Thinkful

I just finished the Data Science Flex course and recommend it for any motivated person who wants to update their analytics skill set in a remote learning environment. The operative term is MOTIVATED. You have to self-discipline and motivation to get through... Read More the program because you are not learning in a class where you can ask instructors questions in real time and it’s much easier to fall off of the face of the Earth in an online format. If you aren’t a self-starter and have the will power to keep yourself on task, you won’t make it through.

As a former college professor who has taught both in person and online, I have been on the both sides of the learning experience and prefer in person courses because they are more conducive to higher quality learning. But, I was not in a position to enroll in a bootcamp in person nor was I in a position to take a full time course for 12 weeks. Thinkful was appealing for three reasons: it provided you with a mentor who was a senior data scientist and you would meet twice a week during the course, it provided a lot of other online support like virtual office hours with other senior data scientists and Slack channels with technical coaching support, and it was part-time with a flexible schedule.

On balance, I had a great experience and learned a ton. The mentor program is its strongest feature because with a good mentor you have someone whom you can regularly ask questions about anything related to what you are doing in the course (including career advice). Your mentor also keep you on schedule for two reasons: 1) you don’t want to waste their time, and 2) they can help get out of ruts when you are struggling with projects. My mentor was outstanding and helped me a lot. My biggest problem was often with syntax and python basics that I would forget and they always provided helpful code.

The material is text-based with examples and walkthroughs. They don’t provide lectures or seminars. You must be someone who learns by reading and doing to master the material. I am one of those people, but you may not be. If you prefer video instruction, you may not get as much out of the program. I, along with other students I was in touch with throughout the course went to YouTube for extra guidance or alternative explanations to help clarify some things. Be prepared, however, to do extra reading on your own on a regular basis. I think that you’ll probably do that in any bootcamp course you take.

You pay around $8,000 for six months in the program with 42 days of pause time. Once you sign up, you get a customized schedule with deadlines to help keep you on pace. Pause time allows you to temporarily stop the schedule for a period of time and push your deadlines back in case you are behind, work gets crazy, or you need to break to clear your head.

Other strengths:
Most of the material (80-85%) was accessible and focused on showing you how to apply what you’re learning. They provided enough theoretical and conceptual material so you got the big idea, but the highest quality materials made code accessible to newbies.
Technical coaching support was always great. Coaches are patient and stick with you until the problem is solved, regardless of how long it takes to figure things out.
Online office hours and other support: Mentors holding office hours were always outstanding and very helpful.
“Pause time”: they give you 42 days of “pause time,” where you can pause your timeline and get deadlines pushed back. You might get behind at some point and this is your option to
Administration: you get an Academic Success Manager who acts like a counselor throughout the course and is there for help related to anything but data-science specific issues. ASMs were always pretty good about supporting you through tough times that were outside of your control. For example, people got extra pause time during the pandemic.
You choose a specialty at the end where you dig a little deeper on a topic of your interest and that serves as the basis for your final capstone project. This is something for you and your mentor to figure out together.
Career Support: You get six months with a career coach to help you find a job, but they require a lot of work. I can’t say more since I am just entering that phase.

Weaknesses
Some of the material was not so clear. You would occasionally come across a subsection where the concept was not broken down very well or the code explanation was glib and you needed to do a lot of outside reading to figure things out. Or, the explanations about the concept and code were both pretty shallow yet there was a big leap between that and what you were required to do for the accompanying assignment. That didn’t happen often, but did so occasionally. Unfortunately for me, I specialized in NLP and the material was incomplete, requiring me to do read a lot of extra material to bring me up to speed. This caused me to take longer than I wanted to for the final project. It worked out OK in the end, but this was pretty frustrating. From my own discussions with other students, this does was not the case with other specialization modules, thankfully.

So, I just completed the Thinkful bootcamp and I definitely think it's well worth the money. The course material felt like updated stuff, and they definitely challenge you. I feel confident that I am ready for the workforce.
I will say that this bootcamp... Read More is challenging, and you can't just slide through. If you want to do bare minimum do not do this bootcamp. If you want to be challenged and learn, then this bootcamp is great for you.
I did the Enginerring Flex program and honestly I think it's best because you get to pick when you work on it, and they match you with a mentor that you meet with twice a week and on your schedule.
I would recommend this course to anyone who wants to fast track their learning of coding.

As the title says, Holy smokes!
Before I begin my review, I want to give a shout out to my academic success manager Cali. She has been absolutely awesome through my whole time through the program. She is quick to reply to emails or slack messages and she... Read More reached for me when I had no idea how to. Second shout is to Victor, who was my mentor during the program, and has taught me a lot. He pushed me to really think about naming conventions (functions, classes). I enjoyed our talks and helped me become a better programmer.

In terms of the actual program. There are bits and pieces where there is some dry reading. Hopefully they change that or implement some video series to break it up. Overall though, all the information you need to get into the tech industry is there, I have learned so much in the last few months. I would honestly referer someone to Thinkful if they were considering coding. The "go at your own pace" really worked well for me and my schedule since it can be unpredictable and it allowed for my dog to not interrupt me during class times.

Overall, One of the best schooling experiences I have ever had. If you are willing to work with them, they will work with you and your needs.

Overview: For those of you in a hurry, here is a quick overview of Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in enrolling in their program, I recommend you read this in its entirety. The curriculum is simplistic in its explanation of topics and has several... Read More errors in the literature. At one point, they send you to Codecademy.com to learn from them. You can pay up to $8,500 to be sent to a completely different company to learn what they should be teaching themselves. The mentorship is inadequate, you will receive thirty-minutes, once a week, to talk with a mentor about any troubles you may be experiencing. Now if you are having a coding problem that you feel unable to solve yourself, and you would like to use the help of your mentor, this creates another issue. Thirty-minutes is an insufficient amount of time for the mentor to become familiar with your code and help you resolve the complication. It's not that the mentors aren't skilled or educated on the topics, it's simply a herculean task to resolve the problems in such a restrictive amount of time. They give you the illusion that you can finish this program at your own pace, that's not true. You will have eight months to complete the program. During this time, you can proceed at your own pace, when the eight months expire, you must pay, per week you wish to extend your program (about $140 a week if I remember correctly). My objection to this program is that when compared to so many other websites (such as Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools, Udemy) Bloc.io falls behind in content and doesn't justify the price tag. The Whole Story: To start, I have received my certification from Bloc.io. I successfully passed all of my assessments in my first attempt. I have not written this review out of anger due to not being able to complete the program. My complaint lies mainly behind the price and its syllabus. I enrolled in the Bloc.io program in December 2018, paid $6500 after applying two discounts. One was a thousand dollars off for paying upfront, the other was a thousand dollar scholarship program that I had received. I started with Treehouse.com, to begin my education into web development. I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and began my understanding of JavaScript. After a few weeks of using other cheaper websites, I was excited to see what I would receive for my hard-earned $6500. Then my program began, within twenty-minutes, I instantly felt buyers remorse. I was met with large sections of tedious text, with an input box at the bottom of each page to write out my answers to the handful of questions. I tried to remain positive and hopeful that the curriculum would improve, I was wrong. The Curriculum: The first problem I noticed is how you send in your assignments. You are given a series of questions, then an empty input field where you have to format the questions and answers in MarkDown to submit it. Now, this isn't necessarily a problem, but it is time-consuming and annoying that you have to waste your time formating out your assignments. They also have a very odd design choice to not include any videos in their courses. Instead, they do live videos, like a web conference over Zoom or Google Hangouts, to somewhat resemble a lecture you would find at a college. This defeats one of the benefits of doing an educational program online. You can view the videos at a later time, but watching a teacher stumble through a lecture suffers in comparison to an edited video with animations and excellent footage like on Treehouse or Udemy. Most online programs I have experienced, have a comment section that you may use to ask questions on the topic at hand. This allows you to receive help from other students if something wasn't clear to you. Bloc doesn't include this, instead, they use Slack. With hundreds of different checkpoints, this becomes an issue. Simple questions and answers can't be related to a particular checkpoint. This leads to the same questions having to be answered repeatedly on Slack, or lengthy searches on Google for a simple answer. In the program, they will go line by line and attempt to explain the reason for that particular line of code. Here is the most important thing to remember about programming. Knowing enough to understand what the code is doing, and knowing enough about coding to solve the problem yourself is a big difference. One of the most important differences if you want to land a job. Coding takes practice, copying someone else's code, doesn't improve your skills. The facile explanations of the topics you will learn are concerning. Through this course, you will learn what is called a PERN stack. PERN, stands for Postgres, Express, React, NodeJS, and represent the frameworks and libraries of code you will use to create websites. While only four topics to learn, they are complex and can be difficult to master. That being said, after eight months of this program, I didn't have the in-depth knowledge that I wanted on these frameworks. Bloc is more concerned about giving you projects to put on your portfolio as opposed to providing a solid foundation on these subject matters. The errors in their code are abundant and are something you will have to fight with throughout the program. It is inevitable you will create your own mistakes while following the checkpoints, and you will have to learn from them. When the mistakes are created by them, it can become frustrating and extremely hard for a student to remedy. A couple of them even confused my mentor to the point where she couldn't figure it out. Mistakes happen, but according to my mentor, they are in no hurry to fix them either. The Personal Touch of Bloc: Every checkpoint you submit is looked over by one of their staff. If you made a mistake in your submission you will be asked to revise your assignment. Sometimes they do give some helpful advice on your mistakes and sometimes include links to help you find the correct answer. This is nice at first, but it becomes troublesome towards the end when your submissions are extremely large. On more than one occasion, I had made a mistake on an assignment or forgot to do a certain task, and the error wasn't caught by the reviewer. Having to do assessments after each module is a nice touch. You get the feel of what it's like to do a real coding interview. Especially in the last module, where you will take part in a couple of mock interviews. This is by far the best part of the Bloc program and is worth mentioning. The Time Restraint: What I found most concerning about the Bloc.io platform is the time frame in which you are to complete this program. You will endure six modules consisting of numerous checkpoints. At the end of every module, you must take a test conducted over Zoom (a web conferencing website) where you will be quizzed on your knowledge of that particular module and its contents. You must schedule an assessment with one of the staff at Bloc, and that person cannot be your current mentor. For the first few assessments, I was able to set a date within a few days. The last couple of assessments became a problem trying to create an appointment. Only two mentors were qualified to take part in those assessments, one of which was my mentor. That left me with only one person that could assess me on my progress throughout these final modules. One of which I had to wait over a month to be able to participate in. I was patient and didn't complain about the long duration between my evaluations. Until, the end of my eight months was up, and they told me I needed to pay them, per-week, to continue. At this point, I only needed to complete two or three more assessments to receive my certification. So I reached out to the Student Success Team, they were responsive but nothing was getting resolved until I mentioned the Better Business Bureau. The next email stated I had received a week extension. In the end, they did give me the extensions I required to finish, without charging me, but they did manage to waste an abundant amount of my time in the process. Final thoughts: Simply put, Bloc.io will teach you the buzz words of programing and their meanings. They will also give you the code to some projects that will make your portfolio look decent. You won't come out of this with a strong understanding of web development, but you will learn enough to get by. If you were like me, and you have no experience in programming, this is hands down one of the worst places to start. Now if you have some familiarity with programming and web development, this is an overpriced, low-quality online program that will let you down after gouging your wallet. The reason I have spent so much time writing such a lengthy review is to inform you and anyone else interested in Bloc.io that there are better places to receive an education on web development. Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools all offer certifications that hold more weight, because people have actually heard of these companies, unlike Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in getting into web development, don't worry about getting a degree or certification. Learning how to write clean code is more important than any certification. There is a reason why many companies do something called "whiteboarding." It's the process of giving an applicant a coding challenge and making them solve it on a whiteboard (or something similar) during the interview process. This weeds out a surprisingly large amount of programmers, who struggle with solving common coding challenges, due to them knowing how to read code and not write it. Learn the fundamentals of web development, focus on creating unique projects that you can show off on your portfolio and go to meetups with other programmers. Those are the three steps that several of the web developers I know have followed and now have jobs without any degree or certification. My recommendation: I wished I had paid the thirty dollars a month for Treehouse, twenty-five dollars for Codecademy. Waited for Udemy to do one of their sales, spend fifty dollars on a couple of their courses, and received a stronger education for a fraction of the price. If you decide to take that path, you will learn everything offered at Bloc.io and more.

I would definitely recommend Bloc's Web Developer Track to anyone seeking to learn how to become a full stack developer. I had some self-taught coding experience in VBA coming into the program, but this was my first formal code training since a basic... Read More Fortran class back in college over 15 years ago. The curriculum is great at building a good foundation and then diving deep into some of the latest and greatest concepts and strategies in use today. The course is challenging and requires that you put in the time to learn the necessary concepts, but if you trust the process and stick with it, you'll come out the other end blown away with the new skills that you have. The general layout of the curriculum requires you to read a written lesson and then complete a set of exercises. Occasionally, these exercises will be reviewed for completion and accuracy, but oftentimes they are just for your own benefit and understanding. Once per week, you'll meet over the web with your mentor. This is a great time to help work through the areas where you're stuck or get some higher level understanding of how exactly the new skills you're learning would come into play in a real-world tech job. In between mentor meetings, you'll have access to loads of technical coaching through Slack where you can talk to coaches or other students working through the same content you are. It might seem like a lot to figure out and accomplish while you're in the middle of it all. It certainly did for me at times! Trust the process. You can do this!

I am a Bloc graduate after being in the Web Developer Track from July, 2019 to March, 2020. I feel this bootcamp does a great job of teaching you the essentials of modern-day web development. My mentor was great at answering questions and the technical... Read More coaches on Slack were superb in addressing my coding issues. I liked the fact that mock interviews and job prep were integrated into the curriculum as they are a great primer for getting me ready for the job market. I liked the online self-paced structure of the program as well. I would highly recommend this program to others!

I currently work at a well established tech company in the Bay, but I will not attribute any of my success to the wasted time and money spent at Bloc. Upon finishing the program, I did not receive reimbursement given the standard protocol. While I was... Read More in the program, I spent more time self-studying on different sites (medium, uxdesign.cc, youtube, etc) The mentors are extremely hit or miss. Mine was clearly in it just for the money. I did not receive much professional help after I got through the course. Bloc promises that you will have presentable work to put on a design portfolio that you can use to break into the industry. Let me just say that the design projects that they bring you through won't get you anywhere close to breaking into any design industry. An absurd amount of time was spent on ensuring that you learn basic HTML CSS and Javascript at the very beginning of the course. I didn't pay thousands of dollars to learn code. I paid for design. And even the design lessons seem outdated - industry best practices were nowhere to be found. My recommendation: self-study - look at other people's work and observe what they have done and how they did it contact a few designers in your area and ask for feedback on the things you've been working on (people will respond, help and actually mentor you) don't code your portfolio if you don't know how to code (some of the best portfolios I've seen are the ones made from website builders... and I've seen hundreds of portfolios given that my current role requires me to interview candidates) don't be a sucker - don't fall for these quick success schemes from bloc... they show all these success stories about former students joining companies like google, dropbox, etc. but they don't show how much work these people had to do outside of the bloc curriculum.

I dropped out the Thinkful Data Science Flex program after 20 days. and I was charged of $1745USD. I was amazed at the low quality of learning content. It even doesn't make sense in the context of the article it presents. Also, there is no video at all... Read More which is really boring and the way of conveying concepts pretty slow.

I went to Bloc in late 2015 to early 2016. I joined because of the policies that made me comfortable. One of the main policies stood out was guaranteed tuition reimbursement as long as protocol was followed. Which I did. Still they refused reimbursement.... Read More

There are a lot of things I wish I had known about this program before signing up so I'm here to tell my story hoping someone finds it useful if you're on the fence about this. I'm surprised at how many 5 star reviews are on here. The program pesters... Read More you to complete a review 2 - 3 weeks into the curriculum which was really annoying. I'd take some of these 5-star reviews with a grain of salt. Curriculum: Once you're enrolled, you're given access to their Slack channels and to their site to begin the program. You then choose a mentor that you'll meet once a week to go over any problems or questions you may have. The material consists of a series of checkpoints with practice problems that you need to complete in order to move onto the next. There are slack channels for each section/modules you're on to ask technical mentors for help when you're stuck on a problem. You'll take an assessment after each module through online video conferencing which will unlock the next module upon successful completion. In the end, you take your final assessment along with a final project to see if you get your certificate. Pros: It gets you started with web development. Some of the mentors seemed to genuinely care about my success and learning. The git workflows. Career services were solid. Cons: This is going to be a lot - The material was pretty disappointing. I was expecting video content at least to explain difficult concepts, but it was just plain text with external links to other resources. It's no different from going to a library and checking out a book on web development. I learned most of the material through Google, Udemy, YouTube - All significantly better resources. The slack channels where you ask for help was extremely inefficient and clearly suffered from having understaffed technical coaches. This was really frustrating and really slowed down momentum when you're trying to solve a checkpoint and have limited time in the day. Sometimes a response could take 20-30 minutes since they had so many questions from other students. If a technical coach's shift is ending midway through a problem, a new one will jump in and you'll start the process over again. This is a HUGE problem when you're trying to complete the curriculum within 8-months. The program is aimed at working professionals, but after an 8-hour workday, I only had about 4 hours before the technical coaches leave for the night. This along with the fact that they were understaffed with 20-30 min response time was painful. My mentors were hit or miss. As I said, some of them seemed to really care about my growth, while others seemed like they were just there for a paycheck and riding the hype train. You're expected to come prepared for these mentor sessions, but the mentors seemed to be disconnected from the curriculum and didn't come prepared by looking at your status in the program (even though they have access to it). Sometimes going over the checkpoints, they don't know what the projects or problem statements are so you have to spend extra time just familiarizing them. You only have 30 mins a week with them which is sometimes just enough 1 problem and familiarizing them with the curriculum didn't help. I also don't think that the mentors, technical coaches, and graders were all on the same page - There have been numerous times where they would have conflicting feedback on the checkpoints. Overall: In the end, I did eventually find a job in the industry, but I wouldn't give too much credit to Bloc for that (Thanks Google, Andrei Neagoie, and Brad Traversy!). I know Bloc and Thinkful were going through a merger throughout this time so that may have contributed to the issues, but either way, it wasn't good for the students. If I could go back, I'd definitely attend an in-person, well-known Bootcamp to alleviate all the inefficiencies. I didn't know this going in, but a bootcamps network and reputation is pretty crucial in the job hunt phase. They can introduce you to more companies along with past alumni's in the industry to help get your foot in the door. While Bloc's career support was ok in job leads, their network is small in comparison. Also, after going through the job search, no one is going to care about your certificate of completion from the bootcamp. Networking, grit, portfolio, and interview skills will be key.