Chegg Skills Reviews
Page 21
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Kyle
Career Path
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The front end career path at Thinkful is exactly what it sounds like: a course intended to help you land a job via tech skills. Thinkful recommends allowing six months to complete the course with a mentor. By explaining to my mentor what I wanted, and by dedicating myself to the course, I landed a job within a month of starting the front end career path!
I currently teach AP programming ,created a "Start Up" course based on tech innovation, and I'm designing the school's computer science curriculum (hello oculus rift programming!). I also have the fun title of Director of Academic Technology, and I am currently helping the school build an innovation building. I get to seek out edtech pitch competitions, go to them, and work with a startups to push the school to frontier.
I was able to shift the course to my needs, interests, and projects. This was critical in the learning process. My mentor was key in helping me succeed. I loved the one-on-one aspect of the course- rather than committing to a physical space and inflexible times. I treated this course like I was designing and attending my own coding bootcamp. If you are a hard worker, and are serious about learning to code, you will. If you depended on others as your driving force, I would not recommend. I like being in charge of my learning, and having a course that adapts to my life and needs, rather than the other way around.
I'm currently working on my own side project of creating a native app (can't spill the beans on it!), and looking at accelerators to fund my own edtech startup. The key is that Thinkful empowered me to enter the tech workforce, and has shown me that I can learn whatever it is I need to do what I want. Thinkful offers a monthly subscription to partake in as many side courses as you like. This is nice, because a little help goes a long way. Plus, the price is right. -
Anonymous
Start this class today! ❤️
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My only regret is not starting this course earlier. I love Thinkful and taking this course has given me the knowledge, skills and portfolio to work as a developer. I still talk to my mentors, refer back to my course curriculum, and hangout in the Slack community. Since I graduated I will be able to pay off the course cost at the end of October - 2 months all with side code projects I've booked in the last few months. It takes a lot of commitment and time, more for total newbies like myself, but it has been worth it. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
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Anonymous
I usually don't write such reviews but Horrible Experience FEWD /career path
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The quality of mentors here are not that great . They might be good developers but definitely are not good teachers . Unable to explain concepts well.
I needed to switch out my mentor and a month later they had not yet assigned me a mentor and kept billing me . I was so frustrated
Also cutomer service is horrible. No punctual replies at all , no matter who you contacted to sort out the whole mess.
NOT RECOMENDED !! -
Anonymous
Luck of the Draw
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This review is regarding the FEWD course.
I had a weird scheduling issue so I was with my first mentor for two months and am halfway through the last month with another mentor. My first mentor was amazing and geniunely wanted to help me improve my skills. He would talk me through issues and explain exactly what was going on. There were also awesome mentors in the office hours, chatrooms, and workshops.
My second mentor has been a different experience. He's told me more than once "there's no easy way to do that". I understand it may be difficult, but it would be nice to maybe have an explanation. Also, I did some googling after our session and was able to find a solution and implement it in five minutes for one of the issues without an "easy solution". I asked about suggestions for a freelance clients website and he mentioned using Wix or Squarespace. I'm here to learn and I think using Wix isn't the proper way for me to improve my skills.
The main reason I signed up for Thinkful was for the mentorship and having finished projects. The curriculum is good and during my time they've introduced the library and workshops which is awesome. I wish they had that when I first started. I believe there's now a cheaper option to have access to the library and workshops only. I haven't gone through the job assistance yet, but I have my exit interview scheduled for next week.
Overall, it was a good experience and the projects helped me have a goal and level up my skills. The community is exteremely helpful. I'm greatful I had an amazing mentor to begin with or I wouldn't know where I'd be. You can't select your mentor so it's all in the luck of the draw.
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Anonymous
Not worth the $$
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I took the thinkful front-end develoer course part-time to bone up my work skills. While I walked away with some knowledge, I ended up abandoning the course about halfway through. My instructor was kind but didn't seem very worldly and would often take our calls from in bed (!) which was both unprofessional and awkward. The material was often out of date from the current version of Chrome. I ended up using other resources through Udemy that were a fraction of the cost of thinkful and got more value. Not recommended.
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Tyler S
Fun, Challenging, but never alone.
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Recently I graduated from the Front End Web Developer Career Path course at Thinkful and I was beyond impressed. With a background in graphic design and animation, and very little experience in web development, I started my journey to land a job as a FEWD.
Getting to meet with a mentor 3 times a week was more than beneficial because it kept me motivated, and when I had a deadline, I was more likely to complete my work.
Many of the reviews have noted that you end up having to google free resourses throughout the curriculum. They are not wrong, but at the same time this is part of the Thinkful way of learning. They teach you how to find the information you need and it has helped me tremendously throughout my professional career. I learned how to phrase questions I wanted to ask and sometimes even figure out my issue prior to even asking it.
The Career Path course is comprised of 5 parts:- Front End Web Development
- Intermidiate Front End Web Development
- AngularJS
- Ellective
- Career Services
FEWD – I was able to complete in a few weeks because most of it was review for me, but I did learn a few tips and tricks along the way. This is a great course for someone with no knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS.
Intermidiate FEWD – I thoroughly enjoied this course because I was able to replicate the game "Flappy Bird" with nothing other than javascript and the canvas element. You also learn about task runners, preprocessors, and other useful programs that can speed up your development process.
AngularJS – This was my favorite course because I finally got to dive into Angular. At first I was very confused, but once I started talking with my mentor, he was able to explain and help me solve the problems. I'm currently using Angular at my job on a huge project and I give all credit to my skills to Thinkful.
Career Services – This course was iffy because I didn't get the full experience of it. I landed a job one week into starting it. The mentor I had was very nice, knowledgable, and helped me look at my resume in a way that an HR person would read it.
Overall I enjoyed my experience with Thinkful and definitely recommend this bootcamp to anyone that is looking for a fun, challenging way to learn to code at the speed you choose! -
Jared H.
FEWD Review
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I'm about to wrap up my time with the Thinkful Front-End Web Development course. I've thoroughly enjoyed my time with the guys and gals at Thinkful and have definitely made some big jumps in a few different areas of web development. Without using too many platitudes, you'll basically get out what YOU put into the course. If you really push yourself and build things from the ground up, you'll come out on the other side with a significantly improved skill set.
Another great thing about Thinkful is that they are always looking to improve and provide more value to their students. I believe they are currently on v4.0 for the front-end course. The mentors are awesome, the projects lead you down a path that doesn't dead-end, and you community is even better. We probably couldn't be frirends if you didn't enjoy your time with the Thinkful team.
PS: Thinkful has also introduced "workshops" recently into their office hours, meaning that there are several different subject areas introduced eachweek in a one hour live workshop. Topics lately have included React, Node, organizing code, error handling, gulp, and a few others.
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Anonymous
Thinkful FEWD Course Review
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I didn't make it far in the course, but when I did make an honest effort to do what they wantted, I found the way they formatted the curriculumn to be overly complicated. I am very new to HTML and CSS and didn't understand when they would say to do something because it was poorly formatted. Perhaps the expectation was for people to know more before taking the course but they said it was for beginners, and I didn't find that to be the case. They even had examples of what the code should look like but when I was showing it to my instructor, we realized the code they used was causing problems for my page, which lead to me getting frustrated. I really didn't have time to waste but waste it I did.
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Aaron
Backend in Node.js
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To lead with the positives,my assigned mentor Denis was fanastic.Extremely knowledgeable, and further was available both for our scheduled meetings and via email, which was a big help for a number of questions that I had. He was an excellent guide in understanding how Node.js works in real life. Thinkful itself did a very good job in facilitating the class, and when I initially had problems synching up with my first mentor, they readily extended the course availability until a new one was assigned. The curriculum itself though I found to be a little lackluster. I appreciate that it was building a project, but I feel that it was a level of instruction below that which I've gotten at Codeschool and Treehouse. In fact, both of those sources were used for certain parts of the course. Thinkful's own lessons were fairly quick, and I don't feel really went into depth the way I was expecting. Also, there were some typos and other issues in the course that made it seem that it wasn't quite ready for primetime (though I'm assuming these have since been improved, as I did report them to Thinkful). Overall, this course felt like it was second fiddle to their more premiere front-end offerings. Given the strength of my mentor, correspondingly high quality instruction material could have really made this course shine. I wonder if it's just biting off a little more than it can chew, as backend programming really seems to require more depth than can be delivered in a short term online course.
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Anonymous
Thinkful Thoughts
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I just graduated from Thinkful's main FEWD (Front End Web Design) course. I have not yet tried to find a job as this process is a career change for me and I am still financially hooked to my prior job for a few more months. I cannot therefore speak to Thinkful's job assistance, but they have offered to help even though it was not covered in my original package.
I have to start off by saying how hard to back office staff works to hear from their students and learn from what they like and dislike about their program. They seemed super attentive to anything you had to say, whether that’s for me, their business, or both, I just can't say, but it did feel as though it was for me.
I did have a small amount of coding background coming into the course. A long length of time trying to teach myself, but not a huge amount of actual time was spent given that I work a 55+ hour a week job with lots of travel. That is the main reason I choose Thinkful and I think overall that was a smart move. Thinkful's biggest competitor is Bloc. Thinkful is a bit newer and rapidly growing everyday thus it is hard to make a full comparison, however, because I spent the money, I think I shall.
Thinkful is cheaper but you do receive what you pay for in this area. The curriculum had a huge number of errors, mainly typographical, however, they started to wear on the student as you go through the material. Given that Thinkful is so young, it is understandable, but nonetheless, quite irritating. Also on the curriculum, there was a great deal of "go to this other website and read their lessons and then come back here for your project". They are updating it as we speak, all the time, and have multiple version going at the same time depending on when you start. This was one of my two biggest pet peeves with Thinkful. Their curriculum is just not uniquely theirs while Bloc's does have a home written curriculum. My other pet peeve was that I was unable to choose my mentor specifically. While they were quite knowledgeable, they did not fit me personally and had some other shortcomings that I would have at least been able to attempt to rectify by choosing one that aligned with my goals. I am confident, that had I complained to Thinkful, they would have changed me out, however, like I said, I would then just be paired with another mentor at random, without really fixing the problem of alignment.
Thinkful's projects are great, though a bit on the lighter side. It is only 3 months of about 10 hours a week but still I felt that doing just the projects at face value would not lead to much help. I took my own initiative as much as I could to do extra for each project, just for the practice. I know Bloc's projects are much more in depth and of larger number. I would have liked that.
My overall conclusion is therefore, that for the money, this is a great program. If you want to go their online only, Bloc is quite expensive but offers more, and Thinkful is cheaper but offers less. This Thinkful program was still great and I would recommend to anyone that cannot afford the Bloc courses or does not need the intensity of that program.
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Jun C.
Perfect for exploring the world of Python Programming and Web Development
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I was a student at Thinkful over a year ago in their Programming in Python course in which I learned to develop a dynamic website using Python and Flask in the backend.
At the time, I wanted to enhance my knowledge and potentially advance or change my career from the pharmaceutical industry to the tech industry. I was researching a number of options. I could get an AA degree in CS from one of the local community colleges; getting a BS was out of the question since the local universities here in San Diego, CA do not allow for a secondary BS and so my other option was getting an MS in CS at one of the universities. This meant that I would have to study for and take the GRE... meh, that's a lot of commitment for exploring getting into the tech industry.
I also read a few articles about bootcamps and so I researched that. Unfortunately, there are no local bootcamps in SoCal. They're based near Silicon Valley and New York. Going into a bootcamp would've required me to quit my job for a few months and hope that I would find a job after the end of the bootcamp pending the fact that I don't burn out from the bootcamp. Since I already had job, the risk of doing a bootcamp didn't seem worth it.
There were also these other free online courses and MOOCs... Udacity, Udemy, Coursera, etc... and I also came across Thinkful.com. I've taken some courses on Udacity and learned how to program with JavaScript. These free online courses and MOOCs were great! Learn at your own pace and sometimes they were free or relatively cheap. And then comes Thinkful...
It's somewhere between a full on bootcamp (I'm assuming here since I've never done a bootcamp) and a MOOC. You pay for their course and service (which is a sh*t-ton cheaper than the cost of a bootcamp) on a monthly basis and in the end, you graduate the course by working on and presenting a project with real world use. My final project was an "Online Training Website" in which a user can log in, do training courses, and it tracks which training courses you've completed. I used Python, Git, SQLAlchemy, Flask, and MySQL to create this site and I've actually put it into use at my current place of employment and they liked it so much since it was value-adding to our safety training. My company was recently bought out by another company (actually, the number one company in my particular industry) and I may even be able to use my training website in this company...
Anyway, I've learned so much from Thinkful and I would definitely recommend it. The most valuable difference between Thinkful and MOOCs or other online courses such as the ones I took at Udacity and Coursera is that you have a mentor... a person who works in the industry with the technologies that you're learning. You do the assignments, just like Udacity or Coursera or Udemy... but when you're stuck on an assignment or if you don't understand the how or why... you have your assigned mentor availble to help you out. That personal touch can't be beat. And even if your mentor isn't available at that time, you have other mentors available to help you out. This type of positive experience doesn't even compare to MOOC forums or MOOC TAs.
After graduating from Thinkful, I've taken a few Python programming MOOCs here and there and honestly, I wouldn't have been able to pass some of those MOOCs without the knowledge I gained from Thinkful. And if I didn't pass those MOOCs, it would've been a waste of time and commitment...
My overall experience with Thinkful was awesome and my mentor was excellent! I've learned a lot about his programming workflow and about his experience in the industry... that's something you'll never ever learn in a MOOC! They are continually updating and improving their curriculum so I know the courses I did while I was their have improved. I haven't really looked into their Job Assistance as of yet since I'm still currently employed in the pharma industry (and using what I've learned at Thinkful) but I just might check with them in the near future...
If you're looking at bootcamps... have a look at Thinkful first... maybe that's a better option for you and they have other courses too! If you don't want to pay... go ahead and look at Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, etc... but when it gets to the point where you plateau in your learning, type http://thinkful.com into your web browser...
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Varun
A Well thought course to get you started
I wanted to learn about front end web development and somebody told me about thinkful. I got enrolled and it was a great journey. I learned a lot and it helped me to make my next carrer switch.
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Cody Karst
Thankful for Thinkful: A new life begins
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When I found Thinkful I was looking for a way to reclaim my life and my time. I wanted to be able to work from home and focus on my family. After all, I didn't get married and have three wonderful kids just to spend the majority of my waking time at work. I wanted to be there, to watch them grow up. I realized that the only currency of worth in our lives is time. You can't get time back and you can't stop spending it. The thought of missing years of my kids lives because I worked a "traditional" job weighed heavy on my heart. It was a driving force pushing me to make radical change.
College was just to expensive and time consuming. I didn't want a well rounded education I wanted a specialized one. I wanted to hone my skills towards a specific goal and while college degrees are cool and all it just wasn't going to work for me.
When I discovered Thinkful the first thing I noticed was that they were really friendly. In fact I was able to get on the phone and talk to them right away. They were quick to go over the pros and cons of online learning. They let me know that it was on my own time frame and that I could go as fast or as slow as I wanted. They told me about how the mentorship program works and what I could expect. I was the most excited about the prospect of a mentor. After attempting to self teach my self front-end dev and hitting wall after wall with no one to ask for help I was ready for a mentor.
After speaking with Thinkful I continued to research my options. I reached out to several other prominent online bootcamps and after weighing all of the pros and cons of each I decided to choose Thinkful.
The price was right and the people seemed exceptionally warm and sincere. I took a leap and enrolled and it changed my life!
My mentor was/is amazing. He is the reason I was able to succeed through the whole process. He not only provided support and accountability but true friendship. I always looked forward to our weekly hangout and a chance to ask questions and show off my work. He was always patient and took the time to make sure I really understood the curriculum. There were times when I just didn't get things. In fact several times we focused on the same weeks problem for several weeks. He made 100% sure I got it and I was ready to move forward. He wasn't trying to push me through, he was teaching me. And I actually...gasp LEARNED the content!
I found the curriculum well done. It continued at a good pace. I felt like each new concept was introduced at the right time and it was challenging but not overwhelming. Thinkful suggests that the Front-end dev course should take about three months. I took four months and that felt just right. I was able to spend time with my family and still have time to continue to learn.
Midway through my course I decided to make the jump into freelancing. I had reduced my hours to part time at my job but that wasn't enough. I needed a change! So I quit and went 100% into freelancing. It was scary as hell but I had made up my mind. I knew my skill set was strong enough to start charging. I also felt confident in my ability to learn and master my trade.
I am now in the second year of my business. It hasn't been easy and I know there are still many challenges ahead of me but its been the best years of my life. I work from home and get to enjoy my beautiful wife and children every day. I am watching them grow up and giving them my time instead of a job I didn't like. I just bought a house and I am getting the privilege to partner with exceptional clients.
I went on to take the awesome Angular.JS course with Thinkful. I was even given the honor to help write some of the content for Thinkful's freelancing course. Things have gone full circle and I honestly couldn't have done it on my own. Thinkful was the foundation I needed to get going and help me live my dream. I am so thankful for Thinkful! -
John Marks
Learn AngularJS by Thinkful.com
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This was a great class, boosting my frontend productivity. The Angular (v1.3) curriculum presented the necessary info and concepts to understand a very large portion of the framework.
It seems that many people today are struggling with Angular, but I love it. Working on old jQuery only apps was such a pain. The Angular framework employs convention over configuration, providing it's own way to create a slick MVC separation between the view (HTML/CSS) and the JavaScript/backend and model. It's built-in dependency injection system is genius. The controllers are super easy to learn. The services handle all business logic and talking with backends. Directives really make Angular what HTML6 should be. I know that are some problems with AngularJS (makes SEO tough, startup load can be slow), but it is such a huge leap forward in SPA development.
The Thinkful team built a very powerful curriculum. Just do it one lesson at a time, and you will come out the end understanding most of the Angular framework. My mentor (Leon) was in the UK (six hours later) and was very helpful. He had been using Angular from the early days and really knew the framework. If you already have a bit of backend experience, having Angular under your belt will definitely give you a boost in productivity. Use Thinkful if you want to do it right.
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Anonymous
Thinkful Thoughts
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I just graduated from Thinkful's main FEWD (Front End Web Design) course. I have not yet tried to find a job as this process is a career change for me and I am still financially hooked to my prior job for a few more months. I cannot therefore speak to Thinkful's job assistance, but they have offered to help even though it was not covered in my original package.
I have to start off by saying how hard to back office staff works to hear from their students and learn from what they like and dislike about their program. They seemed super attentive to anything you had to say, whether that’s for me, their business, or both, I just can't say, but it did feel as though it was for me.
I did have a small amount of coding background coming into the course. A long length of time trying to teach myself, but not a huge amount of actual time was spent given that I work a 55+ hour a week job with lots of travel. That is the main reason I choose Thinkful and I think overall that was a smart move. Thinkful's biggest competitor is Bloc. Thinkful is a bit newer and rapidly growing everyday thus it is hard to make a full comparison, however, because I spent the money, I think I shall.
Thinkful is cheaper but you do receive what you pay for in this area. The curriculum had a huge number of errors, mainly typographical, however, they started to wear on the student as you go through the material. Given that Thinkful is so young, it is understandable, but nonetheless, quite irritating. Also on the curriculum, there was a great deal of "go to this other website and read their lessons and then come back here for your project". They are updating it as we speak, all the time, and have multiple version going at the same time depending on when you start. This was one of my two biggest pet peeves with Thinkful. Their curriculum is just not uniquely theirs while Bloc's does have a home written curriculum. My other pet peeve was that I was unable to choose my mentor specifically. While they were quite knowledgeable, they did not fit me personally and had some other shortcomings that I would have at least been able to attempt to rectify by choosing one that aligned with my goals. I am confident, that had I complained to Thinkful, they would have changed me out, however, like I said, I would then just be paired with another mentor at random, without really fixing the problem of alignment.
Thinkful's projects are great, though a bit on the lighter side. It is only 3 months of about 10 hours a week but still I felt that doing just the projects at face value would not lead to much help. I took my own initiative as much as I could to do extra for each project, just for the practice. I know Bloc's projects are much more in depth and of larger number. I would have liked that.
My overall conclusion is therefore, that for the money, this is a great program. If you want to go their online only, Bloc is quite expensive but offers more, and Thinkful is cheaper but offers less. This Thinkful program was still great and I would recommend to anyone that cannot afford the Bloc courses or does not need the intensity of that program.
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Emily K
Front End Web Developer
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My experience with Thinkful was extremely positive from the beginning. Before enrolling, I wanted to make sure that I would be able to get a mentor that really worked with me. They asked me for guidelines in choosing a mentor for me, and assured me that I could request a change if we didn't "click." Luckily, we did.
The material is very well-presented in an order that makes sense. You dive in actually writing code right away, and work on projects throughout. These projects provide not only hands-on learning, but finished pieces you can show to prospective employers. Many are still in my portfolio today.
The weekly sessions with your mentor are what what really set this program apart from others, IMO. My mentor was great. She helped me when I needed it without just fixing things for me, which helped me understand things. She was available by email outside our scheduled sessions. She was AWESOME.
In addition to mentors, there is a student community where you can post your projects for help or feedback, both from other students and other TAs and mentors. This is frequently the fastest way to get help. There are also office hours daily (or close to daily) via google hangout with different mentors. Anyone can go into the office hours hangout and get help or ask questions. Sometimes the mentor will talk about aspects of the industry if there's not people that need help with specific questions. This was SO valuable!
I also found the support staff to be friendly and quick to respond to technical issues or feedback.
When I finished my course at Thinkful I felt confident as a junior front end developer. I would highly recommend this program to anyone, especially those looking for something in between completely self-directed study like Treehouse and a full bootcamp.
I believe that since I finished, they have expanded the course to include job search assistance, which would make it even more valuable.
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Aaron Piotrowski
Never feel behind and get the time you need
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The Front-end course at Thinkful was one of the best experiences that I've had during my journey to become a developer. They have a easy to read and understand, yet thorough material set. I started with no knowledge of programming or writing markup, and afterwards was able to build sites from the ground up. One of the reasons that I feel I got so much out of the program is that I was able to have one on one time with a mentor. I could talk through the problem that I was stuck on and they would help me figure it out. The keyword being help, you don't learn anything from someone spoon feeding you the answers. Learning to solve problems is such an important skill.
The other reason that I enjoyed the program is that I never once felt like I was competing against my peers. I was able to work at my own pace and not burn myself out. I did move from Thinkful to an on location bootcamp and I feel I can say that people are able to learn without coding 16+ hours a day.
I want to explain the 1 star for Job Assistance. During my enrollment at Thinkful they didn't really have any career help after the program. They have since started a career assistance section. I haven't taken it so I can't give an honest opinion of it.
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Chris
FEWD review
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During the summer of 2014 I attended the online Thinkful FrontEnd Web Development (FEWD) course. I use to be a web developer, but had since fallen out of the game, not knowing what was relevant vs. irrelevant.
In a very short period of time, the FEWD course got my interest back in the field, and also got me up to speed on pertinent things to focus on while trying to get back into the field. This course come down to how immersed you allow yourself to become in the overall course. By overall course I mean, using the community chat, joining the office hour hangout meetings, as well as completing your assignments, etc...
Weekly hour long, and they typically went over, sessions with the same mentor throughout the course was more than beneficial. My mentor would give amazing real world examples of scenarios that I might find myself in somewhere along the line, and I could ask him or her questions about certain WebDev ideas that I may have and they would dive right in, helping me every step of the way.
In summary:
- Great course
- Worth the money spent
- You get out what you put in
- Great people!
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Troy
Great resources
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If you are autodidactic but need a little bit of guidence, Thinkful is amazing. I had a little experience building static websites with HTML and CSS, but really wanted to get more programming experience with Javascript. I had clear objectives and knew what I wanted to learn. This is important because I hit a wall with my first mentor, but Thinkful was accomodating and found me someone who could take me the rest of the way through the course with my particular learning goals in mind.
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Anonymous
You're paying them to re-hash free content
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I had high expectations for the Full Stack Rails course, however I was very disappointed. Their coverage of most topics is superficial and the links they provide for in depth information are to other organization's free online resources.
They skim over many fundemental topics and have you enter a code snippet without explaining fully why. If you have any difficulties with tasks in the course, such as database migration, they request that you go search for a solution in stackoverflow or search in google.
I never have received a mentor. The person who met with me for my first "session" promised to email me their contact info but never did. I have two chapters left but don't know if I will bother completing them. Visually the curriculum is nicely packaged, but you will not gain any true depth of knowledge from it.
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Anonymous
Do it for free
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I finished Thinkful in January. All the content used in the Front-end development course can be found on online for free. In, fact I completed alot of the resources they used before I started Thinkful. You do get a mentor. My mentor didn't show up for scheduled meetings. You are better off using codementor.io to find your own mentor (that meets your requirements) at a reasonable price. It's cheaper than paying $500 a month for free content and mediocre mentors. You will have a portfolio when you finish, but it's not worth paying $1500 for three months.
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Anonymous
High expectations. big let down.
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I'm writing this here to help anyone that might be on the fence about thinkful...
1) They don't teach, sure you can ask your mentor stuff, but the actual lesson plans, the ones your supposed to spend all day doing... I kid you not they tell you to go to Google, or stackoverflow to find the answers.
2) they raised the price to $500 a class, because they offer "career services". I'm not sure what this means because they don't offer you a job or help you find one.
3) at the end of it all your spending $1500 to Google html, CSS, and javascript. You'll find your self using free resources on the web, thinking to your self. " why the hell am i spending $1500?". ohhhhhhhh cool I made a portfolio.... -
Anonymous
Thinkful: Could have been so much better.
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Perhaps I just had bad luck with really poor mentors, but the three mentors I tried were all very young. With one exception they would communicate very poorly (their English was fine, I just mean they would send out a one line email, misinterpret emails) as a result of which they would miss lessons, and didn't seem to care much.
They tended to repeat the curriculum materials, and take 20 minutes to explain really trivial stuff.
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Daniel Bogart
Thinkful Grad 9 Months Later
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I had a background in sales, with little coding experience, but was eager to make a career shift to software development. I decided on Thinkful over a bootcamp because of the flexibility and cost.
The course provided the fundamentals and best-practices I needed to start with next to no experience. I found that the mentor sessions and office hours alone were worth the investment - having access to expert programmers for several hours a week is totally invaluable. Think about this, a comparable "mentor session" from a service like airpair can cost over $200/hour. To me, this is what made it a no brainer.
Beyond the obvious benefit of having a mentor to help you work through problems, I found that having a mentor session or office hours to attend kept me motivated - I never wanted to show up to a session without progress or questions. After finishing the front-end course, I completed the ruby/rails course, and less than two months after, received three offers (rails dev, front-end dev, angularjs dev). I'm now working as an angularjs developer and loving it.
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Devon Campbell
Thinkful Review
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Several months back, I found myself needing to brush up on my front-end development skills. An in-person boot camp is a scary proposition due both to the cost and sometimes the need to move in order to have access to one. (The tech scene isn’t great here in Knoxville, and, so far as I know, we have no developer bootcamps here.)
Thinkful was an attractive alternative. I’ve taken online courses before, but this really is much more like a bootcamp. In more traditional classes, the curriculum is very rigid and instructor interaction is minimal. In the Thinkful course, I have access to a mentor every week which is really great. I’m also bringing my own projects to the course which greases the wheels of learning. Each lesson, I’m getting closer to reaching a goal that means something to me.
The staff has also been very responsive. I’m able to get in touch with the “powers that be” and make suggestions, and they actually respond. They seem genuinely interested in building the thing their students want.
It’s been a great experience, and I’d highly recommend it.
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Sunil
Thinkful: Flexibility and great resources
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Like many people out there, depite competing demands on my time, I had a real urge to increase my understanding of web related technologies and programming in general. While self-taught for the majority of my knowledge in, networking, programming, Linux and basic scripting I discovered self-teaching was taking me a lot longer than I thought. As a military instructor, I came to the realization that I needed some scope and objectives to try and achieve my goals. In the middle of 2013, I started to search for a flexible course I could take to help me get a foothold in the coding field.
There didn't seem to be a lot of institutions out there that provided the mentorship and scoping that would really help me grow as a student and fledgling developer without investing university level fees. Then I stumbled across Thinkful. They offered a great, always evolving syllabus and mentorship. The most attractive feature of the courses they offered was flexibility. From what I read on their website, I could fit their course work around a schedule that could have me working normal office hours one day, then 5 hours later, be searching for vessels in distress in stormy seas in the middle of the pacific ocean.
To be honest it was a no-brainer, I signed up, there wasn't anything really to lose. I never looked back, I have fantastic mentors, who provide honest, critical feedback and have excellent experience. As an instructor, the critical analysis of my code was invaluable to help dme grow as a developer. I also have immense respect for the patience and enthusiasm that Thinkful mentors have. They deal with a multitude of students spread over different time zones, yet always have time for a quick email exchange or chat outside of normal hours. The course flexibility allowed me to work hard when I had the time, and then put in a course pause when my job required that I deploy to a place with minimal connectivity.
I completed the front-end developer course in May 2014 and am currently working through the AngularJS syllabus when and where I am able. I've put the skills I gained in the FEWD course into my job developing applications for my current job, and helped me enhance our own teaching cirriculum.
As a learning institution and flexible educational model, Thinkful is well worth investing time and effort in. The on-going access you gain to an ever evolving detailed cirriculum, fantastic community of mentors, students and developers is outstanding. It also ensures you can go back and review anything, anytime. I highly recommend Thinkful to anyone who is looking at a structured course and highly-motiviational mentors for getting into the programming game.
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Andrew
Join Thinkful
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I was teaching myself front end development for a year or so but felt so overwhelmed by the amount of information and resources out there. I was never sure if I was going in the right direction. Thinkful was the best solution I could of hoped for to solve this problem. Their well crafted and up-to-date curriculum tied with passionate mentors created a winning formula. They have mentors that can answer those difficult questions that googling cannot. These answers are delivered in a succinct way based on real world experience and genuine passion for what they do.
After completing the front end web development course at the beginning of 2014 I have since moved from a role that didn’t involve writing code to a full time front end development role. I am now back at thinkful to begin 2015 taking the Backend in Node.js course. I know by the time the three months is up I will be equipped with yet another set of invaluable skills to further my career as a developer.
Without Thinkful there would be no way I would be working as a developer today. I highly recommend Thinkful to anyone looking to switch careers or just to tie up the loose ends you have with any of the subjects they offer. You won’t regret it
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Megan Taylor
Thinkful Front-End Web Development Course
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I took the FEWD course in the Fall of 2013 and I'm so glad I did! The curriculum was comprehensive, the community was super helpful and my mentor gave me all the guidance I needed to complete the curriculum and make my projects the best they could be.
I loved the project-based curriculum because it gave me hands-on experience and practice implementing what I was learning, while helping me build portfolio pieces to apply for a job.
Shortly after completing the course, I got my dream job as a Jr Dev at an awesome company, and I have since been promoted. I give Thinkful a lot of credit for giving me the guidance and self-confidence I needed.
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Edoe Cohen
Thinkful got me building
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(I orginally posted this review on Quora)
I took the Thinkful front-end course and am now in the middle of the Angular course. After dabbling in code for a while and learning with other tools, I can definitely say that Thinkful has played a significant role in propelling me further in my programming skills and confidence.
What I love most about Thinkful are the hands-on projects you are tasked with at the end of almost each lesson. These projects are what really help me absorb the curriculum and the new tools and skills I'm learning. I've tried a lot of tutorials and online programming schools before including Codecademy and Code School, which were great. But what I was really missing were opportunities to use what I was learning in a real context. With Thinkful I've built numerous apps and sites and now feel way more confident to build something from scratch.
The mentor aspect of Thinkful also played a huge role in this, since there was someone reviewing my code each week and giving me feedback. My mentor also went out of his way to push me further when he saw that I was quite ahead in the course, by giving me extra curriculum projects to work on.
One could argue that you could find similar projects to work on and just use free tools. Maybe. But for me the bundle of the Thinkful curriculum, plus mentor, plus projects was really a winning formula. Different people learn in different ways. But if you're busy with a day job and family, and are serious about learning, I really would recommend Thinkful. It will save you time and maximize your learning. Good luck! -
Anonymous
Provides the mentorship and motivation to learn quickly
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When I first began reviewing software dev training options I found two disctinct groups: free online resources, and $10k intensive bootcamps. Thinkful was the only option I found that lands in the middle of these options. I decided on Thinkful over simply using free resources because of two critical factors that are difficult to put a price on: motivation and mentorship. I decided on it over a bootcamp because of it’s flexibility, price, and the thought that I could always enroll in a bootcamp if I got through Thinkful but couldn’t land a job (spoiler: I landed a job almost immediately after finishing Thinkful). I started with the Front-End course, which provided the fundamentals and best-practices I needed to start with next to no coding experience. I found that the mentor sessions and office hours alone were worth the investment - having access to expert programmers for several hours a week is totally invaluable. Think about this, a comparable "mentor session" from a service like airpair can cost over $200/hour. To me, this is what made it a no brainer - far faster and more effective than posting to SO or IRC. Beyond the obvious benefit of having a mentor to help you work through problems, I found that having a mentor session or office hours to attend kept me motivated - I never wanted to show up to a session without progress or questions. After finishing the front-end course, I completed the ruby/rails course, and less than two months after, received three offers (rails dev, front-end dev, angularjs dev). I'm now working as an angularjs developer and loving it. -
Javier Collado
Thinkful FEWD Course Review
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(Note: This review was originally published here)
Introduction
This week I’ve completed the FEWD (Front End Web Development) course at Thinkful. It’s been three months of hard work in which I think I’ve made good progress in sharpening my web development skills. In this post, I’m sharing my impressions for those who want to have the opinion of a former student about the course before making the decision to take it.
Who is this course for?
This is a course that can be taken by absolute beginners to learn html, css and javascript from the ground up, but it’s also useful to people who already have some experience, but want to improve in any of the technologies involved.
What does the course include?
The resources available to you as a student are:
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curriculum: the course content itself. It’s made from content already available on the internet for free, but structured to introduce new concepts progressively. It also includes a set of assignments to ensure student comprehension that have to be posted to the community for feedback (see below).
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mentoring sessions: every student has half an hour weekly meetings with a mentor that will provide guidance and specific advice in any area the student is interested in. This is good not only to get personalized information about problems, but also because of the accountability that is generated when you commit to finish some assignment for the following week.
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community: this is where the work on the assignments is posted to gather feedback aside from the one provided by your mentor. If you’re in trouble this is a good place to ask for help because you’ll get faster feedback than if you wait for your mentoring session. Also, if you help other students, it’s a nice mechanism to reinforce your own learning since you’ll need to take a look at the same kind of problem multiple times.
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office hours: these are daily meetings in which you can also ask a mentor face to face about problems you might have and learn from the questions asked by other students. As for now, the time isn’t very convenient unless you’re in the US, but still it’s a good experience to attend them.
What assignments will I work on?
In case you’re curious, the assignments that you’ll need to work on are (including links to my personal work):
- Google clone: reproduce the Google homepage.
- 37signals clone: reproduce the 37signals homepage.
- Hot or cold: Number guessing game.
- Shopping list: Todo list application.
- Quiz: Quiz application.
- API hack: An application that takes advantage of public API.
- Portfolio: Final project to showcase the work done during the course.
What will I learn?
This almost entirely up to you. The more you involve in the community and the more you work in the assignments, the more advanced stuff you’ll get out of the course. Of course, you can get by with just basic html, css and javascript with jquery; but if you’re curious you can much further than that.
In my case, some of the things that I learned are:
- Object oriented javascript
- MVC frameworks
- Data binding libraries
- Template libraries
- CSS preprocessors
- Single page applications
- Responsive design
I’m not an expert in any of the above, but now I’m confident that I can refer to the documentation of any library and/or framework in the future and get up to speed quickly if I need to.
Conclusion
After three months of work, I’ve learned quite a few interesting things and I’ve got a portolio that I can improve in the future. I believe this is a quite good outcome for the time spent.
What makes the course shine, in my opinion, is that it includes weekly meetings with a mentor and access to a community of students that are going through the same problems as you are. This is really powerful to create accountability and get rid of procrastination to make progress in short time.
In case you’re wondering, I feel that I could have learned the same stuff on my own, but I don’t how long would that have taken me. If you’re really good in setting your own goals and keeping the motivation to accomplish them and you’ve got plenty of time to look for good learning resources, then you might not need the course, but I’d still encourage you to think about taking it.
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Anonymous
Disappointing, Unsatisfactory, Poor Business
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I was a student at Chegg Skills (previously THINKFUL) enrolled in the Web-Development Course and got WITHDRAWN from the course for not completing on their timeline. The website promises a "self-paced" curriculum which is FALSE. Full-Time students are required to complete the bootcamp within 5 months, while Part-Time students are given 6 months to complete. The Tuition Refund is based on ELIGIBILITY, which a lot of students DO NOT fall under. Their claim in the contract prior to starting the course states, "If you live more than 60 min outside of a major city, you are not eligible for the refund" (many students find this out after they have already taken out a loan, or in my case, paid up front in full. The mentorship given to you during the program is a GAMBLE. I had 5 mentors while I was enrolled, 3 of them actually being helpful professionals. 2 of them being duds; while one would get mad at me for asking certain questions/ making me feel stupid and inadequate and I ended these sessions more stressed, my questions unanswered and feeling completely defeated. The Live Chat is outsourced to India, where I was constantly being matched with the same person, making their business practices very questionable (paying for cheaper labor overseas instead of employing people in the States) Chegg being an American company. 2 of my mentors actually mentioned their pay being insufficient to the students they had to oversee and Chegg not giving the mentors any guidance on how to be a helpful mentor. Chegg had continued to use reviews from the years it was Thinkful and falsely advertised positive reviews, even though since Chegg had bought the company their reviews had started to tank. I ended up completing 35 lessons which came to a total of $6,767.60. Since I paid the full tuition up front of $9,475.00, they offered me a refund of $2,707.40 for the modules I had not completed. Given this ratio, I believe it's a ridiculous waste of my time, struggling and persevering through this program with only about 15 modules left to complete; they still decided to kick me out, ineligible to obtain my certification. Their reasoning being "The amount of time needed to successfully complete your outstanding modules exceeds the amount of time that we would be able to provide you, with approval from our finance and regulatory teams." After having paid my full tuition upfront and the coursework being entirely ONLINE; these reasons are complete BS in my opinion. This company wants your money and does not care about their students' success. -
Anonymous
Absolutely terrible
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Thinkful does a horrible job of helping students understand the intricacies of complex concepts. They walk you through the basics, then test you on something extremely difficult in comparison. There is no intermediate, there is not enough practice, and there is not enough support. 9 times out of 10, I have to go learn from someone on youtube, instead of from the course I paid thousands of hard earned dollars for. I regret choosing this course each and every day. It has been one of the worst decisions of my adult life. -
Anonymous
UX/UI program review
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I found that program overall to be rewarding, but highly challenging. I chose the UX/UI certificate because I have some design in my background. The program of 6 months part-time is extremely difficult for working adults. Especially if you have a child and are on a limited budget, still I chose it and graduated in 7 months. There is a bit of deceptive marketing. It's very hard to finish the time permitted -especially if you think you might have your loan forgiven -should you not find work. That is not the case. You are put on a very hard-to-navigate schedule that you must follow in order to have loan forgiveness. Keep in mind this is a bank loan, so there is no Gov deferring. You are;t in a class with others, that's left to Slack, where you have to ask the community. The advisor I had was a no-show every time I reached out. Homework was often double the amount of hours stated. The biggest falsehood is they sold me on helping you find something and they would help with any agism you faced. That wasn't true. I did gain a lot from this program in terms of understanding and skill. I like the portfolio I made with the three finished projects. I'm just disappointed in the false marketing. Again, if you are older, I strongly caution against the UX/UI certificate. Maybe go for Data Analytics or coding. -
Anonymous
Wonderful
I learnt all technical skills regarding digital marketing from basic to advance level. It provides opportunity to learn in flexible timing with special mentor and in groups. It help you to equipped everything that help you get better job or start a digital career. -
Anonymous
Mediocre and predatory
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Thinkful is mediocre and incompetent at best, at worst it is a predatory and heartless company that prays on the dreams and aspirations of young people for a better life and income on a tech salary. They failed at pretty much every point in the program and I'll try to go into every detail that I can but inevitably, I'll likely miss some things. If there are some class action lawsuits out there against Thinkful, please don't hesitate to contact me as likely not everything I wrote here is actually every single detail.
For those with a short attention span go ahead and check out firstly,
Great Alternatives: I know how scary and intimidating it is to learn to code on your own. I would suggest joining codecademy’s discord, as there are many people active there and it’s easy to find people to code with. Freecodecamp.org, exercism.org is also completely free and there are mentors actively there helping other students (myself included who had just graduated from this bootcamp). Try checking out https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/wiki/faq/#wiki_where_do_i_start.3F For a very handy guide on how to get started. Lastly, for additional questions or to just reach out and talk, go ahead and add me on discord: mollie#3232
Now, Starting with
The Recruitment Process: The recruiters canceled one me twice a few minutes before the actual phone call believing I was outside of the United States (likely because I have a very foreign name). Rescheduling it was a nightmare as the person who had canceled it kept insisting that he wanted to talk to me and I had to consistently request speaking to someone else. The recruiter I finally spoke to bought me on the tuition refund guarantee (you won't ever get it, I'll go into more detail why later in this review), he was very pushy. 3/10
Thinkchat: it just…doesn’t work half the time? Either because of technical problems on Thinkful's side or because the people who are “technical coaches” barely are able to code themselves. Most students give up after trying them a few times
Slack Channel: the slack channel is completely dead and devoid of life. Sometimes some students ask for help and the mentor graciously reads them the error that is printed on the console. Unfortunately, as many students are illiterate, they’re never able to understand the copy pasted message from the console that is sent to the student :(
Students: I was obviously kidding in the last sentence. The students are great, intelligent, super helpful and supportive of each other. The only light in this hell hole and honestly a beacon. I LOVED my fellow colleagues and students. The were awesome! But since they’re not really a part of the course offerings, they’re just kind hearted and poor victims, Thinkful doesn’t get any credit for them.
Mentorship: I had one mentorship meeting over the period of 5 weeks (even though you're supposed to meet twice per week from the beginning). The reason for this is because my mentor kept cancelling over and over, or just simply not showing up at the designated time claiming he had forgotten. He was also just rather rude and saying that "I didn't try hard enough" or felt "dedicated enough" because I complained about aspects of Thinkful's teaching curriculum (more on that later) and if I really wanted this enough clearly I would just deal with him never showing up and deal with Thinkful's bad curriculum, as if I didn't pay to be here. The one time he did show up, he was driving in his car lmfao. My mentor had about 15 students at one time and eventually just sent out a mass email to all of his students apologizing for having no-showed so many of us (I was part of this email chain). I'm not even mad at him, the guy was doing extra hustling and getting paid from Thinkful for doing nothing. It was honestly on Thinkful to have done some sort of screening on the mentors but as long as you have an impressive resume they don't care about anything else (source: asked an actual mentor about the process etc.). I finally did get paired up with another mentor, but they did not have time that week for me so finally we rescheduled the week after. Yes, I did contact ASM but they are awful (more on ASM later). I have never been offered any reimbursements from Thinkful because of this, either in more mentor hours or in tuition. They just don't give any fucks. As far as any interaction that I have had with other mentors on Thinkful, they tended to be rude, dismissive gaslighters. They did the minimum of showing up but often were not very knowledgeable and it was clear that there was a lack of knowledge and obvious that mentors were there only for the money. Mentors will often offer “help” and then ignore messages immediately as soon as they felt bored by the situation (not talking about any single particular mentor, I’ve talked to many, this is the general pattern I’ve noticed).
incompetency: I once had a substitute mentor who didn't know the library that I had to write a capstone project in, so we just schmucked around and talked for the 2 meetings. He was a nice guy, but I found it strange that Thinkful has mentors that don't even know how to help students complete the projects. Most of my interactions with mentors involved them reading back to me my error messages. This may come as a surprise to people, but I don't need help in this area because I am literate.
Lies: Thinkful staff and employees will directly lie to your face about certain aspects of the tech industry in order to defend and justify their abuse of students. They often say things like, “it will work in your favor, imagine when you’re in your career and you will be so much stronger for it”, “this is the type of thing that happens in industries all the time”. The reason I know that these statements are lies is because I have friends and family who work in the tech industry and they’re able to tell me that what Thinkful employees say are blatant lies used to cover up their abuse of students. I imagine that the average student does not have these types of resources and this type of lie can be bought into much more easily. This is the reasoning in which they are able to, as well, feed you technical jargon about how your ‘code needs to be fixed’. Because I have friends and family that are not thinkful employees but also senior level software engineers, they were able to tell me that the technical jargon they fed me was false and a way to gaslight and mislead me. One of the things that was a clear cherry on top of gaslighting was being told that code that had been verified by 4 senior level engineers, was then told to me by the SAME 3 who work for Thinkful that in fact my code had been flawed the entire time. So they approved the code but as soon as the grader made a mistake on his side, immediately “it’s obvious the code is flawed” and sent me solutions to fix it that didn’t work. They sent me on a wild goose chase.
ASM: ASM often will not reply to emails for several days. The emails go straight to India where they just get forwarded to another place. Many students complain about consistent delays in receiving emails back from ASM, so this is not just a "me" problem. Furthermore, most of the emails were canned responses, and I genuinely questioned if I were speaking with a human or not. It wasn't until I wrote a long letter about not having a mentor for the first 5 weeks (this mentor who was being paid off my tuition) that they finally forwarded my message to another mentor who was obligated to hop on the phone with me for 30 minutes to help me prepare for a javascript evaluation. They also claim to have a role in helping you "keep up with the curriculum by making plans and schedules". I did have a full time job at some point in the curriculum and fell behind two weeks. Their suggestion to me was laughable, as they literally just wrote "in order to catch up you'll have to do two weeks of that curriculum in one week". Wow. Amazing. As if I was so stupid I couldn't have figured that out myself. Incredibly patronizing.
Curriculum: The curriculum is shit. Everything about it is shit, from the buggy code (capitalizations and lowercase seem to be a consistent problem), inability to report any bugs or actually talk to anyone about the bugs in the code, sometimes problems submitting assignments because of bugs on qualified causing errors. In this case you have to contact ASM and wait a few days for them to reset qualified. They don't help in any way other than that, and trust me, they don't care so just don't bother. The teaching in the curriculum itself was...sink or swim. If you don't have some SWE background it's going to be tough. I had taken CSE courses before, and even this was difficult for me to follow. Just the teaching is awful. Sometimes skipping parts that were important and assuming the user could infer them from the text (often they didn't)
Capstone and assignments: The directions are awful. They will often contradict each other if you read the instructions in the qualified for example and then the readme in the actual assignment. Sometimes they aren't detailed enough, missing critical points of the project that in any job would need to be discussed with the hiring manager (how to deal with timezones for example). Also the fact that we have to deal with timezones, which is insane as they are incredibly tricky in Javascript. This is a problem senior devs have, but we have to figure it out. But there are also no explicit directions on how they want us to deal with timezone differences either. Often the best way to survive these bad directions is to write code that just passes the tests at a minimum and look at the grading rubric but this may not always be enough (more in final capstone as I found this capstone especially suspicious)
Careers: Many students have complaints about how they forced us to make the resume "incredibly cheesy" and that they don't even pass any ATS. Seriously, not a single one. I once had an assignment rejected on a submission module because I didn't write "dear hiring manager" but instead used the name of the hiring manager in my cover letter. Once I pointed this out they approved it. It's likely that the people looking at your assignments do not spend more than 5 minutes on it. Once I’ve graduated, they seem to add on additional terms to the TRG (as I qualify). Many of these terms, for example 3 of the jobs you apply to out of the 10 per week MUST be through connections, 10 of the jobs each week you apply to must be from the TRG city, you must average more than 1 networking event per week to qualify to TRG (this one is hard, be careful out there guys). They can, and will definitely extend the TRG as they deem necessary up to one year (but this is the fine print they don’t tell you about).
Grading: the grading is shit in the sense that they will pass you if you're lucky but they will also definitely fail you for absolutely no reason. I have had numerous times where I have submitted assignments, and had them rejected for weird reasons. I even once had a grader send me a screenshot of another student's assignment (I could see in the url) and claim this was the reason they failed me. I resubmitted it and it finally passed. This has happened numerous times (at least 2-3). They sometimes asked for fixes for things not in project requirement specs, because again, the instructions for the assignments are bad.
Final Capstone: I decided to make a section specifically for the final capstone as I found some things about the final capstone suspicious. One is that for every other assignment on Thinkful, you submit the project on qualified to prove essentially that you wrote code that passes all the tests. This isn't the case for only the final capstone. One might argue it's because the final capstone was code that was written pretty recently. This is not true as this has been around for at least one year. I suspect that the reason they do this is because they can reject the capstone based on "failing tests". This was what happened to me, despite submitting proof of passing tests in screenshots on submission and then contacting the ASM about it, they let the graded assignment past the date of my graduation making me ineligible for TRG. Before submission I also had the code reviewed by 3 mentors (who work directly for thinkful) who all approved the project and ran the code separately each on their computers. We also tested the code manually by clicking through it together. After hearing that my project was rejected they kindly reached out to ASM (very nice of them). It's been three days and we are still waiting twiddling our thumbs. They needed to wait this time in order for me to pass my original graduation date so I would not be eligible for TRG. The reason I bring this up is because, some, like me, may join Thinkful believing that they have some kind of "insurance". Essentially, following the directions and graduating on time means that you could have insurance that you wouldn't be 10k in debt if things didn't work out. Just keep in mind that Thinkful controls all of this. And why would they want to return money to you? Thinkful has run off with my money in hand and I'm stuck holding the bill. With an experience this horrible, I'm convinced they've engineered it to be this bad, as it can't simply be incompetence. After several days of waiting and mixed messages from various staff a Thinkful, I was told that my project was already reviewed on Friday but they had not told me any progress about it until Monday, again in order to push me past my normal graduation date, which is what I suspected would happen. After speaking with the grader he confirmed that graders can ask for revisions at their own discretion, not needing to following grading rubric/guidelines, and because of a lack of communication between graders and students, there is no way to know what the grader wants directly. I had to fight to be able to speak with my grader who told me that the feedback he gave for the project was completely different than what my ASM and Jessi Whitmore (an educator success team member) had told me. That the revisions he asked for were completely different than what was communicated to me, and that these employees had sent me on a literal impossible task of debugging for 5 hours (this wild goose chase by me, my mentors and other students). It culminated in the grader himself confirming the task was impossible. I felt insane telling my mentors and the ASM and Jessi that the task they had given me was impossible and I was being gaslit the entire time, being thrown off by technical jargon I didn’t understand completely only to be confirmed I was correct all along. The abuse that Thinkful inflicts on students is absolutely unacceptable.
Gaslighting, just so, so much gaslighting: they will literally just close their eyes and say ‘la, la, la’ to avoid listening to any of your concerns or acknowledging them. I had a lady say that my code was the problem in the grading capstone, and then when I showed her video proof of the problem she said that she wasn’t enough of an engineer to watch the video and said I should not message her anymore. Many mentors will continually gaslight you, even if they can’t find an error in your code, somehow it still IS your fault and the grader must somehow be right. Alright, so show me the bug (they can’t).
Miscommunications: (recorded audio between student and grader, starting around 5 mins in) I really had to fight in order to be able to talk to a grader about the capstone and the revisions they needed. Essentially they don’t allow any communication or any feedback from the grader so there were a lot of miscommunications along the way.
Graduation: Light at the end of the tunnel. Oh yeah, they intentionally pushed it back, consistently lying about when they received feedback from the grader. It was confirmed on audio that the grader had sent feedback on Friday, while other employees had claimed it was Saturday or Monday.
Unfortunately, my situation is not unique. I wanted to get this out there in hopes of even deterring one person from taking out loans or owning Thinkful money. There are a lot of better ways to get into tech. Freecodecamp.org and codecademy are two that I can think of (codecademy pro is 250 usd for one year, and is much less than thinkful's 10k for 6 months). This was a huge mistake on my part and I feel like a huge idiot. Don't make the mistake I did. Run far away from Thinkful.
Other notes: Be very wary about positive reviews on Thinkful as they are likely fake. Thinkful has admittedly great SEO and a lot of the first things that pop up show Thinkful in a positive light as they are websites that are promoting bootcamps (and likely get some type of commission). The vast majority of students I spoke to have had similar problems, although some may have different variations of these problems. For unbiased reviews of Thinkful try looking at their google reviews as well as reviews on Facebook as they will not be moderated by Thinkful.
Things other people are saying about Thinkful:
Things other people are saying about Thinkful:
https://ibb.co/h7gmdMzhttps://ibb.co/tDd3kkyhttps://ibb.co/Qk6d4Nrhttps://ibb.co/3fyGsQPhttps://ibb.co/9Ym3SGHhttps://ibb.co/fH2sBVQhttps://ibb.co/5Ggnjg8https://ibb.co/cYSLXzHhttps://ibb.co/tL1YqTGhttps://ibb.co/gJ83b34https://ibb.co/jbrSwBkhttps://ibb.co/qyKQG2Ghttps://ibb.co/2NqWN3gAudio recording of thinkful staff directly lying,, miscommunications (starts around 5 mins in): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bMScUROZRWLVosyk-YFO9pZBmKv0s92M/view?usp=sharing https://ibb.co/L6pZNTyhttps://ibb.co/WHVz1yBhttps://ibb.co/dD6JV4Lhttps://ibb.co/PtybvHnhttps://ibb.co/VWdQXZthttps://ibb.co/9wQZxNMhttps://ibb.co/cvCsbLLhttps://ibb.co/styXJBXhttps://ibb.co/ZB6jzF2https://ibb.co/SdF3fVshttps://ibb.co/M85Vqk4https://ibb.co/6vKxMhshttps://ibb.co/CnSgDsdhttps://ibb.co/VBYv1yMhttps://ibb.co/h7njf1Bhttps://ibb.co/P5pr386https://ibb.co/dj6HwCfhttps://ibb.co/YPRdxX8https://ibb.co/T8BPgy1https://ibb.co/2h8MDsWhttps://ibb.co/jrB9p8whttps://ibb.co/hDbFbxShttps://ibb.co/hYmsZqnhttps://ibb.co/QdySv60https://ibb.co/0KZ1zF7https://ibb.co/CKS7rz5https://ibb.co/7k2QNHdhttps://ibb.co/1T6CZyghttps://ibb.co/z4BTq32https://ibb.co/ZNNjvtDhttps://ibb.co/kgCMvFVhttps://ibb.co/5FmZLwFhttps://ibb.co/pKSZXwchttps://ibb.co/cwV1XZchttps://ibb.co/KhL9y7fhttps://ibb.co/yBpyCtB
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Anonymous
Outsourced admissions
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"Admissions" is definitely outsourced to Asia. I didn't want to assume due to the rep I was talking to but common grammatical errors were made via the chat and I was getting frustrated that very basic questions couldn't be answered so I ended the chat. I was sent an email from the rep where I was asking follow-up questions. The rep apologized for the delay in response due to "different working hours". That was the nail in the coffin I needed to realize they outsource "admissions". I asked to speak to someone over the phone and the rep kept forcing me to respond via email. I still have questions and "admissions" was going to get a call rep to call me instead of someone who actually works within the institute. $17k for outsourced underpaid workers?? It's giving scam. No one even asked me questions, to set up a phone or video interview. I was just sent a link to sign up for funding, pre-work and the syllabus. -
Anonymous
Project Manager
I really enjoyed the whole structure of the program at Thinkful. The curriculum was interesting but not overwhelming, my mentor was extremely professional and supportive, and I truly felt like I received the training I needed to be a viable candidate for the position right away. I graduated early with a job as project manager. I can't say enough good things about this program. -
Anonymous
Was okay
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The program was extremely easy for me. I did not feel challenged at all. Never had to put any tickets in for help. But this is just my experience and I know a lot that struggled through the program. For me I felt the projects could've been bigger and more requirements should've been inserted. Since I opted for the ISA with living stipend I am paying 15% of my monthly salary. The only thing I probably took away from the program was data structures and algorithms. The rest I was just off learning on my own since the modules were lacking. Careers services is great. They helped me land a job but many in my cohort are still looking. -
Anonymous
Data Analytics Immersion Course
It’s an incredible course, sometimes overwhelming workload but you’ll get valuable experience with most of the data analytics toolbox. You’ll need outside resources for sure. You’ll also get help with job searching, resumes, LinkedIn, cover letters, etc. You’re not going to have a lot of free time if you’re doing it right