The Best San Diego Coding Bootcamps Of 2023

I was formerly an entirely self-taught developer who was in his third year of his data science career when I decided to take this bootcamp. I had been working as an analyst since 2019 after graduating with a BA Psychology and self-teaching R, but when I got a more senior engineering position, I decided to take the UCSD Extended Studies Data Science and Visualization bootcamp to shore up my fundamentals and gain valuable new tools to add to my repetoire.

So far, that has been a fantastic decision. The course is fast-paced and demanding, and I think having a prior programming background really helped me, but having the fundamentals of why code worked taught to me in a structured manner has made me a much better programmer. I've been able to take the knowledge I've gained from the course and apply it to my fulltime job, from database work to automation. In addition to filling in the gaps of my self-taught dev career, I have learned valuable new skills, particularly some elements of web development, which will allow me to build out ways to share data with the public at my job. I may not use everything this course covered on a regular basis, but having more things I am capable of calling on if needed gives me much more flexibility as a developer.

The career services have also been quite helpful. I now have a much more polished resume, LinkedIn, and even portfolio, and a solidly built out Github as well. I would encourage all students to take advantage of the career services--I have regularly been contacted by recruiters even prior to graduating the course. I feel confident that I will not need to worry about my employability, even as I am happy at my current fulltime position.

I will say that this course is on the expensive end. I think that it is worth it, but I would caution prospective students to make sure they can fully commit to the course and make the absolute best of it. The pace can be grueling, and while it is great to have actual classes, they are a commitment you must be able to make every week. It is also a lot of work! It pays off, but make sure you know what you are getting into and that you can handle it. This course is heavily Python based, and while it's my personal favorite language to work in, the learning curve is steep and it's important to be able to be the kind of person who can keep trying even if they've failed half a dozen times on a task.

Overall, if you feel confident you want a career in data science, I would say this course is a fantastic way to train for a complex and ever-evolving field.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently employed by UCSD Health in a data science position and was prior to taking the bootcamp, but I am not at all connected to UCSD Extended Studies and this is my honest review based on my experiences as a student. I was actually signed up for this course before I interviewed for my current job, since based off my research it was a solid program!

When deciding on which coding bootcamp there are several key factors when need to consider, and in this review, I will explain those key factors and how LEARN Academy proved to be the best professional educational decision for my goals. 

Overall, there are plenty more points to speak about when speaking about LEARN but at the end of the day after three months of classroom instruction, I was successfully contributing to an agile development team at a tech company in San Diego. The process to prepare for the bootcamp, take the bootcamp, and perform at your internship is INTENSE. The skills to learn to code is like learning a foreign language you constantly need to have a growth mindset and practice, practice, practice. 10 months after my bootcamp I am still growing and learning each day and that never changes. You must have it within yourself to persevere, be a self-starter, and make many many many personal, financial, and family sacrifices to have a chance at getting a junior developer position in 2021. With that being said LEARN is the most well-rounded and experienced resource available in the San Diego area to place your faith in to prepare you for a successful life-changing career pivot. 

From the beginning of my time at San Diego Code School, I was welcomed by a helpful community of aspiring software developers and a knowledgeable industry veteran in Michael Roberts. The way the course is setup was perfect for me. It encourages cooperation between classmates and Michael acts as a fail safe in case you are completely lost. This really teaches you to be resourceful and able to learn new things individually which is a skill required in this industry. Additionally, Wesley was added as an instructor while I was there which provided even more assistance when you hit roadblocks.

The group projects were especially helpful in preparing me for real world development. I learned best practices which impressed interviewers when they asked me if I've programmed in a team setting. I strongly believe I would not have stood out as an applicant unless I had this kind of experience.

The career services that they offer were fantastic and helped me refine my resume/portfolio and offered opportunities in the form of career fairs every month. After the program, you can keep working in the work space and there are weekly meetups for creating projects with your fellow graduates. I personally got a job the week after I graduated.

Honestly, I don't think I would have had a better experience at any other code school. The price point is a steal and it will pay off exponentially as long as you keep working hard and coding every day. 

What led me to enroll in Nucamp was a recommendation for a bootcamp from a friend that's been a programmer for decades, after trying out and not enjoying college and trade school for programming. I felt that I wasn't being set on a path to help in a career that I wanted to do. I would learn the basics of Python, JavaScript, and Java, and it took me into learning JavaScript with HTML and CSS for me to discover that I might really enjoy front end development.

I saw Nucamp having a front-end development course and felt that was direction I needed to take for myself. The course in itself is a lot of work, having to learn a whole bunch of new concepts and coding practices, new libraries and how they function, and exercises and challenges to help understand the course material. Every Saturday you meet with your instructor and go over the course with them, before doing a workshop assignment with your peers to help put what you learned to the test. The instructors are also very honest on what to expect in the field, and has given me a bunch of resources to help hone my skills even after finishing the bootcamp.

The work I've done from Nucamp has paid off. I was always interesting in coding, but I have never felt this confident like I do now with JavaScript. I really enjoy this type of work, and feel its a lot easier for me now to help figure out problems I may have with my code, because I now have a much clearer understanding of troubleshooting code and how to implement the features I would like. I have learned a lot with Nucamp, and although there's still so much for me to learn master, I believe I have fundamentals needed to get started in my career.

I graduated from the 2010-USD-CYB-PT cohort and could not have had a better experience. The coursework was clearly laid out and the class sessions were a perfect complement to the pre-work. The Instructor and Instructional Associate provided real world examples and applied industry experience to better prepare the students for the Cybersecurity field. On top of covering a large range of topics (Programming, Linux, Windows, Red Team, Blue Team etc.), the student success and career success teams were absolutely phenomenal in ensuring student success as well connecting graduates to relevant work experience and networking. If the students are willing to follow the guidance of the Fullstack team and put in the effort, there is no doubt that they will come out of the bootcamp with the capability to start their career in the Cybersecurity field. If there were a way to add more Windows OS related content, that would be my only suggestion in order to build a larger scope of understanding.