General Assembly

I took a part-time General Assembly class, just 2 nights per week (for 12 weeks), and learned to confidently construct pixel perfect front-end websites. Having time between the courses left me with the freedom to thoroughly explore each lesson's contents while practicing my own implementations. 

The teachers (and teacher's assistants) were top notch! Soon after completing the course, I became 100% confident in CSS & HTML challenges, and I'm a bit less intimidated by the challenge of Javascript. In fact, I plan to take another General Assembly course dedicated to JS this coming summer.

All in all, the courses may seem a bit pricey, but they are well worth every penny.

Thanks GA!

Alex

I took the Digital Marketing Circuit online and the course fell way below expectations. As background, I came into the course with very little marketing experience or knowledge (I'm looking to pivot away from my existing, non-marketing profession), however, I am very familiar with the online learning landscape and have taken a variety of online courses through my undergraduate and graduate careers, as well as through MOOCs like Coursera and Lynda. Here's a list of my pros and cons:

Pros:

• Digital marketing, as a topic, is definitely a useful thing to have in one's tool kit
• Content was digestable
• Can be done online, from anywhere

Cons:

• Minimal downloadable course content. For $750 I expect more than a slim "review" sheet that reads more like a list of definitions with some pretty images, and the assignment worksheets.
• The course is trying to target too many audiences at once and, in doing so, is a very poor fit for most potential students. As a newbie, I found some of the assignments to assume I knew or had access to certain information that was outside the scope of the class (for example, market data). Yet, if I were a seasoned marketing professional, much of the content would have been useless for me. For example, spending an entire unit on KPIs and metrics, including explaining the virtues of using a bar graph versus a pie chart to capture certain data, seems really remedial for most people with any marketing background. In other words, it is at once too unrealistic and too basic given the wide swath of audience they say the course is appropriate for. 
• The PDF files for assignments are clunky. Moreover, they come across as schoolgirl worksheets. While useful for establishing ways to think about an issue and plan strategies, they DO NOT equate to a portfolio that can be presented to potential employers or hosted in an online portfolio as a substitue for work product.  Also, for ~$15/month you can have access to Lynda courses and download any worksheet like materials (and you can cancel your membership any time). Since this is the primary thing you can download from the course, they simply do not cut muster. 
• General Assembly makes a big deal about the 1:1 mentoring sessions. Here's the thing: it's the only interaction you'll get, and the content is entirely dependent on you. Therefore, each week you have one, thirty minute opportunity to ask questions related to marketing in general, get feedback on your work, and ask questions about the upcoming material. This strikes me as really odd, particularly for a $750 class. Feedback should be asynchronous. Follow up questions for feedback can be asked during mentoring sessions, but it is a waste of time to utilize scant instructional sessions in this way. I would also point out that the live versions of the GA courses have TAs present at the sessions in addition to office hours. 
• For a digital marketing course, it surprised me that new digital platforms weren't mentioned, such as Vine and Snapchat.  
• All of the assignments required a business and audience for you to work from (you use the same business throughout). You can ask the course produce to give you a model business if you don't have one you want to, or can, use. That's what I did. Funny thing is, the business wasn't well aligned to the assignments. Further, I was given no options or alternative selections. 
• There are only 4 educational units. The 5th is purely the "final project" which amounts to putting all your other assignments together in a brand new worksheet. Of course, you are encouraged to improve upon your work, or start over from scratch (!), but, essentially, the 5th unit is a bit misleading. Again, this "final project" cannot support portfolio use.  
• There's no in-course engagement. Participants are busy, so I don't blame them/us. But, neither the mentors nor the course produce facilitate conversation, comment on posts, etc.  
• Unit content and unit quizzes don't always align.  
• As an interesting side note, the number of enrollees who continued posting completed assignments decreased markedly from week to week. In fact, there was nearly a 50% decrease each week. This is significant for two reasons: first, the entire course started with 34 people, of which only 30 posted the first assignment. Second, you can't view course content for future units until you have posted the current unit assignment. For example, if I'm working through unit 2, I can't see the course content for 3, 4, or 5 until I post my unit 2 assignment. Until then, everything is locked. 
• There was something very grating about receiving email surveys requesting a brief review/evaluation of each unit after submitting an assignment when no similar feedback was provided for students (apart from students asking specific questions in mentoring sessions hosted via Zoom). I don't know, it seems like if I'm paying you, I should be guaranteed a few feedback touchpoints. If I'm paying you, and you're asking me for feedback on an assignment I've already completed, that strikes me as out of balance. This sounds awful, I know, but they would have been better off incentivizing me in some way if they were truly interested in my opinion (hey, I did learn something after all). 

Overall, I felt like this was a beta version of a course packaged as a high-gloss, cutting edge but tested program that would provide participants not only with immediately portable skills and knowledge but also true portfolio material. In many ways, it feels like a cheap money maker. I was told by a mentor that the course was put online recently. Having a bit of background in online education I know that you cannot simply translate existing material for live courses into online settings and expect the same functionality. Truly, though, my impression upon completing the course was that this was a low-cost way for General Assembly to expand their base of customers. Very little thought seems to been given to what online students would walk away with. The actual value proposition is low. You basically work independently, receive minimal feedback (which is entirely dependent upon the questions you ask), walk away with no reference materials apart from the notes you take, and have a pretty useless "portfolio" project that looks like worksheets from high school (sure, it may help you think through things but it is not going to impress anyone). In essence, you can acquire nearly as much, if not exactly as much, from Lynda. For $750, the return on investment is low. I really wanted to like this program. Sadly, I cannot recommend that anyone else enroll.    

For the sake of full disclosure, prior to attending General Assembly, I was an entry-level IT technician and I'd been coding as an occasional hobby since I was 11 or 12. I took an XHTML and CSS course in 2008 and a semester of Java in 2010. In late 2014, I got serious about having a career in web development and made a habit of studying and writing code for 3-5 hours a day. I started with free tutorials in HTML, CSS, and jQuery, then I focused on pure JavaScript. I also attended meetups and took on small coding tasks at my day job.

I applied to General Assembly in June 2015. The process included an interview and some prework: completing the Dash tutorial and making an 'About Me' page. The interview itself involved a logic problem, a typing test, and some basic questions like those one would encounter in a job interview. I did find employment shortly afterwards; I've been with my current employer since the Monday after graduation.

They assigned some prework in July; the estimated completion time was about 40 hours. I think that estimate was a bit generous. It took me a couple of days to complete it. YMMV, of course, but I believe that if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a little JS then it won't take long to complete the prework.

The first part of the course was HTML5, CSS3, Sass, and various front-end tools (Bower, Grunt, Gulp, etc). We were given three days to complete our first project. My first project failed miserably because I tried to do way too much, but I will say that I learned a lot from the experience. We were given more time for the other projects.

The second part of the course was PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails with .erb files serving as the front end, and quite a bit of Bootstrap. Most people in the course ended up with a preferred language. I came in loving JavaScript and I came out even more interested in it. Ruby, on the other hand, was almost counterintuitive to me. So I can't do that part of the course any justice.

The third part was more advanced JavaScript and 3/4 of the MEAN stack. We used Node.js, Express, and MongoDB for the back end. The front end was .ejs, not Angular. The corresponding project was a group project. I enjoyed this part of the course. I started applying for jobs and interviewing after the second project.

The fourth part incorporated Angular, along with more JS. For the fourth project, we were given a little more time and had the option to work individually or in a group. I prefer working solo, so I basically holed up at home for the last week of the course and worked on my project.

As an aside, it is possible to do well in this course and not have a Mac. They strongly recommend purchasing one, but I couldn't afford even the cheapest Mac that met their minimum specs. So I used my trusty Linux laptop with very few problems. The problems I did encounter were solved with some Googling. The good part of that was that I never had to worry about someone mistaking my charger for theirs or vice versa.

The good:

• A lot of meetup groups and companies hold events there, which is a good opportunity for networking.
• The course producers and instructors are helpful and genuinely want their students to succeed.
• I had a job offer less than 24 hours after the end of the course.
• Weekly outcomes (job search) workshops.
• Free Red Bull, food, and beer.
• Great classmates
• Accessible via public transit (but no MARTA student passes)
• Credit towards their workshops
• Alumni discount for future courses and workshops
• A tour of Atlanta Tech Village

The neutral:

• The guy in charge of Outcomes moved on to a different job a few weeks into my cohort, so the course producers had to take over for him and the weekly Outcomes one-on-ones weren't so weekly. His replacement was hired towards the end of the course, and she was extremely kind, helpful, and encouraging, which is why this is under the neutral category.
• General Assembly hasn't been in the Atlanta area for that long, so they don't necessarily have the hiring network that their more established campuses may have. But this is changing. I got my job through my cohort's TA, who in turn got his job through the recommendation of another GA graduate.
• I would have preferred to learn one stack in depth rather than covering two.

The bad:

• Carpal tunnel from the unergonomic tables. I went through a lot of Advil because I was going to finish the course one way or another.

It definitely would have been possible to learn the same material online and for less money than what I paid GA. This is not a knock on the instructors or the school itself; it's simply acknowledging the fact that there's a plethora of free documentation and instructional materials for virtually every major development tool, framework, and language out there. I didn't choose to attend a bootcamp solely for the technical instruction. I was interested in learning how to build a network, how to interview well, and the other non-technical aspects of breaking into the industry.

Overall, my experience with General Assembly was very good. I feel that the 9 months of studying I did before attending allowed me to get a lot more out of the course than I would have otherwise. In order to get the most out of it, I would strongly advise doing as much self-study as possible prior to dropping thousands of dollars on a bootcamp.

I am a student at GA's WDI program in Santa Monica.  I am currently on week 4 of 12.

Thus far, I can say GA Santa Monica has surpassed my expecations.  My background: I'm a digital marketer/content guy.   I wanted to learn a hard skill with a lot market upside.  So I started researching coing programs,  GA, has a lot of reviews on yelp and this website.  After some research I went with GA (Santa Monica).  

Going in I had fear I would not be able to learn code, that the $13,500 tuition (and time would be a complete waste.  After knowing zero code, after out first project sprint to launch a 2 player game using Javascipt/jQuery/HTML/CSS, I can say the program is working!  Without GA, there;s no way I could make progress I've made.  And I am really proud of my cohort, because we all have worked long nights to make it even this far.  Just know you will:  need to work your ass off, up 12 hour days; but this prgram will turn you into a developer.  Defintely do the pre-work, and get up to speed on Javscript (GA does MEAN stack).  

Outcomes Department:  I'm still a sudent, but I think very favorably on the department that preps us towards job placement.  They don't hand you jobs, but througought the program they guide you on your resume, linkedin, elevator speech; the best practices to get a job out of this program,

You can see my project 1 here: fleacircus.tv/moviepop

my Github: https://github.com/dskaiser82/proj1

**You want to read this!

I'm in a new bootcamp, an ACTUAL bootcamp because I actually feel the pressure and in a good way. The people are encouraging and MOST importantly the technology is new and in demand.

I found a lot of discouragement for new approaches, and the reasons were justified with "oh its just bad practice and not used in the industry" what lies. The current and certainly much more reputed bootcamp teaches the exact opposite.

There's nothing special in getting into GA, trust me there isn't, no offense to my classmates but some of them didn't know what "var" in JavaScript meant, and they managed to get in.

Towards the latter half, I constantly showed up an hour/maybe more late because i spent the equivalent time learning things that actually will make a difference to my job search (node,angular,react) - lets say i bought 18 courses on Udemy during my time at GA.

I'm angered by how the course,teaching and environment is fostered compared to my present bootcamp. Turns out i'm not the only one who came to this bootcamp after GA because they didn't feel confident enough!

You will get a job after GA, because the market is just that desperate. Most of the "projects" are you just following some tutorial and show casing it at the end hahaha! All the best getting support if you're trying to do something different!

If u complete codecademy/codeschool you've pretty much done about the first 6 weeks of the course, it gets tricky once back end begins, but then again if i reflect it was "made" hard, it really wasn't that difficult what we did. Yes, relational DB's are difficult for anyone who looks at it the first time but, not impossible.

I spent most of my time playing catchup , typing code blindly because the instructor was typing fast. So i decided to just listen after some time, and guess what - you're told what to do, not why.

You learn about "data structures" well touch on in, in the last week, they make it seem like some super hard difficult thing. It's not, it's linked lists,hash maps are tougher. Data structures are fun, not difficult and they're SO important in becoming a great developer.

You strive for greatness? don't do GA, its a waste of time, get serious and join some of the other top end bootcamps.

End of it, 80% of my cohort got jobs, that doesn't mean GA was good hahaha no way, it was WEAK in it's curriculum, the market is desperate as I said. While people at GA thrive to make todo lists, which we did haha, other bootcamps warm up with todo lists.

If u have experience with backend/LAMP stack and you're finding GA hard, i would suggest you re-evaluate your career choices (i'm never discouraging,not once in my life have i spoken negative about someone, but my distaste for this place grows each day i progress with my current bootcamp)

Want to hear a funny thing, we had our meet and greet, i met up with a recruiter, he called me and this is what he had to say "other than you and 1-2 others, I doubt anyone will get a job because they just don't have the skills". Let it be said that 80% got jobs, so the recruiters prediction didn't work, but you get what I mean, MARKET wants, you learn bare minimum.

TL;DR GA -> 0 to 40 , you may get a job based on your market, but you won't learn anything useful

The WDI class moves quickly, so I recommend going in with at least a cursory knowledge of the bash command line, git, and GitHub. They'll be covered in the first week of class, but you'll be less likely to panic if you've at least seen them before. Just do some Googling.

I also recommend Codecademy.com, which gave me a worthwhile introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby, all of which were used extensively throughout the class. Take your time and type through the lessons.

My instructors were a quartet of rock stars. Super responsive, never contrived, with cupcakes and sprinkles for all ;)

I suppose it helped that all our classmates were totally awesome. If you come to GA convinced that the world is ending, suspicious of the very technologies you're trying to learn, you're gonna have a bad time. But if you come to GA with an open mind and an open heart, you will find a community of real, live humans who routinely take a half-hour chunk out of their day, not even their lunch hour, to just sit around in groups and chat. I think that's righteous.

Having recently completed WDI, I'm considering branching out into related fields as I begin the job search. I enjoy web design, and it'll come in handy no matter where my path goes, but my first love is learning. Possibly the greatest emphasis was placed at GA on knowing how to learn—everyone is different—and in the Cloud, we are never truly alone ;)

The world is changing, and we have work to do.

Peace!

For those who have a year or two of software development experience but are having a difficult time making that career leap, GA might be a great resource for you. For others with little to no tech experience, GA is probably not the answer. The problem with the curriculum is they move to fast for someone who is trying to start out in this field. One doesn't have the time or resources to figure something out before they quickly move you onto the next thing.

The community is good and if you're in the bootcamp program, there is a good amount of attention you get form engineers and teachers who are willing to help you. Albeit that is not to say you will struggle and feel like things are being thrown at you too fast without being able to understand the micro details, which is essential to the coding process.

The classes that are offered outside of the bootcamp, like the part-time front end class will be a headache if you are trying to actually make a career change. You don't get the resources or help you need to make that leap. The TA's have little to no teaching experience and are just starting out in the field as developers. 

The problem with GA is they will take on anyone who has the willingness to learn, but do a poor job of delineating those who already have a good amount of experience, and those who have none whatsoever. They will simply take on anyone because they want their business to prosper.  This presents a huge problem, as I see plenty of grads from the bootcamp who are unemployed and struggling because they don't have the tools necessary to become software developers.

My best recommendation would be to avoid the part-time classes, and if you have a couple years experience and know your stuff but are having trouble making the career leap, GA would probably be a good bet for you. If you have no coding experience, try Treehouse or get mentorship, and a couple years down the line try out the bootcamp. 

 

This course includes 10 online modules to complete with a project (excel file) to submit at the end, along with 10 weekly live lectures (that are recorded and can be watched at a later date). The lectures may or may not be directly related to what you are learning in the online module that week. You are also supposed to book a 30-minute 1:1 session with a mentor each week to discuss any questions or roadblocks you are facing in completing your modules. The course costs $1,250.

The first two to three weeks covered nothing but Excel basics and creating various types of charts. For me this was much too easy, but I understand that this was probably to make sure everyone, even total beginners, were on the same page as more experienced folks. Then we moved onto learning SQL, which was helpful (technically you can get the same info from a CodeAcademy couse for free, but the way it was presented in GA was much more palatable for those with no coding experience). Finally, we focused on design and presentation, which was helpful but also probably covered in any univeristy-level public speaking course.

You don't really learn any statistical methods other than obtaining the basic mode, median, mean, and you don't learn how to tell what values would be considered significant. You do brush the surface of learning how to analyze data (using pivot tables in Excel), how to chart data (using Excel charts), how to gather data (using SQL), and how to present data (using PowerPoint and presentation skills). And also some color/design theory that helps you make your charts look good.

The worst thing about this course is that there isn't a strucured way of getting concrete feedback on your projects. First, you have to ask for feedback. I guess this is more similar to a real-world situation, but it shouldn't be the case when I'm paying for a course! Even when I asked for feedback by scheduling Zoom meetings with my mentor, I was not getting any valuable feedback on my projects or the recommedation that I ended up making based on the data. I don't think my mentor even looked at my projects, he would just say things like "there are no right or wrong answers." At a certain point I stopped scheduling these meetings because they were worthless. They should at least have your mentor grade your project or require that the mentor review your project and come up with some recommendatios to give you.

The second-to-worst thing about this course was how it was a bit disorganized. Maybe it's the technical writer in me, but I got to a point where I was so annoyed at the typos and/or minsinformation sent in mass emails, and the often conflicting information given in the instructions for submitting projects that GA really lost credibility for me, and I don't know if I'd recommend it. Maybe after having a few circuits they'll have worked out the kinks.

In terms of what they are doing well - the content was good for a beginner, lectures are interesting, and everyone I've interacted with has been very nice and willing to help me understand the material. You can tell that they're trying to make this a good course. But you have to be a very specific type of learner (and a total beginner in data analytics) for this to work for you, and you have to be willing to beg for feedback, because otherwise you aren't going to get any, and you're probably not going to get much out of the course.

General Assembly was my introduction to a coding boot camp and into web development.  I attended and completed their full stack web dev program.  The costs were high and I commuted to DC everyday because I was commited.  I stayed late after class to work on projects with groups or sometimes alone, got and pestered instructors for help, but at the end of the course, yes I know so much more but I felt it was not enough.

I would say only 25% of the students were capable of what the course had advertised and the rest of the 75% that were left, most of them were just as commited and dedicated but just didn't get certain subjects nor gain the proficiency to do it well.  If you were in the 25% great but if you were not, then you were SOL, there is no free repeat and the help you needed were hard to find during the course.

I would attend somewhere else as the amount of time you just commited is not something you will get back. 

Programming has always been a passion of mine and discovering General Assembly has allowed me to gain the skills to turn my passion into a career. Coming from a more technical background through my own self learning, GA gave me practical application skills. I'm still amazed that I created three fully fledged web applications each in only one week. Now, I make apps in my spare time with ease as I continue to develop my skills. Through GA's assistance I accepted an offer from Expedia only 2 1/2 months after graduation.

I recently completed the part time Digital Marketing course at General Assembly in Seattle. I am SO HAPPY I decided to do this - and that is saying something considering that it took place every Saturday for 10 weeks during Seattle's sunniest summer ever!

Everything I knew (before taking this class) I learned on the job. (I am currently working as a marketer for a tech company in Fremont.) I joined GA’s Digital Marketing course to become better at what I do, learn from industry experts, and gain a network of marketers who I can continue to grow with and learn from. The course absolutely lived up to those expectations - and even my co-workers have noticed the positive impact this class has had on what I bring to the team!

I loved learning from an instructor who is actively working in the industry. She was super knowledgable and clearly cares about her students. It's great to know that she is someone I can continue to bounce marketing ideas and challenges off of in the future. During our final presentations (which is great professional experience, by the way!), I also made friends with one of the judges (another industry expert!) who I think will continue to be a great mentor moving forward.

And, of course, I can't leave a review without mentioning how happily surprised I was to learn what a wonderful community exists at GA. The staff (Annie in particular) and my fellow students were all so warm and welcoming. 

I'll end this by saying that my company is currently hiring and, based on the content of this course and quality of instruction, I'd feel very comfortable hiring a GA grad!