Fullstack Academy

My thoughts echo many of the other positive reviews on this page. My time at Fullstack (in Chicago) was amazing and the outcomes I've seen since I graduated 1 month ago are unparalleled.

My objective going into Fullstack was to find a job that would allow... Read More me to integrate my background in civil & environmental engineering with software development. At the same time, there were many students in my cohort looking to switch careers completely. I think that's one of the great things about software development...it's ubiquitous! The skills and technologies you'll learn at Fullstack will prepare you to enter any industry, from FinTech to EdTech.

Fullstack's curriculum/setup is great. The first half of the program is lecture-based. During this time, you'll digest A LOT of new information, but you'll also have the chance to apply it immediately (during workshops, labs, and checkpoints), which is a great way to reinforce, retain, and comprehend material. You'll also (almost always) be working in pairs which is a great way to learn from one another. The second half of the program is project-based. You'll have the opportunity to complete 3 projects (which are perfect to show during interviews). The first is an e-commerce site, the second is an individual "hackathon" project, and the third is a capstone project. The first and last projects also give you experience working on a team in an agile environment. This came up a lot during my interviews, and it was great to be able to talk about my experiences conducting daily standup, maintaining a task-board, and creating feature branches/pull requests on Github.

In terms of time commitment, I'd say I spent about 60-80 hours/week total. Class was from 8:30/9:00am-5:00pm everyday, and then I'd usually spend my evenings (which included a 45-minute train ride home) reviewing material, reading documentation, working on personal projects, or completing a task for the day. I would definitely agree with others in saying that you'll get out of this program what you put in. It's a lot of new information and a lot of work, but if you're willing to invest the time an energy into learning, you'll be ecstatic with the results. Overall, I never felt overwhelmed by what I needed to accomplish. Instead, I felt excited and motivated every day to continue learning from my instructors (Collin, Ben & Finn...who were AMAZING) and peers.

In an effort to keep this brief, I'll conclude with a little bit about where I'm at now. As I mentioned, it's been about 1 month since I graduated from Fullstack. Since then, I've received several job offers and accepted one that I'm very excited about. Two of the offers I received were directly from career day at the end of the program. Holly (who's in charge of career success) does a fantastic job bringing in employers, and many students end up getting offers from these companies. Fullstack does a great job helping you feel confident speaking technically about your work, which was a major help during interviews. In several interviews I was asked to give a small presentation on a recent project I'd completed, so having a portfolio of work to choose from was extremely helpful. One more thing I'll note is that throughout my job-search, I surprisingly found my non-traditional background to be a strength. Many employers are looking for people who can bring a unique perspective to their company/product, and to them, bootcamp grads are ideal!

Overall, my experience was wonderful and I would highly recommend Fullstack Academy to anyone looking to attend a bootcamp.

In thinking about how to effectively review my experience at Fullstack, I guess it’s most useful to let my trajectory speak for itself: I attended Fullstack Academy in the fall, graduated in December, and was hired within 2 weeks of graduation as a Junior... Read More Developer at an awesome company. Altogether, Fullstack met and exceeded every expectation I had and I can recommend it without hesitation.

Prior to attending FSA (and more specifically, Grace Hopper), I was a high school math teacher with very iffy coding skills. I knew that I liked to code, and I could write basic for-loops in Ruby. I decided that I wanted a more challenging career and I wanted a skillset that was more in-demand than teaching experience. I talked to a few friends who had attended bootcamps to hear their experiences, and I also spoke to a hiring manager at a tech company, all of whom encouraged me to go for it.

I chose Fullstack for two main reasons: because admissions were competitive, and because of the curriculum. Valuing competitive admissions was a great call: all of the students, fellows, and instructors in my cohort were unfailingly curious, driven, and intelligent. I evaluated the curriculum with the help of some tech friends who recognized that FSA’s curriculum taught skills like React and Redux that were highly in-demand. Once I had my eyes set on Fullstack, I studied, applied, and fortunately was admitted to the Grace Hopper program.

Bootcamp was hard and so much fun. I learned a ton of code (obviously) but also how to pair program effectively, how to work in an agile team, and (probably most importantly) how to read technical documentation. The people at FSA are fantastic, and we hung out every Friday after class.

Finally, the career success support was phenomenal. It was invaluable to have someone examine my resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, personal pitch, and even follow-up emails to companies to ensure that I was putting my best foot forward. In the final week of the program, Holly organized 16 companies that came in to interview us so we could work on our behavioral interview skills. We practiced white-boarding every morning, and we had 1:1 mock technical interviews with feedback afterwards. I felt 100% prepared when I entered the job market because nothing was unexpected.

As you can probably tell from this review, I am so grateful for my time at Fullstack and had a fantastic experience. I would recommend this program to anyone.

I decided to attend Fullstack after over 10 years running people operations. And it was the right decision! If you are planning to make a career switch to coding, Fullstack is an amazing program. The teachers in Chicago are awesome. Ben, Collin, and Finn... Read More taught me how to code, pair program, and develop a complete application with a team. The curriculum is great, focusing only on javascript and its frameworks. When you are about to finish and after graduation, Holly does an excellent job helping you land your first job as a Software Engineer.

There is a lot of demand for Software engineers in Chicago, and Fullstack helps you learn the tools that are in high demand. They help you walk through each step of job searching.

I secured a job within a month of finishing the program. I highly recommend attending Fullstack Academy.

Going to Fullstack Academy was one of the best decisions I've made. I came into the program already having experience with web development, so I was looking for more structured support to take the next step in my career. Even though I had a background... Read More in it, I still learned an incredible amount during my time at Fullstack. The curriculum is designed to challenge everyone and help train you to "learn how to learn." While the program does teach some of the popular frameworks and libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem, I can confidently say that the skills I learned at Fullstack have helped me successfully pick up all sorts of new programming tools afterward. The instructors at Fullstack are extremely knowledgeable, and the entire staff is genuinely invested in students' success. I enjoyed my time on campus, and I would highly recommend Fullstack to anyone looking to get serious about a career in software development.

I graduated from the FSA Chicago immersive program in December 2018. Prior to the program, I worked as an analyst (lots of SQL), but I never went much beyond a CS 101 education during my undergraduate years. Though I knew that I wanted to be involved... Read More in more technical work that required more than my previous education, I wasn't ready to commit to a 2 year masters program. Fullstack served as a way for me to gain the skills needed to place me in the industry without the time commitment.

From day one of the program, I was very impressed with the organization and the quick pace at which we were diving into web development. Fullstack strikes a great balance between lecture and hands-on coding, something that really helped me to retain core concepts. Having touched on the more "academic" CS topics in an undergraduate setting, I thought these topics were covered quite fairly given the time constraints of the program (instructors encouraged us to delve further into supplemental resources in our spare time).

One of my worries for the program was that bootcamps were churning out graduates who are dependent on very specific frameworks that will no longer be in vogue in a few years. I was happy to learn that this was not the case with Fullstack. There is a strong emphasis on conceptual knowledge and WHY a certain framework is helpful. The frameworks learned within the program simply help to form a mental model of full stack web development, and have the added bonus of being nice bullet points to put on your resume that will be recognized by employers.

The instructors (Ben Wilhelm, Collin Miller, and Finn Terdal for my cohort) in the program are top-notch and left me wishing that I had professors that were half as engaging during my undergraduate years. All of the "dumb questions" that I never felt comfortable asking in an academic setting were handled with tremendous patience by the staff. I recall being genuinely excited to come in to lecture in the mornings - a total reversal from my college experience.

In addition to the core instruction, FSA has many pieces of the curriculum that help students secure a tech job after graduation. During the senior phase of the program, there is mock technical practice, resume help, and daily whiteboard interview practice. Because of this, I was able to interview confidently and found myself tackling tough coding questions that would have been very intimidating without all of the great prep that I got at the program.

Overall - if you're looking to make a career change and can dedicate yourself fully to the program, I would 100% recommend FSA.

I was a musician with some web design background (no real coding experience). Attended fullstack in 2017 as a WDF student and now I'm working for AWS as an engineer. English isn't my first language.. In 2017 I was already over 30 year old. AWS is my first... Read More tech job.

WDF is a free tuition program partnered with NYC and was a very competitive process. Had to go through several exams to go to the final “immersive program”. It was sad to see sizing of the class was getting smaller.... but I really liked how energish our instractors were. They were really supportive and good at teaching. Had such a good energy.

Also I was so happy how attentive Fulsltack’s career success counselor was. After graduation, she contacted me every week to check in my job search progress. I took 6 months to get this offer letter from AWS. Until then, I and some of my classmates kept going to AWS loft (free workspace. coder's heaven) everyday to study and hang out. After all, most of my classmates got really great full time engineering positions as well and I'm so happy to see them at reunion. 7 months was short but now we are such good friends after the intense period.

Learning process during bootcamp was just “INTENSE” but see the result. It's worth trying!

I just finished the 17-week immersive program at Fullstack Academy of Code and this was one of the best experience of my life. If you are looking for a boot-camp to kickstart the career as a software engineer, I couldn't recommend Fullstack more!

First... Read More of all, the academic structure, curriculums, and outcomes were top-notch. Fullstack adjusts the curriculums often based on the trends of the tech industry to make sure the materials taught are not obsolete and the students are fully prepared for becoming software engineers. In addition, the students' voices are always being heard. There are multiple channels that we can leave feedback and suggestions. Fullstack takes the feedback very seriously so they can improve the program and students' experience.

Secondly, Fullstack has great instructors who are extremely passionate and talented. The three instructors assigned to my cohort(shout out to Geoff, John, and Dakota) are very knowledgeable and helpful. Every lecture is well planned and delivered, and the guidance they provided are precious. Thanks to them, I learned and accomplished so much during the short period of time.

Thirdly, Fullstack has very good career success support. During the senior phase, students will have on campus counselors and remote counselor to give them guidance on writing the resume, perfecting Linkedin profile and interviewing practice. If students utilize all the career coaching service Fullstack provided during the senior phase and after graduation, they should be very well prepared for job searching after graduation. Besides, the career success team often hosting alumni panel talks and tech talks, which are very helpful for students to expand their horizons and learn the experiences and tips from people working in the industry.

The tuition is not cheap and the program is very challenging. But the friends I've made and the knowledge and skills I've learned definitely well worth the time and money.

I had an incredible experience at Fullstack academy. I came into the program with hardly any coding experience and left feeling like a certified pro. The instructors were made the course such a wonderful academy. Unlike my college educators, the Fullstack... Read More instructors were engaging, thoughtful, and made learning quite fun. I would recommend the class to anyone that has an interest in becoming a software engineer.

I just finished my 3-month immersive program at Fullstack, thought it might be a good time to review and share what my experience was.

My overall experience at Fullstack was great! My intend to join a bootcamp instead of learning from online resources... Read More was to be able to get one-on-one feedback on my learning progress, Fullstack has a good reputation on that and that’s why I chose it! And definitely I made the right choice and got lots of one-on-one attentions both in class and outside of class. During class, you are encouraged to ask questions, and never feel shame to ask DUMB questions (actually they kept saying there is no DUMB questions)! Outside of class, you can sign up office hours with the instructors. I have to say all my three instructors Dan, Karen and David are awesome! They literally knew every single student’s name in one week (we had nearly 40 students in my cohort). I felt that every student was highly respected. And they really want you to succeed and tried their best to help you thoughtout this learning path. They took the initiative to remind you that they had office hours for questions so you would never feel that you are pushed away! One minor feedback I have is that if we have some good sample of code work that we can refer to after we’ve done the projects, that would be a great way for us to review our own projects and find areas to improve. But of course, we can get individual comments and ideas from instructors and fellows regarding our code work too!!! So if you value comments, feedbacks in your learning, you should go for Fullstack!!!

I completed the immersive program in February 2018 and landed a job in May of the same year. I have a BA in English and was an Account Manager when I decided to quit my job for Fullstack.

Was it worth the cost of tuition?

I think that's probably one of... Read More the biggest concerns for people when deciding whether or not to take the risk. You can find all sorts of comments on Reddit or Quora from people telling you to save your money and just teach yourself. And it's true, there are tons of free resources online that will help you learn how to program.

By attending Fullstack Academy, however, I gained more than just practical JavaScript skills. I regularly practiced pair programming, learned to conceptualize and build apps from start to finish (both independently and with a team), became comfortable with tech documentation, beefed up my resume and LinkedIn profile, gained valuable feedback from practice interviews, and now have a network of people willing to help me as I continue my career.

Fullstack Academy will set you up with everything you need to kickstart your career as a software developer, but as others have said, the curriculum is fast-paced and by no means magic, so expect to work hard and take ownership for your own success.