Springboard - India

After using the hype of Springboard in USA, SPRINGBOARD managed to get easy start in India. They got many applicants even at a high price point considering many other MOOCs are way cheaper here. But little did we know that we were going into a sea with... Read More no shores. It has been more than a year when they have started functioning in India with a new batch coming in every month. They threw every heavy word to make us see Gold everywhere when there was only rustic iron. A hope brimmed among Data Science aspirants that (as springboard was saying we were among 20% aspirants they selected) we were going to be successful. Even I was told that they will focus more on us as I was among the initial batches. (Note: They didn't even took a puzzle test that they put up on website. They even lied that my prep course will start immediately just for me to make the payment and then no response for few days. Their marketing guy says any lie he/she can to make you sign up.) At first the course seemed good. Many of us were blinded by the shine Springboard was manufacturing. But mist started to clear after a month. It was all curated content from the internet which was not made clear from the start. I let it go. Their main USP was weekly half hour call with the mentor. Here it comes to Luck which mentor a student get. They didn't had much mentors here to use algorithm to match with mentee, so they just matched as they hired a mentor with no particular reason that why we were matched with that expert. The mentor is someone who has Industry experience yet how can they impart such knowledge in half hour in week. Even if they can guide us, are they really prepared for it or going with the flow? Did Springboard gave any training how their course structure is or what they require from mentor to do for mentee? A Big No. It seemed every mentor was handling their mentee as they could. As feedback from many fellow students, some turned out good and some not so. Thus for many it felt like a gamble of a very large amount. Due to ambition of becoming data scientist and already taking the decision, I moved on. Now we cannot ask every question in half hour with the mentor. So we have Teaching Assistant. They had one who recently graduated from a prestigious engineering college in India. After some of my interaction, my concern was that he was not a good fit for this role as he doesn't have any teaching experience, smart doesn't mean you have the ability to teach or help someone. Many of my questions to him came back to me as another question. Mostly why do you wanna know or in which part of course this question refers too, when the answer could be simple. I raised my concern but in vain. I simply stopped asking questions but googling it myself thus spending more time for answers. Also, their office hours seemed more of a formality. Then there was student advisor who interacts with students and solve their concerns. At start she seemed good, listening to the concerns and trying to solve them. But there were very few students, as the numbers began to increase every month, her response time increased further to a point when it took a month and a half for the my certificate to rectify. But the course went on. There were many parts in the course which seemed very distracted from the course. The difficulty level of a part was sometimes low and then jumped high as we were doing a doctorate on that particular topic. The main part which was Machine learning felt like a game walkthrough than we actually playing the game. Few parts were rushed and few repetitive. But I did not complain, even to myself and used search engine.(Note: According to them we can find everything on the internet so learn to use it.) Their cost was not justified yet I did not squeal. The point where came the breaking point, is their Career services. They give 100% Job Guarantee but all I can see is throwing someone in a deep sea after showing them a video of someone swimming and then asking for the person to swim. I think they are giving this guarantee considering the demand in market and effort by an educated and employed student themselves. It worked in USA but it failed miserably in India. It was all due to lack of vision and effort by the management. The management felt immature, incompetent at first. Then at the course end the management felt even more immature and more incompetent. They did not consider the feedback regarding course being not suited for Indian Market and did not update it. They did not consider so many students who were unsatisfied with the career services. Their career calls ran in a loop and as a pre-recorded tape convincing us that they are working on helping us. This convincing started to feel like manipulation when after 5 months and multiple calls even with career services leads ( Yes lead(s), as their lead changed within a year. Might be fed up with overall management itself), I felt I was where I started from. It seemed they didn't even knew what they were doing. It was at the point when their marketing part was working very very hard to get more numbers in. It was a memorable journey which I wish to forget. If anyone wants to feel the same, then please join Springboard India and I assure you it will be a bumpy ride with a big black hole at the end.

I joined Spring board india Data science Career track in june 2019. here is my experience : I joined spring board india data science career track 2019. here is my experince: If you accept starting with Springboard be ready for -- No job assistance(You... Read More will have to find job yourself) -- 6 months job guarantee is a liar. -- There are lots of unemployment Spring board alumni. -- 30 min mentor time once a week is not sufficient and satisfying. · it’s not worth at all, simply i can say waste of your hard-earned money and waste of time as well. So called mentors will be not available as per the schedules and they don’t spend much time with the students in explaining their doubts or explaining the concept. · Next coming to so called office hours, coding support sessions it’s just for the name sake they fix up the sessions without even asking/discussing our availability time, i can they do as per their need. · They force you to enrol for the course by paying 1.95 Lakhs and they also provide you easy EMI/Loan by third party finance company, after your enrolment they don’t even care/bother about you concerns related to course. · Most imp thing is, they state you like 100%per job guarantee after the successful completion of your course in 6 months but the hard fact is you can’t complete the course within the stipulated time as they mentioned since you don’t get proper support from mentors/support team after your enrolment in any manner and course is not easy at all as they state you while enrolling. · Whenever you try to reach support team/student adviser to discuss your concerns they don’t pick your call many times and if they receive the call they just say will come back to you in few min/EOD or will solve within EOD but you don’t get any solutions on time or they try to convince you as per their needs. · whenever you try to raise your concerns regarding the course, you will get only one statement/answer like you are not attending sessions properly, not following the mentor instructions or you are not spending your time. They will never ever agree their mistakes and listen you concerns as well. · Most pathetic part - When you say i am not satisfied with the course or if you ask for the cancellation and your money back, they simply say we don’t have refund policy at all and they will again try to convince you to the fullest with the flashy words/statements. It’s like mental harassment. · My suggestions please don’t waste your hard money and time as well. · if you are interested to learn data science and to make career transition, we have many institute in Bangalore who offer data science course, ML, AI course with very minimum fee ranges like 15–45k with excellent course structure so please don’t get fool y enrolling Springboard. · All the videos/materials provided by springboard are available for free in YouTube. · When the entire course material is free resources why they are charging 1.95 Lakhs I don’t understand · Mentor ship (mentor call) is something they make as a star of the program. But you will get to interact with your mentor once in a week only for half an hour. · I never got a chance to discuss in detail with my mentor as there was a time constraint (mentor is be not available after 30min) · Springboard is not helpful at all, all they are doing now, are blaming the students. · Whatever the things/words which i explained above, it’s my pathetic experience and wasted money as well. · Now for the curriculum. This was sadly most dissappointing. The course mainly revolves around data camp courses. And then these are supplemented by youtube lectures from Harvard or other institutions that would talk about the subject with the impression that you have intermediate knowledge of the subject matter, despite it being a beginners intro video to a concept. I have had much better success with the self study resources available on the internet, such as youtube tutorials etc. There was no feel of an actual boot camp teaching you, they basically link you to external sources that aren’t theirs. · The whole curriculum is just stuff taken off of the internet or LinkedIn learning. Very little original content. A lot of the content can be found by just doing a basic Google search. Overall this course did not live up to its hype. · I was told that these things do not matter and that you can easily land a job after you get both your projects done. I had done very detailed projects and posted them on github and did everything the career coaches suggested I do. Unfortunately, not a single data science position had reached out to me. · The program is a complete waste of money and time, one more thing, right after I completed my course, got the certification, In certification also they made blunder mistakes they added advanced ML track concepts like time series Analysis and Recommendation systems which is not an part of my NLP track. · They dont know how to deal with students in a cordial way, I will not recommend this to anyone who is serious about learning Datascience, you can find their course on youtube for free · Frankly, I wish that I could get my money back. · I recommend staying away from wasting your money with them. · Don’t fall for false advertising.

Hi All, I am a student of Springboard and sharing real experience with you. First of all, you should know, Springboard is FAKEboard / FRAUDboard. Please don't join this course by seeing high ratings, as we all know these ratings can be biased. I have... Read More enrolled in Springboard India Data Science Career Track (DSC). I was having lots of expectations with this course. But these fraud people, provide you nothing but frustration. Career Coach: No use Mentors: No use [ Mentors are even not aware of the curriculum ] Office Hours: No use [This is the most frustrating thing, any xyz will take the session, they don't care about what have learnt or learning, just will come and talk whatever they want] Job Guarantee: It is the biggest lie So, guys please please save your money. Regards, Subodh Kumar

Currently I'm pursuing their Data Science Career Track. These are my honest reviews about this whole course. I will summarize my experience with Springboard India in a precise manner -- Pros -- There is not even one positive feature about this course.... Read More Cons -- 1. Course content is a complete crap and doesn't prepare one to become a data scientist. Its just a collation of free online videos and some datacamp courses. They hardly have their own content. 2. There is no proper support from Technical Assistants. 3. No corrective action taken on the feedback given on course content. 4. No follow-up from anyone in springboard team on students's progress or any issues they face. 5. False promises were given while on-boarding to this course(which I realize now) 6. The course is not worth a penny for the exorbitant fees they charge. 7. The 1:1 mentor support is not at all useful. 9. Office hours are complete useless. 10. Career services are hopeless. Now, I regret my decision to opt for this course. I hope my reviews find useful to aspiring data scientists.

Trapping People into Joining: I joined Springboard DSC with lot of hopes to make a transition from my current role. There were very less reviews of Springboard India when I joined, now I realized that Springboard team deletes all the negative reviews... Read More for trapping people into this horrible course. I was misguided by the multiple promises made by the admission team during my enrollment. Course Content: Springboard charges Rs.1, 75,000 for the course. The course content doesn’t teach fundamentals which are very important in long run. Not even a 10% of the content is of Springboard’s own content. More than 60% of the course content is from YouTube and CS lectures which are available for free in the internet. For every topic, they redirect you to either YouTube or some articles in the internet. Most of the curriculum revolves around YouTube and Datacamp courses. Even after repeated feedback on the content, they never even tried to change anything in the content. The content should be thoroughly validated by any industry expert. Office Hours: This is a complete waste of one hour session. There is no thinking into conducting these sessions. These are only to attract new students by taking sessions on random topics. They don’t care about the understanding level of students. Support team: There are only two teaching assistants assigned to help all of the Springboard DSC students in India. Whenever someone approaches them with any doubt, they just share an article link without explaining much. Nobody validates the projects/assignments which will be submitted to Springboard as part of their curriculum. There will be no feedback on the projects done. Finally the Springboard management team, they will be calling continuously until you pay the fee, once the fee is paid. They don’t care whether you are doing the course or not. If you have any plans for learning Data Science course, then don’t join Springboard course in particular. There are lots of institutes offering better content at 1/100th of the amount Springboard charges. I Wish, I could get my money back. This post is only to save lot of Data Science enthusiasts from falling into this trap.

No Pros only cons .. am a student of Spring board India or may be was after this post. 1. It is not up-to mark to train students for data science.They just make false promises and their curriculum is not up to the standards for which they are charging... Read More huge fee. 2.The 1:1 mentor is other joke made by them. once you join the course there is no follow-up for even 6 month(or more than that) to my knowledge. 3.There is no face to face interaction if you are struck somewhere in middle of course you need to post your doubt and wait for more then 24 -48-72 hour to get the reply back from them(sometime you may even not get your doubt clear). 4. No Placement drive organised by them ( So How Job Guarantee?) 5. They says that they train students with mock interview and so they gets placed( trust me guys its better to learn yourself and attend 3-4 interviews in real time rather than this mock interview ,though we fail we learn from it. 6. The points keeps on continues with cons but i prefer to make a stop here.

Cons: Course-Fee-17,5000/- #SAY NO TO SPRINGBOARD 1.Joined Springboard with a aspiration of becoming of data scientist but got totally fooled when i saw the curriculm and the way they are just taking materials from other Ed-tech websites and just serving... Read More us. 2.Job gurantee and mentorship is totally very unorganised and very falsely implemented and not at all good . 3.There are lot of false promises and many students who are completing the course are not at all satisfied with the course and curriculum and left unemplOyed 4.This Course is not going to "CONVERT YOU A DATA SCIENTIST" as the curriculm is not well updated and not at all well structured 5.They demand huge amount of money for this course which they get it from other edtech websites like khan academy,Datacamp and youtube videos which we can easily get it in small pay 6.There cost weekly basis ****** WHEN I ASKED FOR REFUND THIS CALCULATION THEY GAVE ME**** Course Fee/Block Payment: Rs. 17,5000/- Course Duration (Weeks) - 32 Per Week Amount - Rs. 5,469/- Duration of Student (Weeks) - 6 months = 24 weeks Total Amount - 5469*24 = 1,31,250/- Total Deduction (round off) - 1,30,000/- Refund amount: 45,000/- ***** THIS IS TO TOTALLY FRAUD AND BASELESS PRICE****** 7.Even nothing was transperent on offer letter about weekly cost and all,they are just fooling around people just to fill there pocket and looting people hard earn money *****OFFICE HOURS IS ANOTHER TWIST IN THE COURSE****** -> HERE THEY SAY THAT WE HAVE INDUSTRY EXPERTS WHO WILL GUIDE AND YOU WILL LEARN FROM THEM.SO THE REALITY IS ONCE A WEEK SOME INDUSTRY EXPERT COMES TAKE A ONE HOUR SESSION ON ANY RANDOM TOPIC,FOR THEM IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT STUDENT UNDERSTANDING LEVEL IS AND TILL WHERE HE HAS COMPLETED HIS TOPIC FOR EXAMPLE: "YOUR ARE IN FIRST UNIT AND THEY WILL TAKE SESSION ON 8 UNIT" -> THERE COURSE IS TOTALLY GOING TO BRING FRUSTRATION ON YOU MAINLY WHEN YOU ARE WORKING FULL TIME AND DOING THIS COURSE AND PRICE IS NOT AT ALL WORTH THE MONEY CONCLUSION: PLEASE SAVE YOUR MONEY BECAUSE MARKET IS FULL OF FRAUD PEOPLE AND THEY WILL JUST PLAY WITH YOUR DREAM BY LOOTING YOU. #SAY NO TO SPRINGBOARD

One line review for this course : 'a web of deceits' Started this course for a whooping sum of Rs. 1.95 Lakhs, but it ended up being a big disappointment because of the following points : 1. Springboard course have no original content : Entire curriculum... Read More of DS career track comprises of haphazard external links from Youtube , Datacamp, khanAcademy and many others. They have simply fooled the students by compiling various mediocre level videos from sources which are either free to access (like KhanAcademy, Youtube) or available at a very less cost for yearly subscription (like DataCamp) . These courses from external sources accounts for majority of the portion of springboard curriculum while only the introductory videos (about 5 minutes) are from springboard. Major Point to be learned : Any budding Data Scientist enthusiast can himself club such resources with a much lesser cost than springboard. The course has repetitive datacamp courses which doesn't explains any concepts, only giving an illusion of learning by giving fill in the blanks type exercises comprising of python and its packages syntaxes memorization. 2. Mentorship is a Joke: Springboard courses are backed by its so called 'mentor-ship program', in which a student is promised to be guided by an "industry expert" on a weekly basis for half an hour. In these sessions, it was promised that weekly assessments by mentor will take place which will help in crossing any hurdles during the course and in making some "out of the world" DS project which will eventually land the student in some fairyland DS Job. Truth & my experience: The course curriculum itself wasn't known properly by the mentor assigned to me. Many times my mentor either asked for postponement of my calls, or took the calls more casually. He wasn't able to help in any way when I was stuck in the curriculum and informed that the curriculum is very inferior and substandard compared to any other courses I have seen. I noticed form the start that the curriculum isn't helping to learn any concept or algorithm and conveyed the same to mentor (It wasn't of any help) . HE simply told to go ahead and trust the course, which eventually led more time wastage and frustration. After a while he didn't even bother to contact me as he already recieved his fees from springboard I guess. 3. Teaching assistant, Career Coach - another big lies TA is promised to clear your doubts. However, TAs simply post google search results which I myself could do. Career coaching sessions : This was the biggest fraud of all. These coaches are for helping you polish your linkedin profile and apply cosmetics to your profiles, projects so that they seem enticing to hiring industries. Note this : They aren't teaching anything job/knowledge worthy and want you to fool other people into hiring you (like they have fooled us into taking the course by simply re-packaging Datacamp & Youtube videos under springboard hood) 4. Most of the students enrolling in this course aren't able to complete the course because of the poor content of the course, zero help from TAs & Mentor. Even after completing also, this course doesn't teaches anything beyond some python syntax and won't even help in landing even an entry level job anywhere. 5. Job Guarantee is another false promise made by springboard people. They don't help in this aspect. A student is supposed to find or attract companies by his own knowledge gained by completing this course (which is irrelevant and insufficient at the least to say) 6. Office Hours : Another trickery to make students enroll in the course. They have another concept called Office Hours in which some existing DS working in another big company is supposed to take a class. It happens almost once or twice a month. However, these office hours are of no use to a learning person as they don't teach anything except doing abstract talking about many vague concepts and we are supposed to be amazed at how awesome job is to be a DS. The Best Part of all : After coming to my senses, when I asked for a refund and informed that the curriculum offered is not was I was expecting for my hard earned money and is below average, Springboard people have informed that I have used most of their resources (Youtube and Datacamp) and it isn't possible to give a refund. They aren't even worried about your money, your career or your skill enhancement, once they get their fees. Moral of the story in a line : I wanted to give a zero star rating, however minimum possible is one. Please don't waste your hard earned money on this course.

• If you accept starting with Springboard be ready for -- No job assistance(You will have to find job yourself) -- 6 months job guarantee is a liar. -- There are lots of unemployment Spring board alumni. -- 30 min mentor time once a week is not sufficient... Read More and satisfying. • it’s not worth at all, simply i can say waste of your hard-earned money and waste of time as well. So called mentors will be not available as per the schedules and they don’t spend much time with the students in explaining their doubts or explaining the concept. • Next coming to so called office hours, coding support sessions it’s just for the name sake they fix up the sessions without even asking/discussing our availability time, i can they do as per their need. • They force you to enrol for the course by paying 1.95 Lakhs and they also provide you easy EMI/Loan by third party finance company, after your enrolment they don’t even care/bother about you concerns related to course. • Most imp thing is, they state you like 100%per job guarantee after the successful completion of your course in 6 months but the hard fact is you can’t complete the course within the stipulated time as they mentioned since you don’t get proper support from mentors/support team after your enrolment in any manner and course is not easy at all as they state you while enrolling. • Whenever you try to reach support team/student adviser to discuss your concerns they don’t pick your call many times and if they receive the call they just say will come back to you in few min/EOD or will solve within EOD but you don’t get any solutions on time or they try to convince you as per their needs. • whenever you try to raise your concerns regarding the course, you will get only one statement/answer like you are not attending sessions properly, not following the mentor instructions or you are not spending your time. They will never ever agree their mistakes and listen you concerns as well. • Most pathetic part - When you say i am not satisfied with the course or if you ask for the cancellation and your money back, they simply say we don’t have refund policy at all and they will again try to convince you to the fullest with the flashy words/statements. It’s like mental harassment. • My suggestions please don’t waste your hard money and time as well. • if you are interested to learn data science and to make career transition, we have many institute in Bangalore who offer data science course, ML, AI course with very minimum fee ranges like 15–45k with excellent course structure so please don’t get fool y enrolling Springboard. • All the videos/materials provided by springboard are available for free in YouTube. • When the entire course material is free resources why they are charging 1.95 Lakhs I don’t understand • Mentor ship (mentor call) is something they make as a star of the program. But you will get to interact with your mentor once in a week only for half an hour. • I never got a chance to discuss in detail with my mentor as there was a time constraint (mentor is be not available after 30min) • Springboard is not helpful at all, all they are doing now, are blaming the students. • Whatever the things/words which i explained above, it’s my pathetic experience and wasted money as well. • Now for the curriculum. This was sadly most dissappointing. The course mainly revolves around data camp courses. And then these are supplemented by youtube lectures from Harvard or other institutions that would talk about the subject with the impression that you have intermediate knowledge of the subject matter, despite it being a beginners intro video to a concept. I have had much better success with the self study resources available on the internet, such as youtube tutorials etc. There was no feel of an actual boot camp teaching you, they basically link you to external sources that aren’t theirs. • The whole curriculum is just stuff taken off of the internet or LinkedIn learning. Very little original content. A lot of the content can be found by just doing a basic Google search. Overall this course did not live up to its hype. • I was told that these things do not matter and that you can easily land a job after you get both your projects done. I had done very detailed projects and posted them on github and did everything the career coaches suggested I do. Unfortunately, not a single data science position had reached out to me. • The program is a complete waste of money and time, one more thing, right after I completed my course, got the certification, In certification also they made blunder mistakes they added advanced ML track concepts like time series Analysis and Recommendation systems which is not an part of my NLP track. • They dont know how to deal with students in a cordial way, I will not recommend this to anyone who is serious about learning Datascience, you can find their course on youtube for free • Frankly, I wish that I could get my money back. • I recommend staying away from wasting your money with them. • Don’t fall for false advertising. • I definitely made a wrong decision by joining Springboard.

I was constantly looking out for a UX course from past 1.5 years or so. I wanted a classroom training but there were limited to no options. I had to settle down for an online course and I can say I made the right choice by opting for Springboard. I asked... Read More few of the designers to go through the curriculum and give me feedback and everyone suggested that the curriculum was thorough and covered all aspects of the process. I completed the course a few days ago and here is my detailed review : Pros : - The course is self-paced which is exactly what I was looking for. - Every student gets a mentor and my mentor was really very helpful in resolving all the issues that I had. - The course material covers almost every important aspects written by great authors. - Additionally, you also get 1 year lynda.com subscription which you can utilize to learn more in-depth about UX processes. - Very supportive student advisors. Cons : - Mentor calls are usually once a week and sometimes they are busy and cannot get back on time. - For countries like India, the fees is a tad bit expensive.