do you as much good, but I've still seen some with similar cases succeed.

Know that I had a great experience at DevMountain, so this is coming from someone who had a positively life changing experience.

Pretty much everything that you read up on DevMountain is true, and so your general expectations of the course will be met.... Read More But that is only if your expectation is met with hard work ethic. There were a few things that weren't what I expected going into the course. I would honestly say that some of these things are bootcamp expectations and not specifically just DevMountain expectations.

-Learn how to learn. Yes, I wish there were more one-on-one instruction (dont we all want a personal help buddy 24/7) but understand that coding is a primarily self-driven activity. The mentors are like TAs, and they are there to help you through your most pressing issues, but something I quickly realized was that I needed to learn how to learn. How to teach myself more than anything.

- Pair programming is hard. Sometimes you are paired with someone unlike you. Some who does things differently than the way of doing things. For example, someone who is outgoing, patient, and a fast coder, vs someone who is a slower programmer, and takes more time. This happened from time to time and it was frustrating.

- Fast learning and raw logical-thinking speed. People have different abilities and therefore catch on quicker than others. Just know some people get things right away, and others dont.

- There is no silver platter. What I have noticed is that there are some students who just don't want to put in work, studying, practice, and mastery to get to a point of being successful. There is no silver platter. I learned this on the second day of class when I saw people complaining about work they were asked to do.

- You will get frustrated. The frustration dragged me down mentally, and my attitude totally shifted on days when this happened. But I will say, I improved at my "teamwork" and collaborative abilities through the whole course. But if you're the kind of person who can weather these sorts of things and keep your head up, then good on ya. I think you are more built for a bootcamp.

-The tech culture suits some people and it doesn't suit others. My particular personality jived with it really well. I am very interested in tech. I have heard the tech culture being compared to the "TJ" type by myers-briggs classification.

- You will actually have a fun time. In general, from what I've observed, DevMountain students have an awesome time there. Socially, culturally, and within the education. It is a great environment. Though overworked and mentally drained, you will really bond closely with your fellow class mates and learn from each other.

Overall, DevMountain is definitely a fantastic choice for a bootcamp, and you can't go wrong with it. Hopefully, my assumptions and expectations that were off will be helpful for all future DevMountain students.