General Assembly

The most valuable part of this bootcamp are the connections (and friends) you make, the projects you learn to make and be added to your portfolio, and the career coach/career outcomes class. Other than that, the instructors are all extremely nice and helpful and willing to help out with any questions. The classes were fun and engaging, the homework was also fun to do and there are extra countless resources to learn more. Even now that the bootcamp is over, I am still motivated to work hard towards my goals and learn more.

Attended 6 months Data Science Immersive Flexible bootcamp. It was a challenging and rewarding learning experiences with instructor and career coach! We were taught with various tools and techniques that are useful in data field. Instructor has shared the best practice and the state-of-the-art models using in their industries. So glad to hearing from them! On the other hand, friendly and talented career coach brought in new skills for oneself to be ready for recruitment and getting onboard in the future. These soft skills are very valuable for personal development.

I decided to have a change of career for something that I thought I would really enjoy. I did the UX design immersive course and it was incredibly enjoyable. Although it was hard work, everything was fun, interactive and engaging and I ended the course feeling like I have a very good understanding to start my new career with!

The SEI Remote program was very challenging as I had never attempted any coding before. That being said, by the end of the program I had a solid understanding of multiple languages and frameworks. Depending on the cohort you are assigned the languages can change. My program started out with the front end languages of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We then learned how to make programs as a MERN stack. After a couple of projects, we moved on to work with Python and Django. Each area has about two- three weeks of learning and then a project to demonstrate your learning. I found that the teachers didn’t want to just give you the answers to your questions but were trying to teach you how to figure out how to find the answers on your own. This was frustrating but very beneficial for the real world. In my cohort, we had TA office hours Monday-Thursday from 5:30-8:00. This was great for when you are stuck and need assistance. A con is that they seem to have needed more TA’s. We had only two TA’s and sometimes you could not receive help because there were a lot of people in line to get help. After the learning is done, they have an outcomes team that helps provide support for job searching. Let me make this perfectly clear- they do not find you a job. They instead help you tailor your resumes, network, and sometimes just give you advise on handling rejection. I would recommend this bootcamp for career changers willing to have no life for 12 weeks. The price is a high but when you finally do break into the industry it will be worth it. 

Your experience at General Assembly will largely depend on the quality of your instructors. It's really hit or miss. And in my case, it was a miss.

1. We had one experienced instructor. The other instructors were woefully inexperienced. They were graduates of General Assembly who were brought back to teach. I believe this is a way for General Assembly to inflate their employment placement numbers.

2. You have one week to drop the course with a full refund. Because of the one experienced instructor, I stuck with the course. She disappeared after a few weeks to focus on a more important job.

3. The other instructors didn't have a great grasp of the material. It felt like they were still learning along with us. I really felt scammed by this. We spent a lot of class time watching them debug their code, and display a lack of understanding of Tableau, Python, etc. Luckily we had a really smart student who could correct them.

4. Due to inexperience, the instructors would blow through the lessons, then give us entire days at a time to self-study. In my 420 hour course, I'd say closer to 100 hours were actual instruction.

I can almost forgive the inexperienced instructors. It's General Assembly's responsibility to make good hires. But at a minimum, they should have worked hard to familiarize themselves with our lessons the night before teaching them.

GA is clearly putting on as many classes as possible to maximize profit, even when they don't have enough instructors. They do have surveys during the course, but they aren't anonymous. I don't feel comfortable giving feedback when I know it may impact my graduation. The instructors specifically asked us to give them 4 or 5 stars on everything.

I took a course called Data Analysis where i learned how to analysis data with excel, SQL and Tableau. I really liked Elise, my instructor. She was very knowledgeable and can explain concepts really well. I highly recommend this class and the instructor as well. The only draw back is this course is 10 weeks long and meets twice a week for 2 hours which is not a lot of time to learn a lot of materials so every class we were going with a pretty fast speed. 

I attended the SEI program Jan 22 through April 22.  I had limited experience when I applied to the school. I was also making a career change.  It was nerve wracking since I am a single father in my 40's. It was scary to consider the amount of time I would have to dedicate with out promise of a job once I was finished.  In looking for the right school to help me accomplish my goals I found General Assembly.  Some of the strongest benefits that attracted me to GA was that they had a curriculum that seemed to cover all the top coding skills. They also had several instructors per course. Last they had a post course support system that would mentor me while searching for a job.  The long story short is that three months after graduating I was hired full time by a LA based technology company.  General Assembly did what they advertised and the personnel were top notch. I gladly give my positive review for anyone at any stage of life to attend GA.  

I know of a handful of students from my cohort that landed jobs in UX design (about 5 out of nearly 30).
These were people who already had college degrees in related fields like psychology, graphic design, and other design majors. I do not have a completed college degree.

I have not succeeded in this course which I graduated from one year ago. It kills me to have to make the payments for it..  And all of the info I could have learned on youtube.
I don't think UX design is the way to go in bootcamps. There is a lot more to it then going through a 3 month "intensive" course. You should have some sort of background related to UX and the bootcamp should just be a stepping stone into the field.. Sort of like an extra.. Otherwise they are just making money off you and you feel so stupid when you cannot get a job in UX and are stuck in a low income job, being choked by the income share payments. In my case, it would have been much more practical for me to do software engineering or cyber security. But I was trying to change my career so I did UX..

Just be careful. Don't jump into it. Please make sure you have a good backup plan and it would be much better to pay upfront. The income share accepts almost everyone so it is easy to get sucked into it believing you will land a job making enough to pay it back.

I make less then the $40k threshold for income share, which they say you don't have to make payments unless you make over $40k. However, Stride Funding has been harrassing me with calls and emails for me to make payments even though I make about $37k (which again, is less then the threshold).

Please don't trust them.

If I could go back I think I would. It was definitely a learning experience of what not to do. Please learn from this review and really take everything into consideration before deciding to join the GA UX bootcamp.

It is overpriced for what they offer.

I had to get a job within a month or two after graduating and when I couldn't find one in UX, I had to get whatever I could. Unfortunately, the career coaching stops and the payments start when you get a job, it doesn't have to be UX related. They removed me from all slack channels, and cut me off from resources to help get a job in UX.

I'm not giving up on landing something in this field, I am trying to be optimistic and hoping I can find something in product design. However, It was not what I expected.

Please choose a much cheaper option. That is what I would do if I could start over.
You will probably get more out of it then you would at GA. 

Before General Assembly I've started exploring coding on my own research. After doing General Assembly 12 week (480 hr) SEI bootcamp I felt so confident that I've had  a great guidance to explore new technology and apply it in to real projects and job search strategies and networking in a very short time. 

I completed the part-time UX Design course and thoroughly enjoyed the content. We successively added on to our projects as we learned new aspects of UX. I was able to build on my project throughout the course and was thrilled with the final product - something I can show off as a portfolio piece and present to current and future employers! 

I attended GA for a whole month. Had perfect attendance always had labs turned and was failed from project one. I was told to reach out for help but everytime I did I was belittled, ignored, mislead by both TAs and IAs.

 I was told by admissions I would get help. I had one instructor yell at me NOT to write or change any code above a specific line. I showed my friend who graduated this school in 2019. He told me we had to make changes where the instructor told me not to. 

There was a instructor in my class that was subtlety flirting with girl in class who lived in same state. Me and her played a game in same genre. I was pulled aside first week when we were all learning about each other and they told me after asking me why I was attending the course. 

I didn't tell them my life's story and my interest in technology. I only told them I wanted a better job. I kept it short because I thought it was odd I was pulled aside to be spoken to
This is where one of IAs went on huge rant not letting me defend myself. 

He was going on about how he believed I wasn't fit for the course. Another instructor then backed him up when I asked you just want me to quit? He said " we're not trying to pick on you" well, was he? Who meets someone ask them why they are hear then base that on there legitimacy of them attending. I did pre-work, I saved money for two years, built my credit in three years, quit my job of 6 years, and took out a loan.  Just to date some girl who lives in another state? Thanks but no thanks. I was there for school not to be judge and treated differently.

When they fail someone they make them leave slack channels. It makes if look voluntary but it's not. I helped some of my classmates when I saw them asking for help and not receiving it. 

I've had classmates message me on LinkedIn asking me why I "quit GA" they thought I was doing well. My cohort started with 67 students and by project 2 they had less than half that failed. Those numbers are not good. Ask yourself if you really want to go to a school that cost 16k where instructor play mind games and try to sabotage you because they don't like you or are intimated

My instructor was Justin Chan, and he had 2 teaching assistants Stephan Chan and Jeryll Chan. I chose General Assembly because of blog reviews done by previous students who graduated from software engineering courses, industry expert reviews for data science courses in Hardwarezone forum and my husband's encounter with previous staff of GA at his work. Other tech academies did not have the same amount and quality reviews. So it was an easy decision to sign up with GA compared to other academies. 

I took the flex part-time course, which commits 2 weekday evenings 6.30pm to 9pm, and a full day on Saturdays 9am - 6pm. Late starts and early finishes are instructor-dependent. Evenings are conducted remotely (hope it stays that way!) and Saturdays alternate between on-campus and remote. (may change in the future to all Saturdays on-campus, but I personally prefer the alternate remote Saturday lessons).

For someone with zero coding background, it will take your own initiative to deeper explore concepts taught in class . Realistically, you won't be able to explore everything, but choose what piques your interest more and dive deeper. After all, this is the beginning of a lifelong journey as a coder, learning never stops! So you have time to explore other concepts deeper when needs arise.   

What I enjoyed the most.. was that I was fortunate to have a fun-loving and authentic instructor , teaching assistants were approachable, and best-of-all, my cohort was an eclectic mix of characters (the louder ones helped with creating laughter moments when we were getting overwhelmed). It was easy to bounce ideas and struggles off, without feeling a sense of judgement from others.  

Pros:
* extensive curriculum that covers a broad based of concepts e.g. data cleaning, data analysis, feature engineering, feature selection, train-test-split, model training, model selection, fine-tuning, model evaluation, deployment
* alumni community 
* career advice, network opportunities, career opportunities sourced by career coaches with ties to various companies - to get priority consideration
* mock interviews
* uses slack for communication and information dissemination
* Singaporeans (maybe PRs too) eligible for TIPP subsidy
* nice campus, comfy (can be a bit cold in the classrooms, bring a jacket), campus in central location, so easy to get to

Cons: 
* career coaching can feel template-like, one size-fits-all. need to implement customised career plans for each candidate for best chance of success
* most project topics and datasets are US-based, difficult to relate to when your campus is not US

Great content that will help me level up in my career. Content was easy to follow and instructions were great and ready to assist whenever I had questions. Highly recommend this course for anyone looking to dive deep into data.

First off, we had 100% white-passing staff although their marketing projects diversity and inclusion.  All of the instructors were younger than me and only had a few years of professional working experience. You are left to fight for your own when the program is done. So far it hasn't paid off and I'm frustrated. Going to a cheaper Bootcamp might be more ideal. I'm still not sure what I paid for. I will revise this if I get work but so far it's been nothing...It's a very costly over-promising program

The instructors were very helpful and knowledgeble. There multiple ways to receive additonal insruction and assistance, The material is explained thorughly.

I had a very good experience learning the design process through 6 projects. Some solo, some group, and a group project for a client. I landed a job a few weeks before the bootcamp ended and I had minimal tech experience before GA, just good art skills and speaking skills. I recommend the course for someone who has a lot of grit. It does take a lot of time and outside effort if you want to be job ready in 6 months. 

Happy with the course, the instructor and assistants were very available and flexible with us, which was key given that the course was part time so life often got in the way of submitting projects on time. The contents of the course focus on the core skills needed for data analytics in excel, tableau and SQL. It can feel hard to keep up with the course at times but if you make sure you have the time and do your studying everything if fine. The skills learnt are 100% useful the instructors recommendations about what skills are really useful in the world of work is important since all of them also work in data. If I had to criticize something it would be the fact that python and its applications in data analytics was not covered, some employers ask for this skill. But given the duration of this course I would not say this is a major criticism at all. Overall happy with the course and would recommend.

NOT WORTH THE COST. You learn a lot in a short amount of time and you do get to meet a lot of new people and possibly make new friends. However, you are there to get a job in the field you want to be in. Unless your portfolio is outstanding, it is very difficult to break through. Going through this program is just an exposure to the industry and no guarantee for a job right away. There will be attempts to expose you to industry people, but again no guarantee. When you complete the program you will have a portfolio and they talk to you about strategies to get hired. Bottom line is, companies want someone super outstanding or armed with a 4 year design degree. GA touts 100% job placement rate but that number is misleading because they only count the ones that did get a job. Actual numbers is more like 30 percent hire rate within 9 months. If you are looking to get into this field with no experience, you are better off paying for a online certification at a way lower cost. You will need to learn a lot by doing projects on your own and find an audience to give you feed back on your designs.

I learned quite a lot but not enough to be successful. The people who succeeded in this course had spent a year of their own time learning UX prior to the course. I would HIGHLY suggest taking time to learn outside of the course before signing up. This is not a program if for those who do not know anything about UX. 
Also, it took the lion's share of my coursemates over 7 months to find any UX work. (Aside from those who had prior experience) I was not able to be unemployed that long so I ended up accepting work outside of design. I love the information I learned but I could not find gainful employment after graduation.

Lastly, DO NOT SIGN UP WITH THE ISA!! It's highly predatory and even if you read all of the information 3xs over - it is not worth it. Take out a loan if you must or save up so you can pay for the program yourself. 

TLDR: study for a year prior to the course, be able to be unemployed for months, & do not use the ISA option.  

My time at General Assembly, while relatively brief, was an intense period packed with learning about the latest and most popular internet software development languages and technologies. The full-stack immersive regimen helped me develop multiple apps as proof of my proficiency and training, and the importance of thinking like an engineer as well as working like one was not lost on us. I'd have liked even more in-depth studies on computer science, but overall this was a worthwhile program to become certified as an engineer.