Flatiron School

Flatiron School was a once in a lifetime experience that changed my life. I challenged myself everyday and met a ton of ambitious and intelligent individuals (instructors, mentors and classmates) who I now call friends and most importantly, I walked away with a profoundly valuable skill: the ability to turn ideas into reality through programming.

I WORKED EXTREMELY HARD AND WAS CHALLENGED!!!

On average, I spent 10–16 hours a day (~75–80 hours/week, including weekends) dedicated to code. I sat in lectures, watched lecture videos and programming videos, worked on labs, wrote blog posts, and built my own projects. Many times during the week I still found myself on campus past 12AM and during the final weeks of Flatiron School in building my final portfolio project, I still found myself on campus past 2AM especially on the weekends. And honestly the only reason why I didn’t stay later was the support of my family, friends and instructors who requested that I take care of my health and not burn out (seriously take care of your health…). But when I got home, I still wrote code. Truth be told, no one should ever tell you that programming is easy because it isn’t. It’s very invigorating and challenging; like really hard. It’s mind-bending work and you constantly have to hold a million different puzzle pieces in your brain in order to solve the problem. There will be days where I go to bed thinking about how to solve the problem and feeling defeated while other days where I felt like I was the champion of the world. Programming, with its instant feedback loop, will constantly play with your emotions. But when things click and you “figure” it out, you will feel a sense of accomplishment like no other. It really is ADDICTING. 

The instructors at Flatiron School were all absolutely phenomenal; highly intelligent, humble and experienced individuals who genuinely want you to succeed and do well. Up to this day they still reach out to me and check up on me to make sure that I am doing well and very excited for me when I chose the software engineer role that I wanted.

The career services at Flatiron School stand out among any other Bootcamps in the world and work hard to get you leads and interviews and the job that you want!

 I graduated from Flatiron School's immersive Web Development program in 2018. It is a great place to learn. The staff is committed to your success and even after graudation there is plenty of support to help you find a job. The best part of Flatiron is the community you build with both students and staff (a lot of the staff are former students). Most classes build really strong bonds that continue even after graduation. Additionally Career Services does an amazing job and can help connect you to companies.

Overall wonderful experience. I came to Flatiron as a recent college graduate with a CS degree, so I had a certain expectation with programming classes. I was pleasantly surprised by my experience at Flatiron. They have a great community where everyone is helping each other out. I did take issue with one instructor who wasn't as engaged with my class as the other instructors were, but they were all extremely helpful and approachable. The only main problem I had was with career services. Although I appreciated all of the tools they provided to help me look for a job, I felt once I received my first job offer, the school pushed me towards taking it just so they could add me to their jobs report. I could be pessimistic but it left a sour taste in my mouth. I would still recommend the course to anyone because of how much you learn in such a short period of time. Just be wary of their career services once you start looking for a job.

I graduated Flatiron School's online web development program at the end of the May and recommend them highly. I did a ton of research before enrolling in their program and they really have the best program out there. I felt supported and challenged during the whole process. The online tech coaching was invuable as I got stuck with trickier concepts. 

After I graduated the career coaching was AWESOME. It was so helpful to me to have someone go over my resume and linkedin profile. I had weekly check ins with my career coach to help in my job search. It was really great and helped me to no end in landing my job!

I graduated from Access Labs on September 14th and just finished my second week at my new job as a Software Engineer. I had a really 3 months+ at Access Labs this past summer. The instructors were really attentive and always made themselves available for us. There were pretty clear expectations on how we should be progressing through the materials.

The most valuable part of the experience for me was the job assistance. They assign you a career coach to meet wtih you weekly and offer advice, give feedback, proofread email correspondance, anything you need. I got a lot of interviews through Flatiron School's business development team (including the one which ultimately led to my job). The job search is incredibly painful and difficult, but I know it would have been much more so without Flatiron's career services.

Overall, the experience has been pretty life-changing.

The online data science bootcamp prep course on learn.co was the best course I have taken. Before applying to flatiron, I took multilpe online python/data science courses (Udemy, codecademy, edex, etc.). So, when I started this one I quicly realized I was learning fundamentals that many didn't touch on. What I loved the most was that they are preparing you to do the data science immersive program, but they want you to be a great programmer as well. Instead of simply teaching you libraries that will be useful, they teach you the basics and build onto it. I was challenged and I learned so much. The bootcamp prep was definitely a huge factor in my decision to go to flatiron--including all the feedback I recieved from alumni, and I can't wait to begin the immersive program. Try the bootcamp prep, you won't be disappointed.

I was recently accepted into the Immersive Software Engineering Bootcamp and have had an extremely pleasant experience with Flatiron throughout the whole process.  I began teaching myself to code using a variety of free and paid resources (Codecademy, Udemy, Edabit challenges, auditing classes online of some esteemed professors, etc), but I found Flatiron's Pre Bootcamp Prep with Learn to be definitely one of, if not THE, best.  I began working through the Prep course without any immediate intention of applying and kept at it because I found it so useful.  It is one of the major reasons I chose to apply to Flatiron.  It can be difficult building your own curriculum when you are using diverse resources to teach yourself, but Flatiron lays out a great curriculum for you, complete with digestible information and challenging, instructive labs.  The lessons and labs build on each other to help your skills stick, and if you ever get stuck, the people behind the Ask A Question feature are immediately responsive and very helpful.  Even if you're not applying, but trying to self-teach, DO THIS COURSE!

The interview process was also totally pleasant and the team at Flatiron seems A+. 

12/10 would recommend!

I recently got in to the flatiron software engineering immersive, and so far my whole experience with flatiron and learn.co has been incredible. A note: if you are applying to flatiron, doing the bootcamp prep course is the most important thing you can do. 

A while ago I tried to learn more about programming and web development on codeacademy, but did't stick with it because I was often frustrated and confused. But with the learn.co bootcamp prep course it just felt easier to learn and I made it totally through the javascript curriculum way faster than I excpected, and it felt great! Learn.co is designed to have you apply everything as you learn it, and the concepts it teaches are really well ordered. The best part about learn.co is the questions feature, which is super easy to use, and always has either other students who have already completed the lesson you're on, or instructors available who make getting through tough spots super easy, and even enjoyable because the people who help are so kind!

For the actual application the admissions team is super involved, and really easy to communicate with if you have questions. The online interviews with them were easy to schedule, and super convenient. If it's possible I would reccomend starting on learn.co and applying to flatiron to anyone. But even if it's not, I would still reccomend doing the free bootcamp prep course on learn.co because of how great the platform and curriculum are.

I initially started self-learning on Codecademy and found that there weren't enough practice problems for all of the material to stick long term. After finding Flatiron's Bootcamp Prep Course, I was making notable progress. I've since completed the course and in my experience, it was the best free resource for learning the fundamentals.

The course is designed so that you're required to think pragmatically which helps improve upon your problem-solving abilities. What's also super neat is that there's a chat function to ask instructors and peers for help if you get stuck on a problem. The response rate is within seconds and the responses have been extremely helpful every time!

Before doing the Flatiron Bootcamp Prep I was self teaching myself from various sources including a free cource on web development from Udacity and a course I purchased from Udemy. 

Learning from the first two methods I always got confused when I got to Javascript Arrays. I just could not grasp the concept. It wasn't until I started the Flatiorin bootcamp prep that the lesson on Arrays started to click. 

The way the lessons build on each other in the Flatiron prep is very helpful. What is more helpful is the ability to interact with your code through their IDE (integrated development environment) learning system. 

Through this I learned how to problem solve and understand better the errors I was making in my code. 

Since completing the bootcamp prep I have been accepted into an upcoming cohort and am excited to get started.