Thinkful

I am currently a Full Stack Flex student at Thinkful's online program. Overall, I'd the say the program is very well rounded and that it has positively impacted my professional life so far. In this review, I'll give you an overview of Thinkful's FSF course,... Read More as well as my experience with each part of it.

- Overview: Thinkful's Full Stack Flex program is a 100% online course centered around full stack web development. which is only half the course; FSF (and other Thinkful courses as well) shines the most when it comes to career building since it is centered around technical knowledge for its own sake. FSF's objective is not only to teach you skills that are valuable in today's market, but also to prepare you for job interviews and professional networking in a realistic environment. To reinforce this, every student has access to their own mentor, who will provide private coaching, which is another selling point for many Thinkful courses. Finally, FSF earned its name because it has a flexible schedule that won't force you to quit your job.

- Program: It takes around six months to graduate from FSF (but you get quite a lot of free additional time for career services). Every month, you will start by reading written material and doing small projects and drills. Every week, you'll have two or three private sessions with your mentor, where you will discuss course material. Near the end of each month, you should be ready to complete a capstone project, which will go through a formal code review. Finally, there are also mandatory mock interviews, where both your skills and professionalism will be evaluated in an emulated professional environment. You will also be assigned a personal program manager who will monitor your performance and make success in the course easier to achieve. Overall, I'd say the program is well paced and not stifling, especially if you already have a job and lack extra time. Although sometimes they take a bit of time to respond, it seems all mentors, program managers and other staff members really pay attention to you as much as they can. If you go without completing a goal for too long, your program manager will send you emails to check you on, which is always a good sign.

- Pricing: Thinkful charges based on how many months you need, which means you will be charged less if you're a faster learner. There's many payment options and I won't explain them in detail here, so check Thinkful's website. However, I will say that overall, the prices are fair and worth it.

- Curriculum: FSF's technical skill curriculum is well rounded, including both clientside and serverside web technologies, all of which are in demand in today's market. Specifically, there are courses in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, MongoDB, React, user experience, and some computer science, which is great for interviews. Mastery of each of these is necessary to graduate. Capstone projects make a good job of cohesively mixing the technologies you know. The course attempts to have you make useable products as soon as you can, which is a plus . This might be nitpicking, but I don't think the curriculum's written resources are perfect yet. Sometimes I found them to be very brief or abstract and I think some of them could use a rewrite. Fortunately, Thinkful staff seem to be working on improving these resources, and you can leave them feedback whenever you finish a lesson. Something else the written resources might be missing is adding superficial introductions to related technologies, even if they aren't part of the course.

- Mentors: You will be assigned a personal mentor which is responsible for helping you with the technical aspect of the course, and to provide feedback on your work in general. All mentors are guaranteed to be professionals with lots of field experience and I can assure you they are. In many ways, I believe Thinkful's mentor approach is vastly superior to those of other schools. Mentors also make up for anything the written material may be lacking. Mentors other than yours will also host daily non-private questions and answers (Q&A) sessions to provide yet another additional resource. Personally, I don't have my mentor explain the material to me; rather, he reinforces it and provides meaningful insights that you couldn't get from traditional pre-recorded lectures, written resources or even structured classes. Ancillary to this is the fact that your mentor has no reason not to wait for your progress, no matter how slow you are, which means pacing will always work with you, rather than against you.

- Community: As an additional resource, Thinkful provides all students with a Slack community where students and mentors collaborate with each other. If you're a FSF student, working with other students directly is not part of the course, which might be a con for some. The community alleviates this a little, being a good example of going the extra mile.

- Career Services: Finally, the greatest asset Thinkful has to offer is career services. I personally haven't fully gotten to this part yet, but so far career-related interactions have been good. Even before you reach Career Services you will practice with mock interviews. Students who graduate from the main course will have free access to the career services staff, who, according to Thinkful, will help you ace interviews, build your network, and ultimately land a job that takes advantage of the technical skills you picked up.

Overall, I would say Thinkful is a great option for anyone looking to start a career on web development and software engineering. However, I also believe FSF in particular is best suited to lone learners like me. I'd say the course's best asset is that it puts you in contact with very competent people who actually have time for you, which provides an unparalleled learning experience.

The Thinkful staff is quite helpful and my mentor is very knowledgable and quite experienced. After coming from a terrible experience with a different company's course (long story short -I was put in the wrong course, dropped from the program, and then... Read More billed for it) I am excited to have the chance to learn relevant technologies in a truly hands on way in the Thinkful "Full Stack Flex" program. My mentor takes the time to answer my questions in our twice a week sessions and allows me the chance to do my work and my research to find the answers before he simply gives them to me. If it is important to you to learn by doing but to have the support necessary to handle those tough questions in the difficult scenarios then enroll in Thinkful.
I look forward to graduating!

I have been a retail manager for over a decade now and decided that it was time for a career change lest I get stuck in this role for the rest of my life so I did some research and stumbled onto Bloc. I applied for and got a $2000 much needed scholarship... Read More which really helped me out. I'm not finished the course yet but it is fantastic so far. There is always someone to ask for help when you get stuck and they start preparing you for job hunting from the beginning. I would strongly recommend Bloc to anyone thinking of a career change.

Hi, my name is Bryan. I'm 47 years old. I spent well over 10 years of my career in web development building simple info sites and WP sites and basically just taking advantage of the fact that web design was in high demand but the digital iq of clients... Read More was quite low.

Then social media hit, then easy site builders came back. The world changed quite quickly. By this time I had hung up web development and moved into management so I let my UI/UX people worry about the tech changes.

But along came a life changing/career changing event that left me struggling to find work in management and I decided it was time to go back to the thing I loved more than any other career path: web development.

But the digital world had gone racing by me during my time away from the coding chair and I was clearly not in the 'know' anymore. I needed a hardcore update to my skill set and clearly additional coding skills that I hadn't bothered with in the past because they just weren't a necessity. Or so I thought.

So I turned to a bootcamp for this purpose. I did weeks of research and digging to make sure I was not going to fall into something that cost thousands but that didn't help me reach my goal of being back in the industry and very hirable.

Through resources like coursereport.com, forums, reviews, articles and even talking to trusted associates of mine, what I decided on was Thinkful.com. I needed a program that would allow me the flexibility to not relocate in order to take the course and I needed flexibile time because obviously at this age I've got a family and many commitments.

Aside from that I wanted the best program available (if possible). What I learned was that Thinkful's program offered mentorship throughout the educational process as well as long-term support (if needed) after graduation to assist in finding a job.

Both of those attributes stood out and in fact did seem to be unique to Thinkful so I began my correspondence with them. They were completely transparent and open about their course, the process, the benefits and even the options that exist outside of bootcamps. I was pleasantly surprised by this and although I was pretty much ready to pull the trigger right there, I continued to ask "what if" questions of my program counselor and she never missed a beat in getting me the answers that I needed/wanted. So after another week of 'cooling off time' to think about the decision, I felt it was my best option and I jumped. Student loan. All in.

Right out of the gate I was given clear guides as to what exactly was going to happen each day/week of the course. I was assigned a mentor and allowed to take part in setting my twice per week, one hour mentor sessions. That for me was just pure gold. I am person that must know what's going on and what to expect without having to go digging for it and Thinkful had that already well thought out and prepared for me. Huge plus.

Next I began the pre-course web basics which I moved through with considerable ease because I had years of HTML and CSS behind me, yet I found the curriculum to be extremely helpful and in fact did expose me to resources and techniques that I had not explored prior. In addition, one of the most valuable attributes of the program for me is that each and every step of the curriculum focues on preparing you for a job interview.

Being in management for many years which at times required me to hire devs, I can tell you this is an outstanding feature of the program. And it's not only training for tech interviews, it's training on interviews themselves! I can't tell you how many people I interviewed that were uber talented but just plain sucked at interviewing. So this feature is awesome in my book. In addition to that, after your final capstone project, you'll work on your resume, social channels, portfolio polishing etc. Again, Thinkful being focued on your professional success after the program is clear and something I value hightly.

Educationally, my first challenge came as the intro to JavaScript began. I'd never coded a single line of JavaScript and was quite nervous that I could fall behind in this section and/or possilby just get overwhelmed and regret my decision to enroll in a bootcamp.

Not the case. I had an unbelievable amount of resources to use for answers/guidance including my mentor which proved to be the most impactful resource of all. Two hours each week with him was like access to a massive trove of knowledge and no topic was too trivial. If he was tied up on our off hours I simply jumped to the Thinkful slack channel where it seems that every mentor stays plugged in to and is ready to help. I can't tell you how many mentors (that aren't my mentor of course) have helped me solve issues with my code. On top of that I attend Q&A sessions each week to either listen in or present an issue I'm experiencing. All three of those resources have been immeasurably valuable.

Fastforward to now, I'm over half way through the program and I have overcome some serious challenges in terms of learning things that I knew nothing of prior, again, thanks to the Thinkful environment. Clearly I'm not suddenly, or about to be, a senior level full stack dev but I can tell you that without this course, the self learn path for me would simply have not gotten me ANYWHERE close to what I know and can do currently.

I would consider myself a skilled web developer again (which is/was a goal coming into this) and most definitely better than I ever was before taking this course. I've still got three months of the program left so the challenges of learning completely new concepts and coding continue but no question, this program has been worth every cent and every second of time that I've spent on it.

If you're on the fence about whether a boot camp is worth it, take it from me (a self-taught hacker that's seen a lot of evolution in web development) this is absolutely a sound investment. Is it the end of the road? Hardly. It's the on-ramp. Albeit, an on-ramp with a jetpack attached but an on-ramp. It takes dedication, hard work, persistence and desire to attain a high level of expertise in this industry but it can be done, and even at my age.

In conclusion I will say that Thinkful (for me) has been an absolute dead ringer. I can and will get where I want to go because of this program and I believe that it has to do with how their program is setup and how it aligned with my learning style and goals.

Hope this review helps someone as I know I needed help in making my decision as well. Good luck!!

I have just finished the data science preparation material. I have had an excellent experience. I find the material challenging and well thought out. I especially appreciate the flexibility in projects where I can choose data that is of interest to me.... Read More There is a capstone project after every section, I have just started, and only completed the first capstone, the project brought the section material together. It was a great project, and a lot of fun. Though this is an online program, Thinkful provides a mentor. I meet my mentor twice a week. The interactions with my mentor are great. My mentor helps me work through any questions and problems I may have and suggests extracurricular topics for additional insight in the subject. Overall, I’m extremely happy that I’ve enrolled and look forward to using the new skills I am learning.

Overall the Thinkful experience has been pleasant. I really enjoy my 1-on-1 meetings with my mentor. The feedback, guidance, and challenges my mentor present have made the program worth while.

The curriculum is decent, but I sometimes get lost in the... Read More assigments and reading material. I do wish it was laid out a bit differently, I think there is room for improvement in that regard. Another thing I've noticed is that you really need to pay attention to the recommended resources at the end of each lesson. Those additional resources are super hepful in driving the topic home (at least for me :) ). The additional resources are well curated, but this student wishes some of those items were integrated into the native curriculum. Chasing down external links and keeping track of all of them can be a bit tedius.

Thinkful offers a student Slack environment which is occasionally helpful, but you've got to be patient due to the sheer number of participants. Another very helpful 'community' type research are the open-sessions held by various mentors and Thinkful instructors. I've found that the instructors genuinely want to help you learn and aren't afraid to answer questions. I find the mentor sessions and open-sessions to be very helpful.

I believe Thinkful is better geared towards individuals with a strong sense of self-motivation and resourcefulness. There are often times where you need to refer to various documentation and the program definetely rewards those who can find answers on their own. There is a lot of reading, which can be a bit monotonous. For me personally, I do wish there were a few video lectures sprinkled through the reading material. I think that would help tremendously - seeing things demonstrated live (or recorded) and hearing someone explain what they're demonstrating is very helpful for some learners.

On the whole, I've enjoyed my Thinkful experience and have seen a marked improvement and progress towards my goal. I still have a little bit left to go in the program, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to individuals looking to jump start their software development education.

I just finished the prep course and I can’t believe how much I’ve learned already. So far my experience has been awesome at Thikful. My mentor is a great help. There are lots of Q&A sessions throughout the day so whenever I’m stuck I just drop by and... Read More ask for help. I like it that they change the curriculum often to be up to date (yes, I was going through previous material to get ready for my first mock interview and noticed the updates) I’d totally recommend this bootcamp to a friend :)

Pros: One-to-one meetings with a design mentor, easy-to-follow course track, links to additional resources, career prep, great support staff, group sessions, robust slack community, video lessons, some solid student discounts on design software & subscriptions.... Read More Cons: You definitely have to be self-motivated -- nobody is holding your hand to complete the needed work. This isn't so much of a con as a "know thyself" recommendation. If you are fairly independent, driven, and have time to devote yourself to the curriculum, I cannot recommend Bloc enough.

Originally I was a bit nervous to sign up for an online program, but I've found that Thinkfuls support structure makes it better than in person classes I've taken. Not only do you have 2hrs a week with a mentor 1:1, but they have Q&A sessions every day... Read More (approx 5-10 sessions) that you can hop into at varying times if you're stuck. These sessions are great becuase you just share your screen and get help. You can also listen in and learn something from the other students that are stuck. Also, their slack channel is very active with mentors and students, so you can get help that was as well. In Portland, the community is very active, so students will get together regularly and code together. All of these outlets for help, make the program very supportive!

It's also a great way to go for people that are juggling work and family priorities. You code when it suits your schedule, and there are typically Q&A sessions to help you when you're stuck...even at 3AM and 9PM.

I started the full stack flex program at Thinkful with the intention of switching careers to that of a computer programmer/web developer. I had very little knowledge of computer programming beforehand and was looking for a time-efficient way of switching... Read More careers while still getting a quality education. I have to say that I am very happy for choosing to study with Thinkful. Being that the course is over the span of 6 months, the program is intensive and challenging, but the quality of education is very good and the resources Thinkful provides are invaluable. The curriculum is thorough and my mentor has been a huge help is helping support my learning when I get stuck.

I also appreciate how honest and straightforward Thinkful was before I started the course. They told me in advance what I could expect and how much time I would have to invest. Instead of just trying to sell the course, they accurately depicted what the next 6 months would look like if I decided to take part in the program. The program also teaches the more in-demand aspects of programming (from what friends already in the field have informed me of) so I am definitely confident this will be a successful yet efficient way of transitioning my career.