Chegg Skills

Thinkful has a lot of information and there are good people there but to find them you have to sift through all the mentors and helpers on their Slack channel that think you should already know everything from the curriculum. The curriculum is good for people that learn from nothing but reading. I however have to build applications to truly understand the material. I have had two program managers during my entire time at Thinkful and I have only ever spoken with my first mentor and that was only twice. The first was my introduction and the second was when my mentor quit in the middle of my introductory course. That is a total of 5 out of the 6 months with no contact. I am a project manager at my current job and if I had team members that were not on track to meet their goals I would be reaching out to their mentor and asking them why not. What is the Mentor's plan to get the team member back on track? Has the mentor talked to the mentee about their schedule and about how to help them learn? What goals have the mentor set with the mentee for this week? Did the mentee meet their goals for the previous week? If not what was missed and why? What needs to be done differently to ensure the mentee meets their goal? As a leader we have to take responsibility for everything. I am a leader and I take responsibility for not meeting all my goals but if I was the Program Manager I would have monthly skip level conversations with the mentees to ensure that my mentors are performing as expected, and that the mentees understand where they are and motivate them to succeed. I say there is a lot lacking in the Thinkful model and most of the issues come from the top down. As leaders all failure is a reflection of our leadership.

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I've been a self-taught programmer for many years with dreams of taking my skills and enthusiasm into the progessional setting, so I was excited to find out about Thinkful's Full Stack Flex program. They work with you on a curriculum to give you today's most marketable skills like ReactJS and Node as well as professional coding practices you might not pick up on your own like testing frameworks and using Git. 

Beyond the curriculum and coding practices they instill, the real power of Thinkful's program is the mentors. You get twice weekly meetings with a mentor who has a successful background in bringing web applications to market. They guide your through tough to understand content, trouble shoot with you while you are stuck and help you build and refine your projects. I looked forward to my meetings with my mentor because he could always help me get unstuck, explain important concepts and clear up misicues with patience and understanding. He also helped keep me accountable and pushed me to try more challenging things and be a better programmer. Additionally, when you aren't working one-on-one with your mentor, you have access to other mentors in multiple daily Q+A sessions on all sorts of topics, live Family Dinner events with students and local mentors/program managers and a Slack channel. 

At the end of your time at Thinkful, you will have a personal portfolio website with at least 3 polished web applications that you built from the ground up. You'll be able to speak about your experience designing apps from the back of a cocktail napkin all the way to deployment with continuous integration. The experience is powerful and much more inline with professional experience than just doing online tutorials. 

Finally, Thinkful offers career services that go into deep detail - whether it be updating your resume and cover letter to networking strategies. Additionally, they push you to try new strategies that you might not  have thought of or otherwise do to help you secure a job. At the end of each unit, Thinkful has you do live mock technical interviews to help you practice for the real thing. They definately do not feature push over questions- you are expected to know your stuff and perform underpressure. As someone whose only gone through standard interviews in the past, exposure to what a technical interview could be like was an extremely important part of the developer job search.  

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Thinkful is awesome! I had a great experience. Everyone at Thinkful is dedicated to student's success and the ultimate goal of getting a job as a developer. There is always someone available to help, whether it is your mentor, another mentor via a Q & A session or a mentor or another student through the Thinkful Slack community. As an example, I was having an issue with my first capstone project late at night so I jumped on Slack and asked a question. Within seconds a mentor replied and as we chatted back and forth he realized it was a quick fix kind of problem. We ended up doing a video chat and he helped me for 2 hours (we didn't finish until 2 am his time). That is how dedicated everyone is to helping the students succeed. 

Throughout my time at Thinkful I had 4 mentors. This was due to a scheduling conflict with one of my mentors. Thinkful is great about finding the right mentor for you if request a new mentor. 

As far as time commitment goes in the Flex program I probably spent on average about 30+ hours working on the curriculum while working part-time. I will be honest, it is not easy and if you are working at the same time you won't have much of a social life. It is 100% worth it. I love what I do and I am really glad that I chose Thinkful.
 
Thinkful gives you the tools you need to get a job as a developer and the skills to learn technologies quickly and efficiently. The industry changes very quickly and that is a vital skill as a developer. Overall I would 100% recommend Thinkful to anyone who is passionate about becoming a Web Developer. 

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Overall the Thinkful experience has been pleasant. I really enjoy my 1-on-1 meetings with my mentor. The feedback, guidance, and challenges my mentor present have made the program worth while. 

The curriculum is decent, but I sometimes get lost in the assigments and reading material. I do wish it was laid out a bit differently, I think there is room for improvement in that regard. Another thing I've noticed is that you really need to pay attention to the recommended resources at the end of each lesson. Those additional resources are super hepful in driving the topic home (at least for me :) ). The additional resources are well curated, but this student wishes some of those items were integrated into the native curriculum. Chasing down external links and keeping track of all of them can be a bit tedius. 

Thinkful offers a student Slack environment which is occasionally helpful, but you've got to be patient due to the sheer number of participants. Another very helpful 'community' type research are the open-sessions held by various mentors and Thinkful instructors. I've found that the instructors genuinely want to help you learn and aren't afraid to answer questions. I find the mentor sessions and open-sessions to be very helpful.

I believe Thinkful is better geared towards individuals with a strong sense of self-motivation and resourcefulness. There are often times where you need to refer to various documentation and the program definetely rewards those who can find answers on their own. There is a lot of reading, which can be a bit monotonous. For me personally, I do wish there were a few video lectures sprinkled through the reading material. I think that would help tremendously - seeing things demonstrated live (or recorded) and hearing someone explain what they're demonstrating is very helpful for some learners. 

On the whole, I've enjoyed my Thinkful experience and have seen a marked improvement and progress towards my goal. I still have a little bit left to go in the program, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to individuals looking to jump start their software development education.

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I tried to study by myself, i tried to study with tons of free resources out there ... but it did not work for me. Conceptually with Thinkful you are still learning by yourself, but with one huge difference, there are always either mentors or/and Q&A sessions available for you when you need them. This makes learning process less stressful and demotivating when you stuck. This lets you move forward and not to procrastinate. Thinkful model is very good fit for those who works full time, has family and other things in their life at the same time and also wants to learn Full Stack :). Go for it! you won't regret it.

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I started off with basically no coding experience at all and was a little nervous starting from scratch - but from day one everyone at Thinkful alleviated those concerns! It starts right from the basics and builds on top so even a beginner can do it if they work at it hard enough. My program manager helped introduce me to the way the course works and is always checking in to see how I'm doing, and my mentor is invaluable in helping me along with the technical side of things. I would definitely reccomend this course to other people like me who are looking for an alternative to college or for anyone wanting a change in careers.

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The biggest obstacles to my decision to learn coding, statistics, and data science had been lack of a functional curriculum and access to knowledgeable staff who can guide, counsel, and assist when I get lost or stuck. Thinkful's Data Science program has provided both. 

The curriculum is well structured. Not only does it offer easy to understand examples of every lesson along the way. But it also increases the complexity of those examples and slowly introduces concepts into the code that you as a student have to go figure out for yourself, which as it turns out is a critical component of surviving in the tech industry. 

Having access to regular Q&A sessions online augments the bi-weekly hour long mentor sessions that keep my on track and progressing toward each milestone. Perhaps in time, the Data Science program will have more industry professionals who can give more Q&A sessions like is present for Full Stack students. 

If you want to learn but simply lack the infrastructure in which to learn, this "boot camp" is a solid move. Its cost is reasonable and will likely pay for itself in the first year alone. The community is full of hopeful, intelligent students who are all just trying to break into a growing, lucrative industry. And the lessons themselves are very challenging while keeping you near to guidance that has kept me going when I thought I would never be able to grasp some of the concepts and code. 

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This has been a very good experience in pushing me to take a step out of my comfort zone. Along with going to Meetups to meet up with other fellow coders, I also get good practice mock interviews with those experienced in the field. The assignments themselves point you in the right direction and it's built step by step. 

Some issues is that parts of the course may be out of date or recommended resources link broken/out of date. Though, I find the next couple days that a new lecture is added to cement more of the concepts. 

Instructors are very knowledgeable and tend to know a lot of tips and tricks. I had two instructors, one that is newer, but had a lot of zeal for teaching which I enjoyed. After the introduction phase, was introduced to an older instructor where I have a little more trouble associating with. 

Currently still taking the course and working on my serverside capstone project.

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tl:dr;

I enrolled in Thinkful's full time web development program in Feburary and graduated in July. I am currently about to go into the careers phase of the program, but I already have one job interview scheduled for next week (they had actually been telling us to begin to apply for jobs about after 14 weeks into the program). My overall experience with Thinkful has been very positive and I would recommend them to anyone seriously considering an online bootcamp to learn full stack web development.

 

The details: (for those of you considering Thinkful)

I'll try to write this in a way to be as helpful to prospective students as much as possible. A lot of it may be me just rambling about my personal experience, but I hope it will be useful for prospective students.

About me- I taught myself how to code for roughly a year before entering Thinkful and had completed a significant amount of Free Code Camp. This meant that I had a head start and found the boot camp relatively easier than other students, many of whom found the boot camp very challenging; quite a few struggled and dropped out. With this said my experience of the bootcamp is going to be more relatable to people who have prior self-taught experience. I also strongly recommend people considering boot camps who don't have any prior coding experience to spend a few months teaching themsleves before considering a boot camp- this comes with multiple benefits: firstly, you actually know very well whether or not this is what you want to do (sounds silly but you'd be surprised how many people just jump with both feet into boot camps), secondly you will be leagues ahead of your peers- and this actually puts you in a good position because the curriculum is designed around the average student and if you are above average, you are performing well and in a comfortable position and... thirdly this will improve your chances of getting not just a job- but a better job outside of bootcamp since you will be far better than you would've if you went through the boot camp without experience. FreeCodeCamp is a great place to learn on your own.

Applying to Thinkful & The precourse

When applying to Thinkful, you will schedule a phone call with a program manager who will assess whether you are a good fit for the boot camp or not (no pressure at all, just a phone call). After the phone call, you will be given access to the precourse and a mentor who you will schedule two video chats a week with to help you through the precourse. The precourse teaches basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript knowledge/skills that you will need to begin your journey in the bootcamp with. At the end of the precourse, you will have to undergo a technical evaluation that judges your coding ability, for our cohort of students this came in the form of 5 JavaScript coding problems to solve within an hour (this is how Thinkful ultimately is able to gauge whether a student has a shot at succeeding in the full-time bootcamp or not. This is very important to other students really, because you will be working with other students and you want to be working with other students who aren't going to hold you back... many other boot camps don't even control the quality of their students and let them be weeded out during the boot camp rather than prior to it, so you can consider this a sign of a good boot camp). 

First Two Weeks

The first two weeks covers REST API and jQuery- you will make your very first project at the end of the two weeks. The instructor for these two weeks really convinced me that I had selected the right boot camp, he was perfect. The assignments he provided were well thought-out and fool proof yet with enough challenge that a growing developer could improve on.

Weeks 3-7

This week included a 1 week break, so really it was just 4 weeks. These 4 weeks were about learning Node.js and database technologies such as PostgreSQL and MongoDB. This is the part of the course that really picks up, and unfortunately our cohort in particular seemed to be the subject of testing for a new node curriculum (I might be wrong, but it seriously felt that way). The instructor would edit the assignments we were working on... on the day of it while we were working on it. This caused quite a bit of frustration in the students despite the instructor's ability to teach. Despite that, we all came out learning everything we needed in these 4 weeks (except a lot of students still felt uncomfortable with PostgreSQL, this resulted in almost all students favoring the use to MongoDB in later projects instead, a large part of this to blame is that many students faced technical difficulties during the PostgreSQL week).

Weeks 8-9

This week is dedicated to learning React.js, an advanced front-end web development framework. Many students truly enjoyed this part of the course as they liked coming back to the front-end and doing many cool things with it. I personally found it a challenge since I had used jQuery for so long, unlike other students whose minds jQuery was beginning to slip out of since they had only used it for roughly a little more than a week. For an experienced jQuery user, React can take some time getting used to.

Weeks 10-11

These two weeks are dedicated to creating your very first full-stack project. You will do everything from front-end to back-end; the structure of your database, how the server communicates with the client (visible web page), the design for it... everything. This is the point where afterwards we saw a huge amount of students drop out of the program from our cohort. This is really the part of the program that is the true test to see if you currently have what it takes (and if you don't manage to succeed, it probably just means you need more time to learn, but the boot camp isn't going to wait for you). Thankfully for those students who felt they needed more time after these two weeks, they were able to swap over to Thinkful's Flex program rather than drop out, so they could continue the boot camp journey at their own pace instead.

Week 12

Break week~ a lot of students used this time to keep polishing their projects and review.

Weeks 13-14

Data Structures & Algorithms- This is where you learn computer science fundamentals and coding challenges that job interviewers may pick your brain about. This is the part of the curriculum that gets you ready for interviews at even heavy-hitting job interview companies. The instructor for this part of the curriculum was a really tough instructor but an outstanding one. She would single students out and call them out to present their work and/or their thoughts about how to solve a particular coding problem. I'm pretty sure she scared the living heck out of a lot of students but we all loved her for it- she was an outstanding instructor as she was also a tough one.

Week 15

This week is dedicated to your 3rd capstone project- a full-stack project that uses a data structure to create a learning-based application using spaced repetition theory. You will be assigned a partner for this project who you will then divide the work up with.

Week 16

"Flex Week"- during this week you can choose a technology that you personally would like to learn (perhaps your specific area has lots of jobs for Python for example and you want to learn it). Many students opted to learn React Native, which allows React developers the ability to create mobile applications for both Android and IOS simultaneously.

Weeks 17-19

These Three weeks are dedicated to working on the final capstone project. Our cohort was divided into teams of four. During this time I got along really well with my partners as we created our most polished project yet. Our project not only included a web application but also a mobile application. I felt very good about these three weeks.

Weeks 20-21

These two weeks are dedicated to getting ready for the job hunt. You will work on and finalize your portfolio in these two weeks and submit the portfolio for review and get ready to graduate.

Overall, my experience at Thinkful was a great one and I fully don't regret spending the large amount of money on it. I feel confident and ready to start a career as a web developer... and I have my first job interview just a week after my graduation!

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I come from a humanities background and began the Full Stack Flex program with almost no coding experience at all (just a handful of CodeAcademny lessons a teeny bit of HTML/CSS familiarity). Like a lot of people here, I was initially suspicious of intensive online learning. I thought if would feel transactional and impersonal. And at first, I struggled with how to best use the time with my mentor. But as I progressed through the course, I  became more comfortable with my mentor and extremely grateful for his expertise.    I’m a big fan of Thinkful’s project-based approach. While many of the lessons felt sparse at first, I was always able to deepen my understanding while building out a full project. In addition to the (essential) mentor sessions, Thinkful offers lots of ways to get help on projects, like a very active Slack community and frequent video chat Q&A sessions with professional developers.    Most important, for me, was Thinkful’s IRL Portland community. Throughout my time in the program, I was able to meet up multiple times per week with other Thinkful students for dinners, workshops, and study sessions (both Thinkful-organized and informal). While all of Thinkful’s coursework is technically online, this additional local community provided me with an essential support system and resources for further learning.    If I were to do it all over again, I probably would have put in more time self-studying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fundamentals prior to starting the course. Because I was only working part-time while in the program, I hoped to finish at an accelerated pace, but ended up needing the entire six months. Other than that, though, I have no regrets. I finished Thinkful with a strong portfolio and a totally new skillset. I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting my work was to potential employers. I interviewed at a number of local companies and received an initial offer three weeks after graduating from Thinkful.   Just this morning I just signed an offer letter for my first job in the tech field—a full-time frontend dev position at a small creative agency—and I'm very excited to begin this next chapter! Read less

I chose Thinkful over other online progams because of the mentorship, the community and the cost.  Thinkful delivered in those aspects!  I was paired with a great mentor who walked me through the lessons when I got stuck, I attended any Thinkful event I could and met other amazing students, mentors, and Thinkful staff, and I didn't have to pay an arm and a leg to pursue a different career path (There's a scholarship for women!).  I was able to find a job before my graduation date!

Unlike the web development bootcamp, I would say that prospective students should have some background in statistics and programming before coming into the course, or be willing to put in the additional time to learn more.  (This is probably true in any data science course.)  Before becoming a Thinkful student, I had a decent background in statistics and some (mostly self-taught) coding experience in Python.  My last job was doing data analysis.  Because the field of data science is so broad, there is a lot to cover. The more you can bring into the course at the get-go, the better.  And this include time!  I personally would not have been able to do this course while having a full-time job.  

Also, data science as a field is relatively new and constantly changing.  Thinkful's data science lessons, while robust, only scratch the surface of what is out there.  This is why the project-oriented nature of the program is so important.  Working on projects allows you to put what you learned into practice and expand on the course material.  Having a mentor to guide you offers another way to learn beyond the material.  While data science concepts are important, one of the most important things you will learn in this course is how to Google effectively and how to troubleshoot your code.   

You do not need to enroll in a data science bootcamp to become a data scientist.  There are plenty of resources out there that are less costly.  It depends on your learning style!  I knew I would benefit from a mentor that could talk me through difficult concepts and hold me accountable when progressing through the course.  As someone who struggles with networking, I knew it was important for me to pick a program with a supportive community.  This community eventually got me a job offer!  For me, Thinkful was the right choice. 

 

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The curriculum was tough, and at times I either wanted to quit or thought  there was no way it was going to work out, but I kept at it and sure enough, 2 months after graduating I landed a job as a Software Developer. I had absolutely no coding experience prior to the bootcamp, so that really shows the quality of the curriculum and the dedication of the Program Managers, Mentors, and Career Services people.

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If you can afford to take the time to commit 5 months to the program, I strongly recommend it. The two aspects of the program that I think helped me succeed throughout my time as a student and now as a graduate were the length, and the community.

For an immersion program 5 months can feel like a long commitment, but it allows you to dive deeper into the concepts that may not come as easily to you. I found that at various times throughout the program certain people in my cohert were putting in more time depending on how confident they felt about a given concept. Also the longer program allows you to produce on more projects in various group dynamics (solo, partner and small groups of 4 or 5), which is extremely helpful when interviewing for jobs. I found that potential employers were as interested in hearing about my experience of balancing work on a team of 5 people, as my technical experience.

Also, I can't emphasize enough how impressed I was with the online community that Thinkful creates. I've grown to be quite close with the members of my cohert as we worked through this program together. The daily live classrooms and partner programming made me feel like I was never alone even if I was learning from the comfort of my own living room. The mentoring Thinkful provides, also helps to make the online experience feel very approachable.

I will acknowledge that it took a certain amount of financial privilege to be able to take 5 months off of work in order to attend their engineering immersion program, but if you have the flexibility and passion for learning software development then I strongly recommend attending Thinkful's Engineering Immersion Program.

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I did not have much coding experience before attending thingful. I enrolled in full-time course which is intensive. I was struggling in the beginning as I was not very comfortable with pair-programing and fast-pace setting, but I tried to adpat quickly. I learned a lot from this program and could not believe that I could build React full-stack applications in a short amount of time. Capstone projects only allow one week to build with your classmates but it really helped me improved a lot of skills from planning steps, drafting wireframes, to creating components. My debugging skills also improved siginifcantly. Another nice thing about full-time course is I could access TAs everyday as we were doing daily assignmnents so it really saved me a lot of time debuggings. Their instructors are extremely knowlegable and their program manager (Theresa) is doing great job to support students in any aspect. Finally, their career service (Stephanie) is really helpful when it comes to the huting job phase, she provided me a lot of good tips on job search. However, in order to suceed in the course, you need to put in a great effort but you will see compound rewardings soon!

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I attended Thinkful from Jan-May of 2017. To be honest, I had a lot of prior programming experience, which may not be typical of a bootcamp seeker - but the fine people at Thinkful always went out of their way to adapt to my needs. The curriculum was always well designed and executed, but parts of it were too simple for me, so they found ways for me to expand my knowledge. The mentorship system really sets Thinkful apart - I've been to dozens of meetups in Seattle and met with students from several other bootcamps and I always felt extremely grateful to have attended Thinkful rather than any of these other schools. That said, when I graduated Thinkful had not yet developed deep enough partnerships in the Seattle area so I found the job search long and excruiciating, though eventually successful. My job coach was wonderful and always did everything she could for me, but the market was really tough, and a lot of companies won't even look at juniors with CS degrees, let alone bootcamps. I stay in contact with my job coach and she assures me they are working hard to improve their connections in this area so future students should have a much easier time. If you are a prospective student in the Seattle area, make sure to ask about their progress on this front. You will get a great education and the staff will do everything in their power to motivate you and keep you on track, but help getting a foot in the door will make a world of difference.

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The flex full stack bootcamp is hard to do remotely but worth it. I worked full time and put in about 15 hours per week and finished in 12 months, well beyond the 6 months.  I think you finish in 6 months if you work park time, not full time. I learned the MERRN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Redux, Node), but I lucked out with a mentor who really pushed me to make architectural decisions in my apps, to push myelf, and use webpack. I got a got a job two months after graduating at a fortune 500 company and it is honestly my dream job. I would recommend this bootcamp. 

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If you put in the time, Thinkful will be an amazing return on investment. I highly recommend the engineering immersion program for that reason-- the teaching assistances were key to my success. We learned the MERN stack, but having some knowledge in HTML/CSS/JavaScript or another language will aid you prior to starting the course. Expect to spend 40-50 hours a week minimum studying, so try some coding on your own and make sure you enjoy it! I loved pair programming with other classmates and I found a job before I graduated.

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I participated in Thinkful's 6-month Flex Program and felt blown away by the results. Let me preface this by stating that I was a theatre major in college, so feel free to make any assumptions about my math ability from that. Thinkful's curriculum increases at a perfect pace to understand everything before moving on. I had several moments throughout the Bootcamp where I felt like I wasn't going to be able to grasp a topic, but without fail after 2 - 3 days learning about the topic I always came around. In short, this bootcamp is for people from all backgrounds and regardless of previous web development knowledge. After graduating I found a job working for Booz Allen Hamilton after one month.

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Thinkful’s Engineering Immersion program was just what I needed to effectively enter tech. The mentors and instructors were smart, experienced, and helpful. The curriculum (mostly Node and React) was fresh and relevant. And a full month of data structures and algorithms was one of the programs’s selling points for me. Thinkful taught me how to continue learning well after graduation and starting a job. 

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I had an awesome experience with Thinkful. It was a lot of work, even more time, a lot of frustration but even more reward. 

Chris, our instructor that led the node/express portion of the course was literally one of the best teachers I have ever had. The amount of support by the TAs and mentors is unparelleled. If you are struggling there is no shame in asking for help and help you they will, everyone that had given me their assistance stayed with me until I thoroughly understood the concept in question. I also really liked the way most of the course was put together with instructor led lectures, then you break off into pairs to practice what the lecture was about and then ended the day with help from TAs and a mentor session to cover anything still not fully understood. 

That being said there were some things that could be improved. I really did not like the consitancy with some of the instructors using vim as a code editor instead of vs code (which is what all the students used at the time). This discrepency was very hard to follow especially when learning react. During a topic or two that was covered, I think the instructors could have spent a little more time with us during the lectures to go over concepts. 

All things considered, Thinkful was definitely worth it in my opinion. You only get out what you put into it though! If all the resources are used that Thinkful offers (which is a lot) and you really, truley are attentive during lectures and put in the effort, the reward will definitely be a job of your choosing!

 

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