Here's the breakdown:

- You'll be working a lot. When they say 80-120 hours a week, they mean it. But it's really not as bad as you think. You get used to it *very* quickly and learn to love it.

- You learn what you need. Don't worry about the other academies that focus more on JavaScript. Trust me, you'll get more than enough of that, and you'll be using mostly JavaScript in all 3 of your projects.

- There's constant support. Your fellow cohort-mates are going to become your best friends during this, and the TAs and staff are always around to help.

- You have a robust portfolio by the end of this. You clone a website, make your own app in JavaScript, and make a larger-scale project on a team. It's a mix of everything and you do really feel like a software developer by the end of this.

Good luck!

App Academy is definitely a great opportunity to learn a great deal of material in a short amount of time. There's a reason it has a great reputation among bootcamps - the instructors are knowledgeable and helpful, the curriculum is definitely relevant to what is necessary for actual tech positions, and they have alumni placed in dozens of companys and start-ups. All of that being said, here are some questions I would ask yourself before applying:

1. Do you handle pressure well? The courseload itself is very intense (9-6 M-F with homework every night and near-weekly assessments) and the tests are very much point-blank "can you pound this out in 30-40 minutes or not". None of this is ever unexpected or unreasonable, but be prepared for a good deal of stress and make sure you have ways to cope with it and stay healthy.

2. How long can you go without having a job? While the course itself only takes 3 months, it is unlikely that you will find a job immediately after graduating. Many students take up to 3 months after AA to find a job, and some take as long as 6. You sign an agreement saying you won't take on any full-time employment during that time, so make sure you are financially stable enough to commit completely to finding an engineering position.

3. Do you actually like coding? If you already know that you're just looking for a quick path to a high-paying job, you'll probably get burnt out very quickly. Obviously you don't have to live and breathe code all the time, but make sure you're doing it at least in part because you find it genuinely interesting.

As long as you've thought through these possible difficulties, App Academy is ultimately a rewarding experience that will leave you impressed with the incredible progress you can make in such little time. It's a lot of work, but in the end it definitely pays off.

App academy is a rigorous and rewarding experience. You will feel lost and behind a lot but when things start clicking for you it is so rewarding. I learned so much and having finished my fullstack i am feeling very good. You will get as much as you put into the experience. 

I applied to App Academy in December 2016 and attended the May 2017 cohort. I graduated in August 2017, worked at App Academy for a few months, and accepted a job offer in January 2018. Similar to you, I read lots of reviews beforehand and stressed about many details before deciding on taking the risk, moving to San Francisco, and spending 80-100 hours a week at this place.

I read these reviews and my basic impression was that it would be really, really hard. Like a year of college crammed into 3 months. While this is kind of true, I underestimated how much the family and community aspect of App Academy would help. There are weeks where you have to essentially code from morning until night with not much time for anything else. After you learn everything you need to build apps, you learn how to get a job. That entails applying to dozens of postings every week, and it could take months. Throughout this entire process, I felt like a freak, but had 70 friends right alongside doing it with me. They helped me when I was stuck, and more importantly, brought me up when I was down. I don't know if I could've ever pushed myself that hard to get a job on my own, but with my cohort, the process was streamlined and almost (dare I say it) fun.

App Academy teaches a really diverse range of topics so the constant work you're doing is never boring. It's hardly even repetitive, and in fact, you will likely not fully understand most topics until you get to practice them again after the curriculum is over. In the end, App Academy didn't just teach me how to use React and Ruby on Rails. They taught me how to program, how to binge-learn any framework or language, how to speak to others in the field, and how to value myself, find a job, and negotiate as a Software Engineer. It was an absolute life changer in the best way. After going through it, I'm convinced anyone can do it, not just those technically inclined, and have been pushing the idea on all of my old friends who are stuck in a post-college rut with debts to pay.

Summed up, if you're the type of person that looks at anything and wonders "How does that work?", then coding is for you. If the idea of coding makes you think "Where do I even start?", then App Academy is for you.

ok here's the TL;DR. App academy is one of the hardest things you're likely to do in your life, but if you get in, you can do it. I'm writing this review because I want a hoodie, but I want the hoodie because it says App Academy on it, and I'm proud of that so, you know, that's something. Specifically, understand that there isn't really time to play catch up. If you stay home sick with a fever, you still have to do the work. If you fall behind, you have to leave whatever you drop and keep moving, there's no time to look back. For me personally? There wasn't even time to do everything I had to do. My journey through app academy is a trail of unfinished assignments and near dismissals. But yo, I STILL loved my time there. 

If you want to get into coding and don't know where to stop, app academy will give you the start and take you much much further. I believe my review is now detailed enough to not violate any coursereport rules but still brief enough that I can get back to sending out resumes, secure in the knowledge that come monday, I will have my sweet sweet hoodie. 

Choosing App Academy was one of the best decisions of my career. After being a post graduate with a degree in film, I was not sure with what to do to progress my career in the direction I want to go - job security and financial stability. That is when I decided to join App Academy. This program is one of, if not the best, coding bootcamps. With that being said, the course is rigorous and extremely fast paced. But, if you are dedicated and have  the drive to pursue becoming a software developer, then you will definitely be able to do it. This is coming from a person with zero software developing experience prior to this program. I did not finish because I was the smartest, I was able to stay in the program because I had enough work ethic and will. You can do it!

Within 2 months I went from zero programming experience to being able to create an entire website from scratch. I think it's incredible what App Academy has taught me in such a short time span. Of course, given such a short window, it's impossible for them to teach you everything there is to know. The real value of the program is they teach you how to think and to learn programatically.  App Academy promises only one thing, to be able to make anyone into an entry level software developer. It will not be the end of your learning experience but it provides a hell of a start.  I love the program, but it is not for everyone. These last 8 weeks have been the hardest of my life. You can't afford to fall behind because there is a very real possibility of failing out. If you've read all of that and you still think App Academy is for you, then I could not recommend it more. It has been an excellent experience and I'm genuinely excited to change the course of y life.

App Academy is everything they say it is.  It is demanding, rigorous, rewarding, all-consuming, high-stress, hysterical, difficult, very fast, and transformative.  I’m in the last couple weeks of the program, and it’s just now sinking in how wild a ride this has been.

Like most things worth doing, it takes all day. I worked on code from 9a until midnight most nights during the program.  This level of commitment is really non-optional for most people-- maybe really fast folks can turn in around 10:00.  There is no coasting.  You will be confronted with high-pressure, timed assessments at 9am on Mondays.  You will pair almost every day for months, which means you will be communicating constantly about things you don’t understand yet. You will switch languages every two weeks, and App Academy will often introduce new material before old has had a chance to sink in. A majority of the class has literally had dreams about code. I had one just last night about launching an ICO to finish a non-existent interactive blue screen of death app.  They know how to get you fully committed here, and they do it very well.

Many reviews fixate on the assessment structure.  The people who failed the high-pressure, closed-book, timed assessments generally had severe test anxiety or attempted to party a lot or tend too much to other responsibilities during the cohort.  It was much more rare for them to not be smart enough, the admissions process is selective enough to filter out those who lack the raw talent to succeed.  It is up to you to do enough self-care, including healthy food, sleep, and exercise, to keep from psyching yourself out of the program, and it’s largely a matter of personal style about whether engaging with deliberately induced stress motivates you to try harder vs makes you unproductive.  

The curriculum is always changing as tech evolves, and the staff works very hard to try and keep everything as current as possible.  Most students leave more knowledgeable in Javascript and related frameworks than the Ruby you start in, and they’re teaching the latest versions of React, ES6 syntax, etc.  Having a path rough hewn ahead of the class through the endless dark jungles of code knowledge has been extremely helpful in helping me stay focussed and to avoid wasting time-- they really do know how to point you directly towards engagement with concepts that will get you producing good work, learning more fundamental concepts, and collaborating well with others.  I really do believe that learning this material would have taken me at least another year, probably with several unproductive detours on the way.

While being demanding and highly structured, App Academy also asks for a lot of independence and initiative.  Much of the curriculum is written in a relatively terse style that demands the reader both be able to read closely through dense instructions and to be comfortable doing more and more independent research as the curriculum goes on, just like a real dev.  The teachers are available to get you unstuck, but you’re encouraged to learn more about solving your own problems every day, and when coding in pairs, you will do tons of mutual troubleshooting, basically proving to each other that you can both teach and learn-- it is very normal to just engage with whoever’s closest to you about whatever bug you’re in the middle of, and people uniformly treat that as an opportunity to practice teaching and cement knowledge than as an interruption.  The job search requires you to have a lot of discipline and follow-through, with strict requirements for volume of applications and development of portfolio materials without a ton of hand-holding.  Ultimately, it becomes very clear that you are ultimately responsible for your own education, relationships with others, and destiny, which is both empowering and scary.  

It’s overwhelming and lovely.  There is just so much to know.  By the end of it, you will have several days like mine today, where I white-boarded for interview prep for two hours and wrote this and also built a full Redux cycle for a new feature in a full-stack app I’m finishing up which involved creating a postgreSQL table through a Rails generator, with AJAX calls to the API sent by React actions routed to the DB through Thunk middleware feeding the Rails MVC which ultimately produce JSON parsed through jBuilder in to a Redux store which is rendered by React Components with Vulpix routing and styled with Sass written in a modified BEM pattern with Javascript click handlers and animations facilitated by a library called Anime-- all so I could render a nice gradient fade-in effect for state changes in a 20x20 pixel bookmark button rendered for logged in users on a site I built from scratch in nine days.  Only one of those languages and frameworks mentioned above is actually a Pokemon-- the rest of them are actual pieces of tech taught in the course that I wrote today in an independent project, and I can’t believe I’ve come this far from being barely able to write basic Ruby programs three short months ago.

App Academy isn’t for everybody.  But if it’s for you, it is one of the best things you can do for yourself.  :)

Overall Experience

I personally thought App Academy was incredibly fun precisely because of how challenging it was and it really was challenging. You are surrounded with incredibly bright people, with very interesting backgrounds, and you will push each other to get better everyday. 

Curriculum

The curriculum is easily the strongest part of App Academy. It is truly incredible how much knowledge you will walk away with if you are able to pace yourself and be consistent in doing all of the readings and preparing for the lectures everyday. They offer a lot, but they also require a lot out of you and it is difficult to keep up unless you are able to motivate yourself everyday.

Luckily they provide intrinsic motivation due to pair programming and assessments. Knowing that you have to work with a different person everyday helps you make sure to try to get a good understanding of the subject matter so that you don't slow your partner down. Most importantly knowing that you could be kicked out by failing too many assessments will also motivate you to keep up. This was a main motivator for me attending, because I knew it would always keep me on my toes.

At the end of the main curriculum you will be able to build a fullstack web application that is dynamic, complex, and impressive. That ten day project will be one of the most tiring experiences of your life, but you will be quite proud when you are done. Be sure to celebrate with your cohort mates when it's over.

Diversity

I added this category because I think it's important to note that App Academy is below average when it comes to racial/gender diversity. My cohort was about 5% women and 10-15% non white/asian. This did not affect my experience at all, as someone from an under-represented group, but I cannot speak for everyone and thought it should be noted for others considering App Academy.

Instructors

The instructors are usually App Academy grads. There is a question button during pair programming, which calls over a TA to assist you when you and your partner are stuck. They are all very cool, helpful, and the lectures are incredibly informative. The lectures will usually go over the reading and assignments for the night before and introduce some new material for the day ahead, so make sure you come prepared. 

Job Assistance

The Job Search Curriculum in the last three weeks can feel a bit anticlimactic. You've just spent 9 weeks going 100mph and then all of the sudden things slow down quite a bit. It can be a good thing because everyone is a bit burnt out from the fullstack project, but I wish there was a way to keep a similar pace going. Here you will work on your portfolio, build a nice online presence, learn how to approach networking, applying, negotiating etc. 

Don't come in thinking App Academy is going to provide you with all kinds of contacts and connections. I don't think they have any more ability to get you a job than any other bootcamp. However, they have a great reputation with companies in NYC and SF and a huge alumni network in those respective cities. I attended App Academy in NYC and I can tell you there are companies that only hire App Academy grads because the curriculum is more in depth and the projects are more impressive. 

Outcome

Personally, I applied to 305 jobs, had 6 phone screens, 3 on-sites, 2 offers, and landed an awesome job at a startup in NYC 3 months after graduating and I couldn't be happier. 

The job search is an absolute grind, but don't get discouraged. Just stick with it, apply everywhere, and don't say no to yourself! You never know who will get a job, even if everyone applies to the same one. There is a lot of luck involved and each person is unique even though you all graduated from the same course. Be financially responsible, make sure you have enough of a safety net so that you can focus, and it'll all come together in the end.

App Academy was definitely the hardest 3 months of my life. At times it was a bit brutal, with 10% of our cohort getting kicked out before the end of the program. The program is certainly not for everyone, but if you are a fast learner AND can dedicate pretty much your entire life to the program, you can get a job as a Software Engineer after this program. You certainly are expected to work as much as you everyday. Everyone is incredibly smart and motivated; I went to a top school in the United States, but found my peers here to be heads and tails above my university peers.

That being said, they do deliberately pace the course so that you can keep up -- pushing you to the brink and then giving you a few days for the material to sink in. I was also able to take a small handful of days off, but some are unable to do so. 

I had absolutely NO computer science background before attending, and ended up getting a job within the first month following the program, so this program DEFINITELY fulfills its promises. 

I recently completed the 12-week software engineering track at App Academy’s San Francisco campus. Before attending App Academy I had some experience in coding but I have never studied computer science or attended any coding course. What I think is great about App Academy:

1. The course is very well structured. Course materials increase in complexity and difficulty as the course progresses and by the end of the course, a student should have a very good understanding of both the frontend and backend mechanics of a web application, all in a matter of 12 weeks.

2. Each day I work with a different member of the same cohort to resolve some coding challenges. I enjoy working as a team and I also have the opportunity to learn how to work with and adapt to people with vastly different working styles.

3. There are weekly assessments which I think is a good way to test what I have learned in the preceding week.

4. The campus is located in downtown San Francisco which is very convenient.

Other things that you should know about App Academy: The course is intensive and the learning curve is steep for most students (unless you have a very solid background in coding, but even for some members of my cohort who had fairly solid prior experience in coding they still found it challenging). Completion devotion to the program is expected from every student

On the whole I am very satisfied with my experience at App Academy although I would hope the program to be a bit longer (say a few weeks more) and to add a reading week in the middle of the course so that students can review or study an area in particular.

You will learn a lot at this program. Every day is intense and you will succeed if you don't waste time and spent your day learning the material. This program teaches you to be self-sufficient with minimal hand-holding which is essential in this field. If you are a hard worker and want to break into the software development industry this is the bootcamp for you, especially with the deferred tuition model.

Looking forward to the job hunt and I feel pretty well prepared.

Honestly the one feeling I walked away from my months long studies at App Academy was enjoyment. I surprisingly enjoyed every day of the App Academy curriculum. I was worried that I would not be able to sit through a full day spending 1-2 hrs in lecture and then simply coding away at a desk and yet the curriculum and the way it was laid out + pair programming made every day a joy. I benefitted immensly and thank G-d I begin a new job next month after being on the job search after the course for a little over a month.

Everything you've read about App Academy is probably true. The hours are long, the course is intense, and for some people it's probably the most difficult thing they've every had to do. But more importantly, most people who have gone through it will agree that it was the best decision they've ever made and I can definitely agree. 

One of the greatest things about App Academy is the fact that they have the same goals as you: to land you a job. This is especially true when students (most usually do) take the deferred tuition model, which means not paying full tuition until accepting a full-time job offer. You can really tell that everything they do is to try to set you up for success. The work space is available 24/7 and there's always a TA available to help, whether it be in person or on Slack. 

It is important to note that while everything is laid out for your success in the course, how far you'll go is 100% dependent on the work that you put in. Due to there being no grades (aside from weekly assessments), it is sometimes easy for students to overlook some homework assignments and projects. If you're someone who likes to barely scrape by and do the bare minimum, then you're going to be in for a bad time. I had a few pairs I worked with that did not complete any readings and seemed very behind and those people ended up being the ones asked to leave after failing two assignments. On the contrast, those who study JUST for the assessments and put other parts of the curriculum on the backburner may pass all of them, will sometimes end up hurting themselves during final projects and end up having to relearn a lot of concepts that were not covered in the assessments. You really do get what you put into the program and knowing/balancing what concepts to focus on becomes a really important thing to learn over the course of the 12 weeks. 

Overall, App Academy was definitely worth it for me. If you're looking for a change in your life and you think that web development may be for you, I would urge you to apply. If you get through the application process and get accepted, the only thing that you will need to get all the way through the course is having the right mindset. 

My background and context: I come from a very non-technical, liberal arts background and my first time ever coding was about 5 months before my cohort started, while I was preparing for the JumpStart course (if you get invited to take part in JumpStart, I HIGHLY recommend doing it - you get a great taste of what the real program is like, including overall instruction-style, assessments, pair-programming, basic material, etc. and it reportedly greatly improves your chances of getting accepted into the program). 

Review: Overall, I would say that App Academy lives up to its ranking and is a great experience for turning someone like me, with absolute minimal tech / coding background, and in just 3 months turning this person into someone who can create a web app from scratch and can comfortably apply to jobs in that field. That being said, everything everyone says about the workload and intensity is completely accurate and you need to take it seriously. I gave up the vast majority of my life's activiities outside of a/A out of necessity - you really need to put in every weeknight and most of your every weekend into catching up if you're behind, getting ahead if you're not, or studying for the next week's assessment. Being someone who wasn't as naturally gifted or previously trained in the field, I had to work much, much harder and put in way more effort than those people so that I could still contribute and be productive in my daily pairings, projects, assessments, etc. 

Pairing - I found the pair-programming experience to be one of the most educational and enjoyable aspects of the program. Every day you are assigned a new partner to work with for the entirety of that day. You work through (and rarely complete) all of the day's projects together and over that time end up learning a lot, both about the person and about the day's material. Whether you find yourself to be the faster/more knowledgeable of the pair, or the slower/less knowledgeable, you end up learning at least a few things by day's end. Sometimes your partner will know a few cool keyboarding shortcuts in Atom that you hadn't seen before, or they will know some tidbit about Javascript formatting that you end up following yourself every time after, or they will have some alternative strategy to solving a problem that you find much easier to follow than the normal methods. I didn't have a single bad pairing experience in all 7 weeks of my pairings, half the time you end up eating lunch with your partner and talk, and most of the time by the end of the day you end up befriending one more person in your cohort. While everyone is learning the material at different speeds, you find that there are no "dumb" people in your cohort, every one is highly intelligent in different ways; they are the 2% that made it in with you and each is inherently capable of getting through it. 

Assessments - The assessments were definitely one of the more difficult aspects for me. The assessment policy is: out of 6 assessments in the first 8 weeks of the program, if you fail 2 of them (failure usually being defined around 85%), you are asked to leave the program, that day. This is where I find my only cons with the program. Having to leave the program that day, in front of all of your classmates, is downright brutal and borderline humiliating. If anything it motivates you that much more in your studying to avoid such an experience but I still think it is overly harsh - a simple email that night instead would be a less degrading situation, in my opinion. I also don't like that because of this intense "Survivor"-style policy, I was often put into the very difficult situation of having to choose between fully completing the readings/videos, and hw assignments for the weekend, or studying sufficiently for that week's assessment to avoid expulsion. While I tried to balance this as best as I could and ultimately did make it through, I hated having to make that decision each week and having to compromise my getting-ahead for that week. 

To get you through all of it, there is an amazing team of warm, highly-gifted instructors and TA's who come to your aid either in person or online at the push of a button and explain concepts and bugs to you until both of you are confident that you fully understand, all of your highly-motivated, chill-mannered classmates, and of course, Google :).

For context: I came straight out of college with a degree in pure mathematics, a significant history of programmatic thinking, and a few years of basic programming experience and game development in some unconventional languages under my belt, so I ended up being one of the faster ones. However, I'll write the review from the perspective of my classmates since I understand that the majority of applicants don't have technical backgrounds. I'll cover the scary before I cover the positives.

You need a lot of grit, determination, and motivation. The overall pace of the course is extremely fast, and it challenges your studying habits and your ability to overcome nearly incomprehensible material being thrown at you at lightning speed. 9 hours of class time per day along with hours of homework each night means that you end up eating and breathing code for 70-90 hours per week. Weekly assessments are given to ensure that everyone is on track, and two failures means you get removed; about a dozen people from the cohort didn't make it to the end and it kinda sucks seeing them leave. You could feel the stress hormones through the roof, and over half of the cohort experienced failing one assessment and the doomsday mindset that followed. There was an unfortunate tradeoff between fully understanding the material and studying for the assessments, and most people opted for leaving the understanding to after the assessments were over. I did not experience the stress that most people did, but it's common enough to be worth mentioning. 

That being said, the amount that you end up learning is quite impressive. No one could learn all this through self-study at the pace that they teach it here. At the end of nine weeks, I found myself with a fully functional single-page web app built on Rails and React/Redux, which was super cool (too bad they don't teach this kind of stuff in college). The pair programming was also a great experience - you find yourself developing soft skills and becoming more eloquent at communicating, which are of utmost importance to the job search. My classmates were all super chill and bright folks, and it was an absolute pleasure to be working alongside them and pairing with them every day. I can't say I miss pair programming, but I can say I enjoyed it a lot and experienced a lot of growth that I never experienced when I was self-teaching programming.

I feel prepared for the job search, and I know that I will be much more successful in the search than I would have been had I tried to pursue this path through self-study. 

The bootcamp prep course with Alvin (and David as our TA) did exactly what it said on the tin - got me into my top choice coding bootcamp (within 2 months of starting the course)! The curriculum takes you from complete beginner to Bootcamp ready, moving at a pretty quick pace at first, but with plenty of time to solidify and practice what you have learned over the 4 weeks. The material is thorough, however there are a few topics you will have to invest a little more time into if you are interested in schools other than a/A - but nothing you can't handle with each invidividual school's prep material. 

Alvin and David were both awesome. Patient, supportive, serious about the work but also lighthearted in their approach. I think the money is a worthwhile investment if you are serious about getting into a bootcamp and want to jumpstart that process.

General Summary:

I wholeheartedly enjoyed my twelve weeks at App Academy. The program provides an intense, unique experience. Basically, it lasts twelve weeks: the first nine weeks comprise the “Technical Curriculum” and the last three the “Job Search Curriculum”. However, after being admitted and accepting your offer, you have to complete a one-month online course called “Alpha Prep” before starting.

The technical curriculum is intense. In seven weeks, you will learn all the material you need to be able to develop your own React/Rails web app from scratch in the eighth and ninth weeks. On a daily basis, you will have many projects (whose material you covered in readings and videos the night before) to work on with your partner. You’ll learn Ruby, Postgresql, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and React/Redux.

However, pair programming and the “question button” system serve to alleviate some of the stress of the course. Pair programming is basically you coding on a single pc (and keyboard) with a partner. Every fifteen minutes, you switch “drivers”, i.e., the person who is physically typing on the keyboard. For the first couple of days, you might feel uncomfortable having to code all day with a partner, but the benefits of doing so become apparent soon after. Having to verbalize and communicate problems to someone else rather than hacking away at the keyboard forces you to become methodical in your approach, and it helps you ask better questions when you’re stuck.

The “question button” is a button on the internal web app that puts your name on a question queue. The TA’s are pinged every time a person is added, and they come by to field students’ questions on a first-come, first-served basis. The benefit of this system is that it allows all students an equal opportunity to have their questions answered and it deals with the issue of less vocal or visible students receiving less attention.

The job search curriculum begins in the tenth week. By that point, you will have learned all the skills you need to develop fully functioning web apps from scratch. However, simply because you have learned the technical material doesn’t mean the course becomes less intense. In these three weeks, you will work on your résumé, cover letters, online presence, personal pitch, and whiteboarding problems. In this aspect of the course, you will receive a lot of support from the career coaches. They will review your projects portfolio, résumé, etc, in depth and will give you detailed pointers on how to improve each item.    

Pros:

The TA’s are always on call, and they generally are able to pinpoint your problem within seconds and do not leave you until all your doubts are assuaged.

Almost the projects serve some practical use, and the emphasis on repetition ensures that you internalize the material.

Pair programming makes the experience more enjoyable, and it ensures that you rarely get bogged down with trivial bugs.

The career coaches provide a lot of support in the job search. They help with your portfolio, personal pitch, networking skills, online presence, and negotiation.

App Academy’s alumni network is helpful and supportive.

Cons:

The curriculum is constantly being updated so sometimes you will find some inconsistencies in the material. This problem does not appear so much in the 12-week program itself, but it is definitely noticeable and distracting in the Alpha Prep course.

As much as I love pair programming, you will have days where you work with someone you find intolerable. Fortunately, this only happened to me three days out of the roughly 35 in which you pair program, but this experience is variable.

There are six assessments throughout the course, and they are a bit stressful because if you fail any two of them, you are asked to leave the program with your initial deposit refunded. Moreover, because they are graded automatically, they are unforgiving--meaning that a single typo can cause code with otherwise sound logic to fail their automated tests. However, the expectations of the assessments are straightforward and you are given plenty of time and material to prepare for them.

Caveats:

If you are not an independent learner, you will have a hard time at App Academy. Despite the great amount of support you will have, there is a lot of material and little time. If you assume App Academy is like a traditional educative program where the student plays a more passive role, you will likely struggle through it. This is not a criticism of the instructors (I hold them in high esteem), but it is simply the nature the program.

You will not have time for anything else. This is not an exaggeration. I taught myself to code for half a year before attending App Academy so the first three weeks were relatively light for me. That being said, I was only able to have weekend evenings free during this time. When it came time to create our web apps from scratch, I literally had no time for anything else even on the weekend.

Some people assume that the job search curriculum is less intense than the technical curriculum. This is not true so don’t get your hopes up!

This is an excellent bootcamp. The instructors are capable and it takes little time to get help on a difficult or confusing problem. I would say the only con is that it is a tremendous time investment, and it is punishing if you fall behind. I had no time to go to the gym and even on weekends had little time to socialize. You should not enter this program with the expectation that you'll have multiple hours of free time a day over the run of the course. You will not have time for part time work while in this course.

But almost everyone acclimates to the pace and learns an enormous amount. It's a very strong course and the organization works hard to help you find a good job once you've graduated. I recommend it very highly.

App Academy was my first choice,  because: — it's tuition model — great reviews and overall rating — greatest TA's — it's curriculum — supportive classmates Although it's pretty hard to keep the pace for the whole course, it pays back, once you start working on your final project, you'll realize that you know a lot, even if you thought you don't. Greatest experience.

I was part of the July 2017 NYC Cohort. AA attracts people from diverse backgrounds and top-schools, but one thing they all share in common is that they're sharp and driven. Coming in with programming experience will help, but don't be discouraged if that's not something you have. The TAs do a great job in teaching languages and frameworks you need to succeed in this course. Also, AA really -is- full-time. Although class ends at 6pm, many people either stay in the office to study/work on projects more, or continue at home. The material is challenging, but there's camaraderie that naturally forms in every cohort as you're struggling along others to achieve the same goal. I think the TAs really make a huge part of the experience, I hope the AA continues what they're doing and how they select staff. Stay curious, humble, and be sure to reach out for help when needed.

After accumulating six figures of debt and few hard skills at college, I had developed a cynical attitude about education as a whole. I discovered an interest in programming at work and when I realized that I'd reached a limit in my capacity for technical growth, I considered my options. Another 2-4 years in college was a big no-no (fool me twice, shame on me) and, for similar reasons, spending 15-20k upfront on a bootcamp with no guarantee of success seemed like a bad bet.

App Academy was groundbreaking. For the first time, I found a school whose tuition model aligned with my own personal goals. The better I did, the better AA did.

The rumors are all true. No amount of words can describe the rigor and the challenge of the program. An 80-90 hour weekly commitment is typical. You'll lose sleep. You'll be challenged consistently and think "I'm not sure I can finish this". You'll be surrounded (and outcompeted) by some of the most gifted people you'll ever meet. You'll fail to understand a topic on a Saturday and pass an exam on it on Monday. Once the learning curriculum concludes, you're thrust into the job search, which is filled with entirely different challenges -- personal projects, phone calls, take-home assessments, technical screenings, whiteboarding sessions, in-person interviews, salary negotiations.

And then, almost miraculously, things start working out. You get complimented on your GitHub code at interviews, you do well at whiteboarding sessions, you get offers that are almost double what you earned at your previous job. You have the confidence to choose which offers to accept and which to reject.

A single review can't do AA justice. It truly provides a life-changing experience. The TAs are phenomenal --- amazingly brilliant people who not only understand the material but have a genuine desire to help others. The in-class pair programming assignments are perfectly structured; there is enough material to ensure a good 5-6 hours a day could be spent coding. The caliber of the students is phenomenal -- lots of different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. The job placements team is stellar as well; all were confident career coaches that were eager to lift you up and fill you with optimism.

All in all, I have zero regrets about the program. All promises were kept. It was the most challenging educational endeavor I've ever attempted but, thanks to App Academy, I feel confident about my future as a software engineer. If you're passionate about the field and are willing to put in the hard work, there's no better place to learn web development.

The resources available are amazing. The curriculum is always changing to keep up with the latest technologies. As a result, it's not always the most polished, but it's probably the best way to learn the latest tech. This is facilitated by the amazing TA's who are always available, even outside of class hours via slack or email. My classmates were all awesome people and it was nice having a space to come in and study. (I hear they're upgrading locations again, too).

As for cons, the pacing of the curriculum was pretty bad, but they try to do their best to time assessments and projects to be as manageable as possible. Even then, because of the sheer quantity of materials to learn, it behooves you to keep up and understand where you're at as best as possible. I didn't find the curriculum to be too stressful coming from a specialized high school/ medical school background. I also had a basic understanding of a lot of programming concepts, so I was definitely at a bit of an advantage over my classmates who had to teach themselves the basics of coding a month or two before starting the course. Generally speaking, if you made it past the interview process, you've got what it takes to pass the course. The job support portion is nice, but there are a lot of students so it might be difficult to pin down subtle issues you're having with the job search. If you reach out, though, you'll get the support you need.

Some advice: SLEEP. Especially if you have an assessment the next morning. Your priority during boot camp MUST be in this order from most important to least important: Sleep, food, studying, everything else. If you do not sleep properly, you will not retain the information you're cramming, especially if it's all completely new. You will learn the most by doing what you read about the night before, and you won't be able to code the next day on no sleep and an empty stomach. Also, when you apply to jobs, apply to everything at once. You will have the best chances while all your projects are fresh. You have nothing to lose by getting in touch with hiring managers and CEO's of companies. Do what it takes and be sure to keep coding. Good luck.

If you're just starting off your research into boot camps, a/A is one of the best, especially in NYC. You will need to save up a lot of money in order to support yourself and pay a deposit. I would recommend saving around $15k to be safe, $12k bare minimum.

I believe enrolling at App Academy was the best decision I could have made when I decided to transition into software development.  If you enter this program hungry to learn and open to possibilities, you'll gain a ton of valuable technical skills as well as computer science basics that will help direct your own continued learning.  

I entered this program with no technical knowledge at all (Microsoft Excel was my limit) and came out of it having built full-stack apps and with a job offer from a startup working in a completely different stack from the one we learned at a/A.  I also have the confidence to take that job, knowing I'll be able to learn what I need quickly and well.

This was a super difficult process--don't enroll unless you're able to essentially turn off the rest of your life for the duration of the program--but I made it out and couldn't be happier with the experience.

I had a great experience at app academy.  It’s a tough program and you can expect to dedicate all of your time to it during your three months as a student.  Despite all the hard work, it’s still fun(if you enjoy coding). Pair programming, a fundamental part of app academy’s education, keeps you alert and engaged while learning.  I highly recommend the program if you’re a self starter and looking to get into the tech field.