Xccelerate

As an undergraduate studying Economics and Finance, I think it would be a great add-on to my experience to learn Python during my summer break. Learning the basics of this language could broaden my perspectives and enrich my exposure to the financial... Read More world, better equip myself before I begin my second year in September. I have a glance at the syllabus next year and found out that I am not learning many technical applications next year, so I think it would be nice if I could learn some basic Python fundamental operations because these are some of the most in-demand skills in the current job market. I heard Xccelerate from a friend of mine and have a look at their website. I found out that this Python for Finance course seems a good fit for me because I do not have any technical background and taking an online course may not be the best choice; you cannot find immediate help when you are stuck and it takes a long time for you to figure the correct solution or even you never figure it out if you are taking an online course, while your instructor can immediately point out the mistakes in your code during the class.

This course is a great first step for absolute beginners who haven't done any programming before. Adrian, the instructor of the course, not only is willing to guide me through the technical aspects of the assignments when I am confused but he can also enrich your exposure to the current business environment. The location of the class is also convenient, situating in Sino Plaza and Leighton Centre in Causeway Bay.

I have also met people from different backgrounds, including investment banks, properties, commercial banks, etc. Everyone can learn the fundamentals in a few weeks time.

Although I am not a full-time student, Resham, the co-founder at Xccelerate Talent Solutions, are willing to provide career consultation and support to you. I have enriched my interview skills and learned how to build my CV. She is very patient and can definitely help you to identify your career options.

I would highly recommend people to take this course as the starting point (especially those who would like to apply for the Bootcamp afterward) and potentially taking other more advanced courses in the future if you would like to get into the industry.

The class is an eye-opener for those without much exposure to coding, I highly recommend it.
The instructor and admissions team in particular are friendly and experienced, and they are very enthusiastic to help. It is best to have a clear objective before... Read More taking this class, and the instructor is very to happy to help.
This class has been a good lesson overall, with lots of insights into different topics in tech and the classmates are very collegial.

It’s my first time doing a bootcamp and I must say I’m surprised at the huge amount of materials covered in just four short months! Given the breath of materials covered, it’s natural to say you have to take the initiative to go deeper for topics that... Read More interests you. And this course provides an excellent foundation for it.

The instructor (Jyoti) is very resourceful too. Help is always available, and you will benefit the most if you think through the problem first before asking. She may not give you the solution right away or even returns you more questions to get your creative juice flowing. But the bottom line is you will be amazed at the problem-solving skills you pick up along the way.

I’d highly recommended this course to anyone who takes the plunge into data science without knowing where to begin. Keep pushing yourself and you will enjoy the course like I did. Good luck!

I spent 15 years in the professional world -- 8 at Goldman Sachs and 7 at Uber -- and throughout my career always wished I had a stronger technical foundation. When I had some time off, I decided to take the full-time Xccelerate Web App Development course.... Read More Lavine, the CEO, cared a lot about the students, personally reaching out to me when I was in my decision-making process and connecting multiple times throughout the 4 month course.

I ended up loving the course. It gave me a great roadmap and framework for thinking about how to build apps myself. There were a few apps I had always wanted to build and now am well on my way. The curriculum is still a work-in-progress in many ways, largely because the industry is so constantly changing. Our instructor was very hard-working and cared immensely about the students. There were other people in the program who were always willing to help if we needed an extra hand.

I got everything out of the course that I had hoped to and really appreciated that Xccelerate clearly cares a lot about what they do and a lot about their students. It was brought to my attention that there are many fake reviews out there as the industry is quite competitive in Hong Kong and China and competitors seem to be trying to sway the review landscape -- but feel free to ping me on my LinkedIn or Twitter if you are considering this class and would like to talk to someone who took part in the full thing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samgellman/ or www.twitter.com/samgellman

Background

Xccelerate helps me to get a job as an analyst programmer so I am happy to share with you my experience in this few months.

Before joining the bootcamp, I had worked in a bank as a frontline staff for one year. I don’t have any tech background... Read More and decided to change my career into IT field.

I strongly appreciate that xccelerate does not break the commitment — get a job which meets the local CS fresh graduates’ salary standard.

Here is my perspective for the course.

Pros
1.motivational environment
Without systematic learning ,It is easy to give up when you study alone in front of computer. Buddies do matter when you need to sit and study from day to night, day by day for four months, especially you and your buddies have clear and similar goal, that is good enough getting a job.

2. Employment service
Xccelerate has such service as a job agency to refer students to employers. It is significant for non-tech guy in hk as so many employers don’t want to give a chance for guys who are not from CS degree. Even they does, they probably will not offer you a CS FG salary package

Cons
1. Instructor needs huge room for improvement Instructor can’t help a lot after module 1(basic front-end knowledge ). This is especially the case in react nodejs lessons. Mostly I need to seek help from google and buddies(luckily they are nice and willing to help!).

2.Course material has so many careless mistakes, and some even misleading

I hope it can be improved in the future! You can’t imagine how frustrated I was when I had stucked in some work just because the material missed “s” for the variable in some lines.

To have a simple conclusion for my point of view, if you do want to entry in IT industry as a web developer, just joined the course, but if you are interested in the academic things and want to learn deeper, here is not the case. There is no shortcut to become master!

I attended the class "Python for Finance" and here is my comment for those who are considering to enrol.

Pros:
- My instructor Wayne is nice and experienced in Python. He is very patient to answer our questions and try out other solutions
- The course syllabus... Read More aligns with my expectation to learn Python from scratch step by step
- The course covered the most basic Python coding and data manipulation skills
- The Founder is very nice and helpful to solve problems I encountered
- The class venue is in Causeway Bay and the scene is very beautiful

Cons:
- The venue itself is also a problem. Personally I don't like co-working office being classroom because there are many annoying events guests and staff walking around anytime disturbing your focus. For one lesson some unknown people were even playing video game with a big TV near our class table. This is totally unacceptable.
- Since Xccelerate also resides in this co-working office, you won't see any decent receptionist nor any helpful staff for classroom related arrangement.
- Course schedule arrangement is weak and unprofessional.
- No official course material. All coding things were taught at lesson time and then the codes would be sent to students after the lesson (if you consider those are course material)
- Course fee is expensive

I had some special reasons to take this course at Xccelerate even though I knew the price tag.
However, with such a high price, I did not expect these sub-standard services and disappointing classroom problems.

Pros:
Michal Szczecinski is extremely knowledgable with years of experience in the field as well as being a patient and understanding professor and funny too! The course materials were in-depth and highly detailed with lots of examples, references, and... Read More clear explanations. The venue was nice and very conveniently located near the Causeway Bay MTR; and if I was held up at work, I could join the session virtually which I really appreciated. Xccelerate also allows for payment plans which helped me out a lot. After taking this course, I can say with confidence that computer science and coding is something I will pursue further as it has so much relevance and applicability in business today and it is quite fun!! Lastly, as a working professional, I appreciated how flexible Michal was regarding HW completeness and project depth. (But as a personal recommendation, take this course when things are a bit calmer at your job, towards the end I became inundated and my grasp of the course suffered as a result)

Cons:
I believe the biggest shortcoming of this course was not requiring Python or coding in general as a pre-requisite. They provide suggested learning materials prior to the start date which gives you a bit of a crash course in Python, but it is not enough. What would happen is, in doing HW/projects I would take so long to try and figure out/look-up simple code in order to apply what we were learning, and it would be quite frustrating. Thankfully there was a student in the class who studied computer science in Uni, and he helped me a lot. This also led to my conclusion that a coding base would be very beneficial as he grasped the course better than anyone else in the class. Furthermore, if you are someone who works around 60 hours a week like myself, it's even more important that you needn't spend so much time just trying to wrap your mind around those fundamentals.

My only other con is that I feel the price was not worth the amount of time we have in the class - if the course was 8 weeks it would have been more reasonable. In addition the syllabus was somewhat jam packed, which is great as it was all very interesting, but 6 weeks is not enough to properly get through it. Machine learning is such a vast topic and even though we just scratch the surface in the class, we needed more time.

In conclusion, it was a great experience, and I learned a lot. Now the task at hand is to keep practicing so I don't lose it!

Part time data science. Instructor: Michal Szczecinski

Instructor: 4/5
Curriculum: 2/5
Course Materials: 2/5
Venue: 4/5

Pros:
+ Curriculum enables students to understand and apply data science and machine learning concepts (albeit on a surface level)
+ Instructor... Read More has a lot of industry experience and answers questions quite comprehensively
+ The instructor highlights key concepts and problems that are important to understand in practice
+ The instructor tries to make material immediately relevant and applicable to student's environment (e.g. replacing Excel work with pandas)
+ Class examples and discussion themes are practical
+ Conventions, and good practices are also highlighted whenever possible
+ A LOT of additional (beneficial) resources will be provided
+ Venue is comfortable and classy
+ Can attend in person or via video conference

Cons:
- DO NOT expect to be spoon-fed
- Fast pace. Can be overwhelming for those without coding experience, (manageable but expect to put in time. I highly recommend covering the prep-work provided before the course begins)
- An inactive Slack group can be detrimental to the learning experience
- Course material is sub-optimal, should be restructured so it is easier to digest (alternatively the material should be released earlier to enable students to prepare or at least skim through the material to be covered next)
- Instructor needs to do a better job of answering questions outside of lesson hours
- R One’s other staff must do a better job of coordinating with the instructor with regards to logistics. At least five of the twelve lessons started later than scheduled and one session was continuously interrupted by other students who were being sent to the incorrect venue. While most other cons are manageable or can be remedied with some extra time and effort from the students, these logistical issues that are outside the control of the student are unacceptable, specially given the price of the course. It’s undisciplined and unprofessional

Other personal recommendations:
- More time should be allotted for the pandas and machine learning units compared to the plotting modules
- More time should be allotted for model analysis and interpretation

I took the full time Data Science bootcamp in early 2019 and I must say, it was one of the greatest most immersive learning experiences I've had. It's far from easy - so don't come into the bootcamp thinking they will hand-feed you everything. If you... Read More come in without being ready to put in the work and expect to be hand-fed information that will just magically make you a data scientist or a software engineer - this (or any bootcamp for that matter) is not the place for you. You're going to be expected to build guided projects and do exercises for the majority of the time after the lecture and that's the majority of the time where you're going to learn how to learn.

The instructor (Jyoti) is extremely knowledgeable (she has many years of experience and taught computer science at University) is very good at explaining difficult concepts and is very patient with any level of student. She will take the time to work with you until you understand it - as long as you put in the effort. Make sure to do the exercises, build the projects, and you'll be ready for the job market. Bonus tip - make sure you upload your projects you build in this class to your online portfolio (github) so you have something to show / talk to employers about.

I am an Indian Postgraduate in Engineering. I came to Hong Kong in 2016. As I started my Job search it was very difficult. Every job requirement was having updated Skill Set in their description which was very difficult to learn by self. Then I came to... Read More know about Xccelerate. Really they changed me from traditional to Modern (in terms of technical skills). Staff and CEO are very helping. I got a job before ending Bootcamp means the Bootcamp is very worthful to enhance your career and skills. One step towards technical skills may change you.

Last, the person who wants success in their life they just need a mentor (Guidance) and I recommend Xccelerate for that.