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Galvanize is an education company that offers software engineering bootcamps under its Hack Reactor by Galvanize brand name. Galvanize offers programs for rapid career transformation, designed so that anyone with motivation can succeed, regardless of education, experience, or background. Please visit the Hack Reactor page on Course Report here to learn more about these bootcamps.
Galvanize also offers Enterprise training designed to rapidly upskill and reskill employees at any level, helping companies develop internal tech capabilities, broadening workforce representation, and empowering the workforce of the future.
Galvanize has long been committed to upskilling and reskilling the U.S. military. They equip active duty service members and Veterans with in-demand technical skills, empowering them to succeed in competitive, high-paying civilian careers in software development, data analytics, and cybersecurity.
First off, I'll start this review by telling you all that I didn't end up graduating from the SF Galvanize bootcamp (the only one out of 13. I'll also state that I graduated UCSC with honors, so it's not like I'm completely dumb). Despite my own personal situation (more on this later), I share many similar sentiments with the rest of the cohort about the school.
Secondly, I'm trying to leave a fair review despite not graduating; however, this review is subjective and, of course, ...
First off, I'll start this review by telling you all that I didn't end up graduating from the SF Galvanize bootcamp (the only one out of 13. I'll also state that I graduated UCSC with honors, so it's not like I'm completely dumb). Despite my own personal situation (more on this later), I share many similar sentiments with the rest of the cohort about the school.
Secondly, I'm trying to leave a fair review despite not graduating; however, this review is subjective and, of course, is based off my personal experiences at Galvanize.
A typical day unfolded like this:
9-10: warm-up algorithm
11-12: Reviewing the algorithm's answer, and then lecture.
Lunch from 12-1
1-2: Another 1-2 hour lecture.
3-Rest of day/evening: More work to be done; projects, homework review, etc (typically with other classmates, with some instructor assistance - in other words a lot of pair programming. In fact, if you're anything like most of us, you won't get by without working with other people.)
There are 4 quarters at G:
1) Front end (HTML/JS - lots of working with dom manipulation)
2) Server side stuff/back end (our stack was Node, Express, and Postgresql)
3) Computer science stuff (algorithms, data structures, trees, linked lists, etc)
4) Learning a few front end frameworks (React and Angular - more on this later), as well as "self exploration"
Each quarter had its own project:
1) A front end app that requires an api call
2) Connecting an app to a server and database
3) Something computer-sciency
4) A final capstone project in culmination of the cohort, bringing together most of the ideas throughout the school. Must be full stack, and requires a new technology not taught in the cohort (a different database, for example, like mongo db).
I guess I'll start with the pros of Galvanize:
1) Our personal cohort had an student:instructor ratio of about 13:3 (more on this later), which is a very good ratio as far as bootcamps go (from what I've heard). Also, the instructors stayed from about 9-6, so we had them for almost a full 8 hours.
2) The instructors and staff were all enthusiastic and supported us. They truly did care about our success (which I've heard differently about other bootcamps).
3) The campus itself was pretty cool. Kinda like a tech hub, with a whole bunch of tech companies in the building, as well as Galvanize data science cohorts.
4) We also had a lot career support. A few times a month, our homework would instead consist of networking, resume building, targeting companies, how to present yourself, stuff like that. We even had our own personal good docs of all the career things we were supposed to keep on top of (which was a lot - a lot).
5) Lots of events on campus - tech companies coming in to present there stuff, networking events, and companies (like IBM) coming in to give presentations and talk to potential future employees (us, hopefully).
6) At those events - there was a lot of free food. Lots of pizza, booze. A lot of delicious, fancy food as well. Most of the events are open to students - as long as you sign up on Eventbrite (sign up for as many as you can to network and eat awesome food). If you go to them, even if it's for the free food, at least pretend to care about the event, and give people time to do their spiels.
7) Getting to know everyone for 6 months was a pretty fun experience - we were from all walks of life (more on this later), and had a lot of different experiences. A lot of us became pretty close throughout the cohort.
8) The cohort was 6 months; most other bootcamps are much less than this (more on this later).
9) They preached a growth mindset. Look it up if you're not familiar. Quite necessary, however more on this in a bit.
10) I ended up receiving two scholarships, for a total of 4k off the admissions price (bringing it to 17k from 21). However, I'm not sure if they're still offering these scholarships.
11) The staff is pretty receptive to our suggestions and complaints. So they may be working on some of the things I'm about to list below.
Ok, a lot of good stuff, but there was definitely a lot that could be improved upon (the bad):
1) Of the three instructors, one was really not fit to be an instructor at all. His lecturing skills were bad, and we're all convinced he actually didn't know anything he was talking about. However, it sounds like he's changed his ways since we left, as we did quite a bit of complaining about it.
2) The next cohort turned out to be much bigger than ours (20-something students), and right in the middle of their cohort (somewhere near the end of quarter two I think), Galvanize ended up firing two of their better instructors, meaning for about 30-something people, we had 4 instructors or so trying to help us finish up our capstone while helping the new cohort. Since then, they've hired two instructors more, and might bring back one of the fired ones. The newer cohort was pissed about this situation, and did a lot of complaining (as did we).
3) Some of the students felt as though the career services came too early; the lectures and homework weren't really relevant early on in the cohort while we were trying to bust our butts coding and really had no prospects or thoughts of getting a job. I, personally, didn't mind a break from the extensive coding.
4) The school (and even some teachers) claimed we'd only be working 40hrs a week due to the fact that the school was 6 months long. This was entirely untrue. Don't expect to be working under 50 per week. 60 is more like it (for 6 months don't forget). It's LONG. There isn't time for a part time job, relationships, partying, etc. A lot of normal life things will be pushed to the side. Keep that in mind.
5) This school will kill you if you don't get good rest and have mental stability. I, personally, was going through a lot of stressful situations throughout the cohort, and was averaging around 5 hours per sleep, with 10 hour days for the entire 6 months. It's entirely possible that, had my mental state and life circumstances been better, I would have faired much better in school, and would have an entirely different outlook coming out of G.
6) A lot of the homework didn't sync up with lectures, which made things confusing. A lot of times, there wasn't time to do the readings either, as there was just too much homework. In addition, a lot of the tests in the homework were simply wrong; we'd spend hours trying to fix our code when it was right in the first place. Hours lost over this stuff.
7) Galvanize dropped the ball entirely in quarter 4. We were supposed to learn at least one new front end framework (we voted for React). It turned out we had only one one-hour lecture on it, and many of us were hoping to create our capstone with it. This is possibly the reason I didn't graduate, as I tried to use React and didn't quite understand it. The instructors also pushed me to use it, despite me being very uncomfortable with it. This is what I'm most pissed about. Also know that you will be cut off from campus resources (career support and instructor help) if you don't graduate. I'm now basically alone in my job hunt, minus some help from fellow students.
8) Ok, this is a big one: it seems the ONLY people that did really well were people with prior experience in some way. Someone with years of database experience, an MA in engineering, a grad from another bootcamp with a couple years of experience, and two with prior coding experience in some way. For those of us from different walks of life (this includes me), this class was ten times the struggle - and it showed. Everything came slower. Some of use still can't center divs correctly on a page. Our projects looked ten times worse than everyone else's.
9) Speaking of centering divs, our time with CSS was pretty rushed. A lot of us don't have good foundations with it, and there weren't many lectures on it. We were basically given some links to check out to get a better understanding of it.
10) At some point throughout the cohort, we found out our area's market (SF) only wanted senior devs, and we were told it'd probably be a good idea to look out of state. Yikes.
11) I was accepted to the bootcamp even though I didn't pass the entrance algorithm. Had I not been accepted (and rightly so), I would not have taken out a $20,000 loan with no prospects of getting a job. Were they just trying to fill seats? It's possible, as I did hear rumors of this floating around at some point.
12) The reason they fired two instructors possibly due to the hiring of a new CTO, who possibly wasn't a good fit. Whoever it was made cuts in the wrong spots, and some of this landed on us. This made me remember that G, along with all bootcamps, are still a business (non-accredited btw) at the end of the day, and saving/making money is what it's all about.
13) Multiple people (outsiders watching) I had talked to claimed the students didn't get enough support. They felt as though we needed a few more tutors/mentors. I suppose this is the nature of the bootcamp however.
14) Many of these negative sentiments are shared not only by me, but also by the previous and proceeding cohorts. In this case - the bad points may not just be a manifestation of my personal situation, but are a true reflection of the school. The upside is that Galvanize is aware of many of these sentiments, and is trying to correct at least some of them. Again, I'd like to remind you that much of the staff does truly care about student success. Many of them even made themselves available to me personally even though I had not graduated.
15) In regards to instructor situations, the current cohort just had their best instructor randomly get placed as a student in a data science class. This doesn't really make any sense, especially since the current cohort was so upset over the previous instructors getting fired. To be clear, this particular instructor was already promoted to another position, but that was still a teaching related position I believe. Now, the current cohort is completely without his help. In regards to all this instructor movement/loss, I've heard this about more than 2 other bootcamps, so it's not necessarily just a Galvanize thing.
16) One final point, which is definitely a big one as well, which I hadn't thought of at the time for some reason... Why are we paying money for a personal exploration quarter? I came to school to be taught, not to learn things on my own. In this case, what am I paying money for? The school might as well have been set in trimesters instead of quarters, with a smaller tuition fee. Remember, for a 21k tuition, that means you're paying $5250 to learn things on your own for a quarter.
Not sure if this is relevant or not, but I'll list it anyways as just something to ponder. The prices people paid to get in were kinda all over the place. Like I said, a few of us got 2-4k off, one person got their entire tuition paid for (I think by some foundation, so that may be irrelevant), and one student got half the tuition off upon threatening to go to another bootcamp. Now, from what I understand, there were no scholarships given for the current cohort.
My personal conclusion:
Galvanize wasn't worth it. Or any other bootcamp for that matter - unless you already have a previous related background and you know your brain is trained to think like a programmer. The market (at least in Silicon Valley) does not want entry level programmers. The risk of not getting a job is too great (unless you plan on moving out of state), especially if you're planning to take out a loan, like I did (and now feel pretty screwed in my situation).
My personal recommendations:
Do your research. I thought I did enough, but now I don't feel as though I did. I'm not talking about research on just bootcamps, but research on the market, what stacks are most wanted, what camps teach these stacks, and which camps will give you the most support. Research tuition prices, potential scholarships and deals, connections the school might have in terms of job placement, etc. Possibly most importantly, talk to previous grads to get their experiences. Was it worth it for them? Pros? Cons?
Finally, do plenty of soul searching before you fork over thousands of dollars. Do you even want to be a programmer, or are you in it for the money? If you're in it for the money, you might not survive. I personally was in it half way for this reason. Yes, I wanted better pay (how else can one afford a living in Ca? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Also I had back surgery, so I lost half my job opportunities right there). However, I also knew that I liked solving problems and making things work (better). I also wanted to upgrade my resume. In this sense, it's possible I might not even end up as a developer, but I may end up utilizing my full stack skills in some other way. Combining them with previous work experience? Possible.
If you don't know if you want to program - take online courses first. Make sure you do enough - not just a few free ones off CodeAcademy. Take full stack courses off Udemy or Udacity, places like that. Even if you spend a couple hundred bucks on online classes, this move can potentially save you thousands of dollars if it turns out you don't wanna program. It's even possible you'll get a job with just online courses if you're that adept.
Finally, trust your gut. I was very hesitant to fork over the 2,000 tuition fee; I should have taken this as a sign. Throught the first quarter, there were many times when my gut was telling me to drop out. I should have trusted my gut again, yet I listened to instructors that told me I should stick with it.
Remember, my experience at G was subjective (as everyone else's). Read more than just my review. Do your research and soul search!
Good luck in your bootcamp prospects!
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Short-term contract, part-time position, freelance | N/A |
Employed out-of-field | N/A |
How much does Galvanize cost?
Galvanize costs around $19,480.
What courses does Galvanize teach?
Galvanize offers courses like 12-Week Software Engineering Online Immersive, 19-Week Software Engineering Immersive with JavaScript & Python.
Where does Galvanize have campuses?
Galvanize teaches students Online in a remote classroom.
Is Galvanize worth it?
The data says yes! In 2022, Galvanize reported a 100% graduation rate, a median salary of $95,000, and N/A of Galvanize alumni are employed.
Is Galvanize legit?
We let alumni answer that question. 216 Galvanize alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Galvanize and rate their overall experience a 4.5 out of 5.
Does Galvanize offer scholarships or accept the GI Bill?
Yes, Galvanize accepts the GI Bill!
Can I read Galvanize reviews?
You can read 216 reviews of Galvanize on Course Report! Galvanize alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Galvanize and rate their overall experience a 4.5 out of 5.
Is Galvanize accredited?
While bootcamps must be approved to operate, accreditation is relatively rare. Galvanize doesn't yet share information about their accreditation status.
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