BrainStation

I have taken the Web Development Immersive - fall 2016, course.  I have enjoyed the course a lot.  I liked the speed and the structure of the program very much.  Every week they were focusing on a new topic and everyday was full of intense materials.  The best part was, they gave new lessons for 2-3 hours then we had time to do an assignment ourselves.  It was like hands-on training.  When I listened to the lecture, everything seemed straight forward but when I started doing the assignment, then I realized, I had tons of questions.  TAs were the best, they were always there to help you out.  It was fun to learn a lot of materials in a short time.  

For a beginner, who has no programming background, this course might be challenging but if you can keep up with the assignments and ask away questions to TAs or peers, it's doable. 

It was also great to see that, BrainStation tried to keep up with the latest technology.  My batch was first to learn about React.  Also, every Friday, they had different speakers to give insight about various topics such as algorithms, background about how internet works, networking, how computer works, etc.  Someone coming from a non-Computer Sc. background, these topics are crucial that they know.  

Overall, it was fun experience for me and I have learnt a lot.  The best part was, BrainStation taught me how to teach myself.  They have introduced a lot of topics, that they didn’t have time to teach but it’s an opportunity for me to continue to learn myself and keep working on my projects to add on my portfolio.

I was registered for a UI Course in Vancouver Campus. On the first day, 4 hours before the class time, I received an email saying that the course got cancelled for this cohort and asking me to move the start date to the next season.

The institution offered me a refund but it was a very negative and frustating experience.

I came to BrainStation with a background in finance and my goal was to get a better understanding of how teams within digital businesses (Design, Marketing, Operation, Engineering) work together to bring ideas to market. The hands on experience I got being guided by top industry professionals in modelling my own market opportunity and finding product market fit was top notch. 

By the end of the class I felt more confident in my abilities to speak the language of digital and better evaluate digital businesses. 

Another really interesting aspect of the course were the students I got to work with. They came from a variety of backgrounds which made for a dynamic environment with many view points and opinions. Also made for an interesting group of student presentations. Highly recommened this course as an intro to how the digital product development process. 

I took BrainStation's Data Analytics course as a way to further my analytical skills for my current role. I use Excel often but had no experience working with larger data sets, and wanted to upgrade my skills to be able to do more complex analysis.

I came out of the course with an understanding of some complex tools (SQL, Tableau) as well as with hands-on experience doing analysis of a variety of different data sets. The instructors were very attentive and there was enough time in class to work through problems with their assistance. The pace does move quite quickly, but there is enough support in and outside of class if you need it. Highly recommend this course!

Signed up as a part of my company's effort in learning more about Google Analytics. The company spent roughly $2.5K to send 7-8 people to the 7-hour course on Sunday. 

In the first 30 minutes, it was clear that both instructors have not prepared at all to host the session :

• No structure
• Reading from slides
• No structured approach to explaning material
• Lack of rehearsal for the class

In about an hour, I realized that we are already a section behind and instructors did not think of sticking to the agenda up until the moment it was lunch time and we were nowhere near the expected point in agenda. 

There was a huge gap between the audience and instructors, no interactions and on occasions when "students" would ask questions, answers were never 100% satisfying - as if we are paying someone who is only "good enough" to teach us. 

My advice : before thinking of signing up for one of these 1-day bootcamps, I definitely recommend searching for available online materials ( especially if this is a Google Analytics/Ad Words/Digital Marketing) as this will be a more structured approach to learning rather than sitting in a classroom where instructors aren't 100% or even 75% confident about the topics covered. 

Most common words used during the session : 

• I think this is how its done
• I'm not too sure because I'm not a developer
• I think that's what it used to be
• Not sure why they do it that way
• Need to look it up during the break

Question to Outbrain : HOW DO YOU SELECT INSTRUCTORS? 

Do you ever look past their resume and have any other ways to see how fit are they to host sessions that cost 300$ per head?

I did the web development immersive program. The group started off on the wrong note as there were way too many students, the ratio we were promised was incorrect. 

There was a lot of great topics covered in the lectures, but it was presented too quickly for most, and once you fell behind you stayed behind. Brainstation offered little to no support for anyone who was struggling. I had reached out for assistance on several occasions to multiple instructors and was ignored or put off for the most part. The one time I was spoken to it was in an aggressive manner, it was strongly suggested that I was the problem, not the program. 

There were many times that the group was promised something that was never delivered. The portal we were getting our lessons from was a work in progress, often you could not access the lessons and they kept modifying the website. It felt like we were the test rats for the new platform. Everything felt very disorganized, and the cohorts took second place to any corporate event that took place in the space. 

After going through Wyncode, It definetly was not worth the 10k. After graduating I enrolled in a Udacity nanodegree course and graduated after 2 months. My current employeers were way more impressed with the work I did in my nanodegree program. The job support I received with Udacity actually helped me get my current position. It is strange that Udacity offers money back after 6 months if you are not hired but Wyncode won't do that. I would love to get that 10k back to be honest. Waste of good money and time. I do not reccomend. its a good course but worth around $700 to be honest. I urge you to try something else.

A lot of people chose Wyncode because of their 90% placement in 90 days. After their own audits we now know the truth behind that. Many people are still looking for work. Many people had to go back to their old lives and even move back to where they originally lived before moving here with the hopes of finding work. 

Saying that Wyncoders graduate and go to work in Tech, isnt a stretch. But with that said, they are not coding. Lots of people graduating Wyncode are taking jobs with companies doing things other than coding. 

Wynwork (job placement) sessions are depressing. They ask you if you have any leads, then share them with everyone else, causing that company to get bombarded with applicants. That arent always qualified. 

Miami tech doesnt really exist as much as they try and sell you. Its the same small group of people. To be honest they arent even that welcoming. If you dont beleive me just go to any "tech event" in Miami and say "hello" to the same 30 people you see at every event. 

After looking for work for almost over 6 months, I can tell you that Ruby is not hiring here in Miami. They will tell you that so many companies use Ruby, that may be true. But they def. arent hire, and if they are. They arent hiring Jr. Devs.

With that being said almost no one is hiring Jr devs in Miami. 

JavaScript, PHP, UX developers is where the work is.

There arent many negative reviews here because Miami is all about who you know, and people know that if you get blacklisted. Its pretty much over for you. There has actually been talk about class action lawsuit between quite a bit of previous Wyncoders from multilpe cohorts across multiple locations, because of the 90% job placement rating which was their biggest selling point. A lot of people took out loans and are paying them back and honestly havent even gotten a single interview after Wyncode.

Also, telling people that "getting the job is up to you, we give you everything you need to get the interview" is a really crappy way to make people think its their fault they cant find the work. When in reality there is no work. 

Finally, if any of this sounds far fetched or just someone being bitter. Lets look at the facts, well over 250 people have graduated Wyncode and there are only 118 reviews. If everyone was satisfied with their experience they would have been happy to leave a review, or let alone resond to the audit questions. 

I signed up for the part-time class in NYC.

They cancelled the class 4 business days before the start date of the class.

Or as they put it "Unfortunately we've had to delay the start of our part-time courses, and we don't have an official start date posted yet."

I couldn't sign up with another institution due to the fact that all fall classes had passed their admission deadlines. 

Didn't receive any type of accommodation for the inconvenience they caused (like a discount on a future course or something of that nature).

They provided me with a refund but the waste of time and effort, not to mention how unprofessional this was, forced me to write this review. 

Intro

First, let me say, that I met a lot of cool people who I still keep in touch with and who I had a lot of fun with.  But like a previous reviewer stated, I did not sign up to make friends, I signed up to learn to code and acquire a set of skills that would make me employable. That however did not happen.

With that out of the way, one of my first issues with Wyncode is with integrity. It seems like they will say anything to get you to signup and give them 10k.  90% placement at 75k is terrible unethical marketing. Not even close to 50% for my cohort.  That was their pitch when I signed up. I've actually considered taking legal action as I'm still stuck paying the loan.  When I was on the fence, they pitched " hurry, only one spot left", so I did, only to see 2 students admitted after our start date.  In the previous cohort they admitted a older gentleman who was unemployable and In our cohort they admitted a student who could not type.  If they could pay they were in.   

Curriculum:

I agree with a previous post, if you sign up for code school,($25) and if you read a book each in JS, Ruby, and RoR, ($75) you would have learned more then the curriculum and only for $100!!!  I agree with homework issues stated below, many times you would learn something very dense, only to realize the hw is from yesterday's lecture.  

Instructor:

We were basically lab rats with our instructor.  They hired Damon, who while a great coder, was a poor instructor.  He only taught two cohorts and was let go, so that tells you all you need to know.  Meanwhile we are stuck footing the bill for this experiment.  

Job assistance:

This is one of the worst parts of the whole program.  You are basically on your own.  Send emails and come to follow ups and talk about it.  The wynterviews, are good, but I think they should probably be longer and allow you to show off a project or two.  In my cohort alone, I would say 75% were not hired and/or no longer coding.  I would also second the email bombarding from Wyncode was a turn off to potential employers, as I had an employer say this to me directly.  

Summary

Save your money.  Sign up for codeschool and code academy, read a couple of books, and you'll be fine.  Definitely not worth it.  I would also recommend some project based learning like code4startup or baserails.  These were excellent.  Also like someone mentioned before i would focus on Javascript more, it's barely taught at all at Wyncode.  

For those newly in development, Wyncode helps support people to launch into new careers, especially if you're a south florida local. It was definitely a fun and memorable experience! Still though a price tag that costs an arm and a leg of $10,000 which was SOOOO MUCHH for me, I would probably expect similar education for $5K or something... in terms of actual content, didn't feel like a full-on developer or designer and so much to learn still so a bit bummed out for that but maybe I had too high expectations and yeah wyncode did help me jumpstart everything still and yeah am happy I still got access to the network and for learning about the power and elegance of Ruby on Rails. Pitch day won't be forgotten! Nothing is perfect but take the leap if you're ready :) And if you're not or can't afford it..it will be difficult but you can pull through with right mentorship so yeah keep the hustle going and find local guides to help steer the way! Anything is possible for those committed! 

For the amount of money paid for this course, the quality of teaching was really underwhelming. Industry experts are awesome but that doesn't make them good educators. Brainstation needs to do a better job of training and equipping the industry experts to teach an effective class. I walked away feeling very disappointed and without a goog grasp of Digital Marketing, and I know many/most in my class felt the same. For the final presentations reps from the companies we were presenting on were supposed to be there but only 1 showed up. They announced a winner but didn't explain why the rest of us didn't win which would have been an idea learning opportunity that was missed. There's a lot of potential here but Braintstation really needs to step up it's game if it wants to be a leader in this space. There aren't really any substantial perks for alumni who have spent thousands of dollars for these courses. I definitely wouldn't recommend to a friend.

As someone who has just recently stepped into the world of product management, BrainStation's 10-week long part-time course kicked things into high gear for me. Starting from the basic fundamentals of what it is to work in the industry, I found very quickly that so much of what I had done and have been doing in my role as Academic Operations & Digital Media Manager at an e-learning start up was translatable.

The course content is well put together, practical and current with a hands-on approach in mind. I'm holding these class resources dearly now as I venture into new projects at work, searching for ways to apply the material. For me, this was the best part of the entire 10-week course; the fact that I could turn around and use what I had been learning in the class the next day at work. The course covers a lot of ground and touches on all aspects of being a product manager from market research to user experience to pricing.

The instructors in the course were fantastic as well. Industry professionals who have the experience and stories to make the material incredibly relatable and contextual for the class. Their feedback, never-ending patience, and passion for the industry made the 10 weeks fly by!

The product management course at BrainStation is a must-take for anyone looking to transition into a more product-focused role. The small class size makes it easy for students to dive deeper into the material and have meaningful discussions with each other. I really appreciate how the students all come from diverse industries as well. The instructor is super approachable and spends time answering your questions, while providing relevant anectotes from his experience as a product manager.

The course content is also really impressive, although I wish we had more than 10 weeks to go over it all. There's a lot to absorb, so I recommend that after class, you take the time to review and really understand the concepts. The material touches upon all aspects of product management, and explains how different business functions interact with each another. As a marketer at a tech startup, it was crucial for me to understand how product marketing fits in the product manegement discipline.  

Lastly, the final project allows students to build their own product from start to finish. Thinking critically about the features you're building and the problems you're solving for really trains you to think like a product manager. I'd recommend this class to anyone. 

The curriculum is a work in progress.  Things we were supposed to learn were never covered and not replaced by anything else.  We were promised files containing the solutions to many of the challenges, but many were never delivered.  The deployment lessons we were promised near the end of the course still haven’t been added to the online portal.  

Some of the challenges used starter code provided by other people from Konrad Group which didn’t work and actually prevented us from completing the challenges.  Even the code written by our lead instructor Rares was frequently wrong because he didn’t take the time to check his work before giving it to us to work with.  This is not the right way to teach!  Spending hours trying to figure out where I went wrong only to eventually find out it was the source code (which we weren’t supposed to touch) that was wrong, was a colossal waste of time and incredibly discouraging.  Rares just shrugs this off like the quality of the information we are given shouldn’t matter.

The lead instructor was mainly unavailable, across the street working for the parent company, taking meetings, or even teaching a different class while we did without.  That’s double-dipping, and Brainstation should know better.

The TAs tried to be helpful, but it wasn’t enough.  One had the attention span of a gnat, one was too busy babysitting the girls who were flirting with him (for hours on end), and the third didn’t have the training to be able to answer even the most basic questions.  The teacher was rarely in the mood to answer questions.  Waiting for 45mins+ for someone to be available to answer a question was the usual.

The pacing of the course is uneven.  We raced through HTML, CSS and Javascript, then pretty much stopped dead while the teacher was teaching the other class.  Each lesson was dictated at lighting speed so most of the students didn’t even try to keep up.  We just had to teach ourselves via Google after our teacher or TA stopped talking.  They have no presentation skills.

Most weeks there is a “guest speaker”.  I put that in quotes because every single speaker worked for Konrad Group, so they weren’t really guests.  One week they brought a female developer all the way from the Costa Rica office to talk about being a woman in tech.  They couldn’t find a female developer in Toronto?  Hmm.  The single freelancing talk was taught by our lead instructor who told us he only worked freelance long enough to build up a portfolio and get a job.  The company doesn’t know anyone who actually chooses to work freelance?

The website used to brag about the classroom being in the midst of industry professionals.  It isn’t.  It’s across the street in an old building they haven’t finished repairing yet.  There is no heat, the floor shakes like the building is falling down, the plumbing isn’t hooked up right, and the brick walls are held up by wooden shims.  But the design has won awards!  LOL

There is zero job search support.  Only a couple job ads were posted on the Slack channel before it became a ghost town.  These were not for companies that Brainstation has any connection with, but just ads somebody saw.  The interview preparation consisted of a slide deck prepared by Konrad Group for their own hiring purposes.  We were promised a copy but never got it.  There were mock interviews conducted by Konrad Group which consisted of, “Show me your project,” and “What is…” (simple questions of general programming knowledge which we hadn’t actually been taught).  Useless.

Konrad Group/Brainstation exists in a bubble.  They don’t bring in other companies to speak, they talk about themselves exclusively, and they don’t care if we get hired by anyone other than them (as TAs or interns, never as web devs).

The consensus among the grads from my cohort is that we were ripped off.  An immersive course is better than nothing, and better than studying on your own, but for $8000, we did not get our money’s worth.

I started Wyncode in early August of this year. I can honestly say I've never learned so much from a school in such a short amount of time. Before starting the course, I had never had any programming experience. My background is in music and I was skeptical about how much could really be taught about a subject in just 10 weeks. This school is doing a great service by teaching these skills, and the instructors they have on staff are so articulate and thorough that they make the material easy to learn. I would highly recommend that anyone who is interested in learning to code look into Wyncode and reach out to some of the staff, students, and alumni!

I enrolled in BrainStation Data Science part time course to learn Python. It was a great experience. Instructor Colin and Ahmed were very resourceful and helpful. 

Course material covers a broad area of Python. I found the first three classes are a bit challenging since I had no expericence in Programming, and most of my classmates had some computer science background. After some crushing learning time by my own, I was more comfortable in the next couple of classes. 

The pratices are beyond the course mateirals, which will encourage the students to learn by themselves during their spare time. It could be hard in the beginning, but if you are motivated, and keep learning, it should be ok in the end. 

I'm a bit older than most of my classmates, who were in their early 20s, which on positive side gave me a lot of energy.

I would suggest this course to someone who has some degree of programming knowledge.