Data Science Career Track Reviews

Springboard is one of the more affordable data science bootcamps ($7500 upfront cost, compared to $10k or even $18k in some other bootcamps). They're able to do this by not having in-person lecturers. The curriculum is completely online, self-paced. Much of the curriculum is actually videos and articles from other online resources (see "Cons" below). But they make up for this by their mentorship program (see "Pros" below). On the surface, this looks like a really good deal--it's cheaper than other bootcamps, it's self-paced, and you get a tuition refund guarantee if you don't find a job within 6 months of graduating. However, in practice, when you have a 6-month deadline (instead of in-person classes with an instructor to keep you accountable on a daily basis), it can be really easy to fall behind. Fortunately Springboard has a number of student advisors and other support staff who can help with setting a schedule for you to follow and giving you extensions (both of which I've used). But I think the people who can best thrive in this kind of program are those who can set clear goals for themselves on a weekly basis, in spite of all the other things going on in their lives. I had a lot of trouble balancing my bootcamp assignments with my daytime job and family obligations (your job and familial needs will feel very immediate while the bootcamp feels less urgent because of the 6-month deadline), and I quickly fell behind and needed extensions. This might all sound very obvious, but it's something that I and others I know often overlook. If you're not the kind of person to set hard deadlines for yourself, don't do a self-paced bootcamp. But if you are, and you don't mind not having an in-person instructor, then Springboard is for you.Pros: The mentorship program is the highlight of this bootcamp. Every student is matched with a mentor who they meet with once per week, 30 minutes at a time. You can also schedule additional unlimited 1:1 mentor calls with any mentor that's available, but I've found my weekly mentor to be the biggest help. I was able to ask my mentor for guidance on capstone projects, discuss questions I had about the mathematics behind certain algorithms, and ask for career advice (they are people in the industry, so they have insight on the field and job searches and whatnot). Springboard also has career coaches to help us with job searches, but it's still helpful to hear directly from the mouth of a person in the industry.Cons: Much of the curriculum is material that you can find on your own online (like articles on medium.com). Springboard organizes it all into a nice package for you, with many of their own project assignments sprinkled throughout, but this can make some of the material feel disjointed since it's a conglomeration of many different sources put together. Springboard goes through many updates with their curriculum though, so they've been making improvements to their assignments and curricula. To sum it up: you get what you pay for; Springboard is one of the more affordable bootcamps, but they're able to keep the price low by not building their whole curriculum from scratch and instead using other resources already available on the web.

To sum it all up, this is a great program to enter/transition into the Data Science field. You will get all the necessary tools to succeed in completing the program as well as finding a job. You get an industry expert as your mentor and have weekly meeting with him. You have a career coach to look over your resume, linkedin profile, and motivate you. And last but not least you have amazing counselors who look out for you and make sure you are on track to finishing the course. 

In searching for the right Data Science bootcamp,  mentorship was the most important element to me: I needed to connect with someone who was able to help me master coding, thinking in data science, and the cutting-edge innovations happening in the field, while bearing in mind my background in philosophy and interest in AI Ethics: Rigor in the field, plus a way to tie it to the mental model I already had about the world. I was lucky to have found a mentor (Ben!) who did exactly that in my time at Springboard. Especially great, too, is their unlimited mentors option -- a half hour/day, every day, for the entire time you're part of the program. I used that liberally to cover the gaps, ask deeper questions, and find resources that were off-curriculum.Springboard's curriculum is mostly public-domain, and I appreciated most of the resources they provided. DataCamp isn't very helpful to learning to code, in the end (try learning French only by being given full sentences, with a single word missing in each sentence you have to fill in -- not gonna happen). The notebooks they provided were mostly good. Sometimes they were unhelpful to learning this or that concept, although the team was rapid to help out. Here's my recommendation to Springboard: Give the option for students to do e.g. four capstones after Unit 6 (the guided capstone they have us do), rather than walk through the whole curriculum. If they opt to do four capstones, make the rest of the curriculum optional -- they'd simply be resources to help students out on their capstones. The capstones would then have to be approach-specific, e.g. do a capstone that works with a time series, or NLP, in order to get credit for the capstone. I suggest this because I find that I learned a LOT when I worked on my capstones, because they related to topics I cared about, and sincerely wanted to understand -- more, in fact, than I ever did plodding through DataCamp or lectures that didn't necessarily interest me. I think that'd also be better for student portfolios -- it shows they're self-motivated and can actively produce multiple projects on a diverse array of subjects/problems within Data Science. Just my two cents. IMO it's an idea worth piloting.I didn't graduate through their job guarantee (or get a job ultimately related to data science), so I've left the "Job Support" section blank.Overall, extremely grateful to have gone through the program. I learned a lot and I know I'll apply my knowledge in unexpected places & ways. Thanks to Ben Bell, DJ Sarkar, and Kenneth Gil-Pasquel! 

Pros:1) Easy to register, had some hiccups but they were taken care of easily.2) Access to Data Camp and LinkedIn learning.3) Flexibility - allowed me to complete the course and take of things at home.4) Suzanne - one of the best career coaches out there.Cons:1) Assignments are rather stale.  May want to consider writing up some new ones.2) Mentors need to be flexible to new ideas; be practical and innovative at the same time.3) One of the career assignments was impossible to complete; may want to rethink it.

Springboard is one of the more expensive courses. However, as someone who is new to coding this is a great option for individuals looking for in depth knowledge of using Python to solve data science problems. Geared more towards data science for business problems. As someone in the research field, I was still able to apply these skills to less business oriented tasks. A little light on the statistics. The one-on-one weekly mentor meetings and monthly career coach calls are a great advantage. Finishing the course I feel well prepared to find a job in data, as well as, learn other statistic languages more independently. 

I was always interested in looking into a boot camp for improving my programming abilities as I felt college's style of teaching never got to me. With Springboard, my mind was so focused on the curriculum that I questioned if the cost was worth the investment. In retrospect, I would of started sooner as it expanded my mental horizon in a lot of ways from my approach to learning, improving my productivity, better managing my time, and ,y networking skills that translates to being more sociable. The connections I have made have been so invaluable to my growth as a person that my confidence in my ability to succeed has bolstered by the person I have become.  It also served as a good time filler during the Pandemic while I was working on the COVID response and graduating college. It was manageable and I attribute the mentorship to that. This program fills the void that  college could not fill for me as I feel more clarity in my direction path.

I planned to transit my career into a data-related position in March 2020 and wanted to study all the required knowledge. I chose Springboard Bootcamp as a start and it turned out to be a wonderful decision. The Bootcamp has an organized curriculum schedule which includes topics from basic python coding, data analysis technique, to lots of machine learning techniques. Everything is well explained, and the Bootcamp provides lots of materials to help students understand the knowledge. Each student will also be matched with a mentor, who is very experienced in the data industry. The student will have a call with the mentor every week to review the homework and to discuss the problems that the student might have. I found this mentor call very helpful. My mentor taught me a lot about real-world data science knowledge, and well explained the data problems I met. Besides all the technical parts, Springboard also provides a wonderful full career coach service. They taught me how to do networking, how to update my resume and cover letter, and well prepared me for the future interviews. Overall, I give 5/5 stars for my experience at Springboard.

I took the Data Science Career Track (and prep) and was very impressed with the material covered and the real world examples they used in this course.  If I was to do it all over again I would schedule a 1:1 mentor call each day on top of my weekly mentor call.  The daily mentor call people can help you with anything but you only get 1 a day.  I ended up finding a job before I graduated the course. I owe a lot to Springboard for my success! 

I enrolled at Springboard for Data Science Career Track. It took me about 8 months to finish the curriculum, with a weakly mentor calls. I also worked on two data science projects using machine learning and deep learning. it was a lot of content and I feel more confident about my abilities now that I finished the course. the advisors were always responding and helpful and from the learning part I believe it did a pretty decent job and I got what I expected, of course there is always room for improvement but I am satisfied with the experience.

I have enrolled for the  Data Science Career Track program at Springboard and I had a great learning experience there. Springboard has a very good course curriculum which guides from the basic to higher level. The course curriculum has two capstone projects and 14 mini projects which helps to understand the Data Science concepts very well. The best part of the course is they provide us a weekly call with an industry expert mentor who guides throughout the course and also they have unlimited mentor calls facility to clear any doubts throughout the week. We also had calls with a career coach who helped with tailoring portfolio, resume, guided for networking, behavioral interview and many more to get ready for the interviews. We also had office hours for general Data Science and career services. I had great experience with my student Advisor Atiriya who was very understanding, flexible and granted me several course breaks when I needed one. At the end of the course, we had four mock interviews on General Data Science, Coding, Project Walkthrough and Behavioral which helped us to review all the course curriculum and get ready for the real interviews. Now I am confident to apply all my Data Science knowledge in my job and loved learning at Springboard. 

I took the Data Science Career Track (and prep) and was very impressed with the material covered and the real world examples they used in this course.  If I was to do it all over again I would schedule a 1:1 mentor call each day on top of my weekly mentor call.  The daily mentor call people can help you with anything but you only get 1 a day.  I only wish Springboard would increase this count because there is a lot of stuck moments when you try to do this 4+ hours a day.  Side note:  I took this as the monthly installments and was able to do the course in 4 months (saving 2 months at almost $1500/mo = 3k SAVED!!!)

P.S. I took this class while busy working full time during this pandemicThis program is not just a classroom. It is something new to me since I've only been in traditional school or classroom. I think what Springboard taught me is pretty practical and on top of that, the mentor. Imagine if you have a TA but this is from the industry, that's my experience with my mentor. More than just the curriculum, what I found very helpful is the job search support. Of course, I could not speak that much since I have not found a job as DS yet, but I do feel like it's helpful. Instead of just blindly applying for jobs posted on job boards, I was taught more methodically profound approach (which hopefully I can testify with a success in the near future).The cons - it's quite overwhelming. Unless you have DS background or similar, you would need to work hard to get as much as possible from this program. For me personally, it was quite too much at times. I allocated times after finishing the program to actually review / relearning data science from other articles to sharpen my data science skills. Do you have to do the same? probably not. During my review, I found I picked up the materials pretty fast. Doing review on your own will give you extra confidence in your knowledge but it'd come back to you.