Thinkful

I have recently graduated from Thinkful data science program and got positive reviews from all their Mock Interviews. I have followed everything they required, but was not able to land a job. They did not refund the tuition as they promised. Do not trust... Read More and chose this program. For anyone who want more information, I can show you everything that I have done with Thinkful.

Today, I graduated from Thinkful Digital Marketing Immersion Course. It was a challenging 2 months, brushing up my skills and building up my portfolio.

Joining a bootcamp was one the best investments I ever made. The education they give you is practical... Read More to today’s world, and it is the latest marketing insights and trends you can find!

I learned industry best practices and practical software development standards during an intense 8 month remote learning program while juggling my full-time job. I created and deployed mobile-first applications while learning new languages and frameworks.... Read More The program helped me evolve my career to a senior program manager dream job that leverages my prior work experience as a digital marketer and the full stack foundation I acquired. This is a very, very challenging program that requires tenacity but the outcome is incredibly rewarding. The Bloc team is passionate about student success and provides a robust range of resources to support students beyond the online curriculum: this includes a dedicated mentor, online technical support, numerous live Q&A session options with instructors, meticulous assignment grading and feedback and highly effective career coaching. Joining and completing the program was one of the best career and life decisions I've made. Great job Bloc-Thinkful, you've made a huge positive impact on my life!

Prior to the program, I had work experience with Excel and a little bit of experience studying SQL and Python. I really wanted to move my career in a more technical direction, but didn't know how to start. I had a little bit of exposure to Data Analytics,... Read More but not enough technical skillset to get the job. As much as I was eager to learn, for a technical job, you always need the experience to get the job and you also need a job to get experience, so I decided to sign up for this program!

I found it through a Google search and what drew me in the most was their tuition guarantee for a job. I am so glad that I found and finished this program. I was able to get hands-on experience in Excel, SQL, Tableau and Python and feel more confident with my data analysis and presentation skills. The program is very well-structured with an organized curriciulum. My Academic Success Manager was always quick to reply back to all my questions about the course. My current mentor is also very encouraging and offers amazing insights on real world application. I loved the Slack community, especially the technical coaches - they were so nice and always made sure my questions were thoroughly answered. While anything nowadays can be learned online, I feel like doing a bootcamp is better because of the certification and doing projects that are relevant that has been reviewed by someone who can give feedback is so important. I'll be moving on to the career phase of this program and I'm impressed so far about the resources they provide!

So bear with me for a few minutes as I go through this. Thinkful is a glorified loan company that offers a sub-par program as a guise for their ridiculously high-interest loans. I was interested in the engineering immersion class, with the ISA and stipend.... Read More I'm 44. Single. My job bit the dust with the plague, and I've had zero phone calls in over 3 months for new jobs, in any field. I cooked for most of life, and for the last year I've done wedding decor and coordination.

I have 8 years experience in LPC, which is a dead language now and a sub-branch of C. I had never even looked at HTML, CSS, or JS before I started the prep course. I went through the entire prep course in 4 days and knocked it out of the park. Their timeline is a little over 3 weeks. I was done and approved before I ever spoke to my mentor for the first time. My first call from admissions was rescheduled by email 5 minutes after the call was supposed to come through. When I did finally receive the call a week later, I could tell immediately I was talking to a salesman, not an admissions officer. He did little more than send me what he called as an application, but it was simply a a permission form for a credit check. Nothing more.

It's notable to mention that up to this point, after having finished the prep course so easily and so quickly, both my mentor and this saleman were very eager to extol all the wonderful things about Thinkful and kept alluding to the prep course being some sort of os scholastic-type test for potential students, and also to make sure all students started with the same basic knowledge. This was utter horse crap all around, but I'll get into the curriculum itself momentarily. After having hyped me up about how great they are and making me think my performance on the prep course actually mattered, they denied me the ISA and stipend both within 24 hours.

Your eligibility is based solely on that credit score and current employment. Nothing else. NOTHING. Leaving me wondering why the hell I was given any work to do at all before they ran my credit score. I busted my butt and excelled in every way, even with the poor materials they provide. In reality, the ISA is nothing more than a $16,000 loan, and the stipend is just adding $7,500 to that loan, bringing the total loan up to $23,500. If you couldn't go out to a bank and get a loan for this amount, you won't qualify for the ISA or the stipend. The payback price is $40,000 at 25% of your gross income for 4 years or until paid. That's close to double, and any bank could do better.

I received a call from my salesman again within 15 minutes of being denied, urging me to apply for the 6 month course instead of the 5 month with stipend, which still costs 16k and takes even longer, and I would still have not been eligible for. Jobless, almost no credit history, no debt to speak of. I don't even own one single credit card. I've always lived with what I have and never borrowed. When I tried to just tell this guy to forget it, he started in with the sales pitch again, and when I didn't bite he actually accused me of trying to just scam the school out of the $7500 stipend. As if that was a lot of a money and even worth the hit to my already crappy credit score. He was quite rude once he realized I wasn't going to take anything less than what I signed up for, or I was going elsewhere. When I tried to find an avenue of complaint over his behavior, I met nothing but dead ends. I emailed the one link in my course material that goes to someone vaguely official and got no reply.

So if you thought ISA was some kind of helpful service you end up paying out the butt for, you're wrong. There is zero interest in your ability, aptitude, or state of need. This company would rather have a double digit IQ and high credit score than a potentially amazing coder with a low credit score. There is zero interest in helping you, only in putting you in debt. I also got the impression that if I simply paid the 16k up front and didn't owe them anything, I would be placed at the very bottom of the list on helping me find a job after the course. Since there is no certification of any kind given after the course is complete, you would be out 16k with nothing but a few simple projects to show for it, while Thinkful steadily places all the graduates who owe them 40k into a job.

The curriculum was no better. The three week course covers what would amount to your first two classes in a tech school. It is stressed up front that an actual programmer knows how to find the information they need without help from outside resources. Which is totally true, except in this case it's a way of covering their repeated mistakes in code and the various pieces of misinformation you are given. I'll give a few examples.

In the demo on assigning multiple classes to one element, they create a class called "bold" in the CSS, and then use "heavy", which is undefined, in the HTML, making the demo worthless. The examples don't show properly. The video and instructions on how to properly publish a web page on Github are incorrect and result in a fail. You are plainly shown wrong instructions and neglected being told that your repo name has to be created in a specific way or the site can't find the files. This was huge for me, because this isn't even coding, and it's a necessary step in completing your final assignment. Then, on the final assignment, if you place the CSS normalization link in the head that they literally recommend you use, it causes the test to fail and have to be resubmitted. The link is good, the grading code is bad.

Those are just a few of the various mistakes and pieces of false info I found. And this is the PREP COURSE designed to draw people in. It's awful, and for the same price you can easily go to a technical institute for a degree and actual job placement help. This is a scam.

I considered becoming a software engineer for 8 years and researched bootcamps for 1 year before selecting Thinkful. The greatest strength of the program for me was having an experienced mentor debugging with me, pair programming with me, and providing... Read More insight into the real world of tech. I valued the flexibility of the course to schedule my studies around when I had the most time and energy and could get the most out of what I was studying. As you may expect, a fully online, self-paced program requires some passion for programming or at the very least self-discipline. I see the flexibility provided by Thinkful's engineering flex program as the perfect way to find out if programming is right for you and if it is, to gain confidence in problem solving along the way with the weekly support and guidance of your mentor.

I pivoted into tech after working in Property Management for four years. After completing three months of Thinkful's program, I was asked to consult for a small business and design and develop their website, and the best part is, I had the confidence to do so because Thinkful taught me to embrace the unknown and to approach challenges methodically with the belief that you will learn and solve for any problem that comes your way. Highly recommend if you are looking to learn a relevant stack, change your career, and/or build a great portfolio of projects.

I graduated from Thinkful's Data Analytics Flex program in late March and was recently hired for a new position -- I had an overall excellent experience with the program! The curriculum is comprehensive and rigorous, focusing on Excel, SQL, Tableau, and... Read More Python. These are core skills for any data analyst; Excel and Python are especially emphasized, and you will mainly use these to complete three capstone projects throughout the course. Although a little bit more weight could be placed on SQL and Tableau, i.e. requiring their use for independent projects, the curriculum provides a solid foundation for all of these tools; students could easily apply them to their own separate projects if desired.

The instructors are great; you get paired with a mentor for 1-1 sessions twice a week, and an academic success manager whom you meet with every 1-2 months or so. Both my mentor and success manager were very helpful and responsive. After completing the curriculum, you get paired with a career coach for up to six months of career assistance; this stage requires you to apply for jobs and participate in networking activities. I did really appreciate Thinkful's job guarantee, as it demonstrates their confidence in landing new roles for their graduates. Thinkful is currently providing added support in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I also really appreciate and believe will be very beneficial to students and recent graduates.

All in all, I loved my experience with Thinkful and greatly appreciate the education, guidance, and support they provided me in my career transition!

I attended Thinkful's Engineering Nights and Weekend course. I graduated in May 2020. I would not hesitate to recommend Thinkful. I originally chose Thinkful because of the tech stack that they teach (JavaScript, Node, React, Express, SQL). I choose that... Read More tech stack because that is most common for the jobs I see listed here in the bay area and what I'm interested in. I made a great choice. I learned a lot through blood, sweat, and tears. What else I really like about Thinkful is they really want to see you succeed. You are assigned a Project Manager as well as a Mentor. What else I loved was being in a cohort with other students. My cohort was amazing and I learned as much as I did with my classmates as I did with my instructors.

I feel I got a well-rounded exposure to a full-stack web environment in a supportive environment. In order to help you succeed here are a few things I wish I would have known going in:

* Have down the basics of JavaScript before you start. There is a JavaScript module, but you really need to go in having a good solid base. If you are new to coding or JavaScript, I recommend doing work (either from free resources or find a good low priced Udemy class) until you are really comfortable with the basics (writing a function, what is an object, array's, etc.).

* After each section, you will be tested. The test will consist of verbal questions and live coding. Make sure you are comfortable with both. I get very nervous so I wish I would have known that. That being said, while they can be nerve-wracking, they are exactly what interviews in a real-world environment are like so these are really helping to prepare you!

* If you get a mentor that you don't feel you connect with it is perfectly ok to ask for a different one. This happened to me. My original mentor while good, did not meet my needs. I requested a new mentor and I was assigned a new one right away. He was amazing!

* Make the most of your mentoring sessions. If you don't have anything that you want to ask your mentor for help with in a session, ask for drills that you can do, etc. Never go in without a plan of something you want to work on. While the mentor is there to help, you must drive your own learning. So if you don't need help, you could go in and ask, I want to get better at X, can you give me some drills to do, or can we talk about X.

* Coding is hard and you will swear and be frustrated often. This is normal. Just do not give up. Get up, take a break, and get back to it. If you are stuck you have mentors, classmates and technical coaches that are there to help.

* Get comfortable with troubleshooting and doing research. I see a lot of new students asking questions, such as "I can't get into X site". Did you open Dev. tools and see if there is an error, did you try a different browser, did you clear your cache, did you restart your machine, etc. If you are having problems troubleshooting getting into a site, how are you going to feel troubleshooting when your code is not working. I do realize this is a new skill for some people so it is not meant as a criticism. If you are new to tech and not really familiar with troubleshooting problems, I would do some reading on how to do that. It really will help you in all areas.

* Give as much as you get. There is a vibrant Slack community of students. Try to get to know other people and contribute where you can. I'm a big believer in giving back where you can.

I just completed Thinkful's Engineering Immersion program! My experience was amazing. I knew nothing going in and learned so much by the end. This is not a program in which you participate casually. It is a hard Bootcamp, I’m not gonna lie, but my effort... Read More was worth it. The projects are closely aligned with what is expected in a real-world situation, and this, in my opinion, is the best way to learn to code. I was unsure how the fully online model would work with regards to being able to get help when needed promptly but to my surprise, I was fully supported by my mentors who assisted whenever needed. Although you’re on your own, you never feel isolated—there are always instructors available to help. My advice to any of you considering this Bootcamp 1) make sure you ask questions and do not shy away; 2) Be prepared to invest yourself- fully; 3) Do not get discouraged if your teammate is not performing to your expectation. It may happen anywhere in school, at work but the show must go on, the project must be completed, work hard, and bring that project to the end. Remember, you came to Bootcamp not for the certificate but for the skill which will get you a job. Good luck everybody!

Pros: -curriculum up to industry standards
-lots of support from mentors and slack channels
-clear guidelines to pass assignments
-career support for different types of interviews and professional documents (resume, cover letter, etc)

Cons: -pacing of the... Read More curriculum could be better
-curriculum in development because of how new the Data Analytics is