General Assembly

Over the last few years, I have taken TWO courses at General Assembly. I enrolled in both the Front End Web Development Course and the Business Fundamentals and Tactics course. Both were TOP NOTCH learning experiences.

When it came to the FEWD program, I had tried many times to learn to code on my own and had picked up on HTML and CSS quickly. The first part of the program was focused on HTML and CSS, which came more easily to me given my prior experience. When we began to learn Javascript during the second half of the program, this is where I found the MOST value from the GA instructional team. Javascript was challenging and it was the time and attention from my TA and instructors that enabled me to truely understand this language.

The second course I took was Business Fundamentals and Tactics. This class was very stimulating. Both of my instrcturos were ex-McKinsy consultants, VERY bright. I thought it was a great mix of practical skills and soft skills -- we covered things like the business canvas model or deep excel work on how to build a financial model paired with stimulating conversastion around business case studies. During one of the sessions, we had a guest speaker come in from Inbev and he was talking about supply chain and operations of a beverage company, which was very fascinating. 

I took the Digital Marketing Circuit simply to learn about the field, even though I am not a marketing professional. I found the course to be super interesting, and for an online course, they did a GREAT job of keeping me focused. Here's what I liked about it: 

-There's a good split between slide presentations and videos 

-Knowledge checks keep you honest

-The projects are fun

-The workload is manageable. Not too much, and broken out in sections. 

Like I said, I think everyone should take this course. Marketing is such a key component of any business these days so I'm really happy I learned about it. If you're an entrepreneur who doesn't know much about building an audience, this is particularly a great class for you. 

I highly recommend this course! Great way to learn. Thanks GA for the great experience!

This course is amazing for beginners! I walked in completely new to coding and can say I've confidently walked away being able to code a website from scratch. Don't let the "online" nature of this course fool you. It is work! It takes about 4-6 hours to complete each weeks worth of instruction and projects. That amount could be even more depending on how in depth you want to get. Another tip: be sure to use mentor hours. I rarely did this but you could easily double how advanced you become by utilzing the mentor team. This team is already in development so they know their stuff. Overall, great but challenging experience perfect for beginners. 

You're really paying for the name and recognition of General Assembly. If you want to get into UX, it is a good idea to take this course, as it gives a good overall base understanding of UX. But it doesn't go any further than that. You cover only the basics of each topic and the instructors don't bother going into greater details about any individual topic. 

It's really important when you're choosing GA to see which instructors you're going to get, becuase that determines your overall expereince as a student. 

Personally I don't think the course is worth $15k. But GA gives you the name recognition and network, so ultimately that's kind of what you're paying for too.

Summary:

Don't listen to the demand or trend of next hot jobs. Listen to your heart. Do you really think you can do this for the rest of your life? General Assembly does not guarantee jobs. If I had to go back, I would have taken a cheaper course via different online Bootcamp.

General Assembly itself is nothing but looking to take student's money. Their false belief of job guarantee is a scam to get students interested. General Assembly does not care for individual students who are looking for a career change. 

Many of my cohort students had to go out and find their ways to get jobs. People who had design background were in a better position. That does not mean that they got jobs right out of the Bootcamp. Overall, students end up freelancing or work at small to mid start-ups.

When it comes to the course material, I was impressed. The reason why I was impressed is that instructors were knowledge in teaching UX (The quality of UX knowledge in LA is good).

What is the process like?

Phone call with Admission Producer --> GA Dash exercise --> Interview with Admission Producer --> Bootcamp pre-work --> 3 Months Bootcamp --> Project Showcase + Networking --> Job Searching

My experience

I attended GA WDI HK (May - Aug 2016) and here's what I thought:

• Inspiring and helpful instructors and classmates. GA is really good at creating energetic and friendly atmosphere
• Programming stack are pretty much up to date. Learnt html, css, javascript, ruby, MEAN stack (mongoDB, express.js, Angular.js, Node.js), ruby on rails, postgreSQL, ionic, git & github, AWS, heroku, package managers (npm, bower), agile and scrum method (project management). Please check with your local GA as it will be slightly different !
• Fast-paced and compact course. WDI actually took more than 40h per week
• The students are mostly non-developer trying to make career change.
• To actually get the most out of the program, you should have tried a bit of programming before. Lack of knowledge will give you hard time to pick up the pace. If you are already a developer, you won't get much out of it.
• Guest speaker session is not always interesting/helpful. so i skip some :D
• It is overpriced considering it's more "5-80" course and no job guarantee
• GA WDI is aligned more with startups culture.
• Depending on your local market and your projects, you will get job offer within 2 weeks or more. Finding offer/company culture that you really like is another story though.
• It does help that GA has its own career website and the instructors+outcome producer will help you on job preparation such as mock interview; personal CV, portfolio website feedback and networking event. However, you still need to do extra work by yourself
• It's actually the beginning of your journey after you finished the bootcamp. What you've learnt is just enough to kickstart your career/company.

Reccomendation on what you should do before committing yourself to the program

• Attend the one-day course preview/WDI students showcase and get to know your potential instructor(s). By the way, don't refer to the list instructors in official website WDI page cause it's not up to date. 
• learn basic html,css,javascript from https://www.codecademy.com/ https://dash.generalassemb.ly/ http://www.freecodecamp.com . If you are not used to type fast, using computer, searching with google, little idea about webdev; please do so.
• Consider GA WDI bootcamp if you are ready to dedicate the time and money + looking for structured course and get you ready in short period. If you have really high discipline/okay with spending part time learning 6 months - 1 year, free online course such as freecodecamp is actually good too

feel free to contact me on twitter 

As an introduction I must say I did not enjoy my General Assembly experience, so this post may be biased.

However I’ll do my best to stay as objective as possible, as in the end I still believe I got from the course 75% of what I was looking for.

I was moderately satisfied as a learner, but very dissatisfied as a customer. To me the value for money was not there, as when you invest 10kGBP in a course you expect excellence.

But the worst part was definitely the way GA handled those with complaints. Either you shut up or you  are told off, that was the sad truth we experienced.

The setting

• Data Science Immersive (DSI) in London, 1st iteration starting 10th October 2016. General Assembly ran other DSI before, but in the US or AsiaPac, never in Europe.
• Cost: 10,000 GBP
• 12 weeks course + 1 week dedicated to preparation to job search (so called “ouctomes”)
• 23 students at the beginning, 17 after 10 weeks (2 left after week 4, another 2 after week 8, another 2 after week 10)
• 2 teachers and 1 assistant teacher for the whole course

About myself

• Software engineer by education
• 15 years experience in the industry (but little as an actual programmer)
• Did online Coursera “data science specialization” prior to joining the course to ensure I liked the area
• Resigned from my job to attend the training

What was good

• Student required pre-work: lots of pre-read and programming exercises to do before joining the course in an attempt to bring everyone at the same level
• Curriculum: wide variety of topics covered, choice of one main programming language (Python)
• Learn with practice: daily homework (during the first 8 weeks), weekly project for the first 7 weeks followed up by capstone project, occasionally pair or small groups projects
• Outcome programme: help to refresh CV, improve online presence, sharpen negotiation skills, eventually will work hard to get you a job. GA has a target of getting 95% of their students a job in the area they studied, and they will do their best to meet it (that’s assuming students comply to all requirements, i.e. most homework/projects completed, 2 or less days absent from the course, strictly follow the job search guidelines, otherwise students may be excluded from the outcome programme)
• Nice office on the edge of the London City

What needs improvement

• They miss “science” in data science. GA is very good at teaching Web Design and User Experience Design, it is their core business. Unfortunately they handle data science similarly to these two areas, which means they think you become a data scientist mostly by coding in python and learning associated data science libraries. The whole scientific/rigorous side of data science is overlooked, statistics are barely covered
• Teachers had too little teaching experience. Data scientists are in high demand, that’s a well-known fact. When I registered for the course, I was given two instructor names, it turned out none of them actually taught us. One of the instructors was actually recruited less than two weeks before the course. With such complex topics as machine learning and little time to prepare, the result was obviously not great. To be fair one instructor worked hard to improve during the course. Still sometimes I felt with my Coursera background, I knew more than they did, and really it didn’t feel like value for money
• Admittedly, they bring people from all horizons and backgrounds in the class in order to increase revenues. The selection process is light and conducted by non-technical people, so pretty much anyone with very little coding experience can get in. Can you really become a data scientist in 3 months starting from nearly scratch, keeping in mind it will require you to learn coding, statistics, machine learning and much more? I doubt it.
• Customer support. The class was overall frustrated with the level of teaching/rigorousness of the course. This was highlighted through surveys organized by GA, but GA didn’t seem to take the feedback into account. After the group complained more, we had individual interviews with GA course producer Still not improvement. Then we wrote an open letter to GA administration signed by 95% of the class, which led to another round of individual interviews (during which the staff was not always nice with the students). Only then GA started giving signs of taking our feedbacks into account. By then 8 weeks had passed (i.e. two third of the bootcamp), and it took a lot of nerves to reach the result. To me it sounded like GA refused to admit that the course had flaws, and kept claiming this was “their way” of doing things, closing the opportunity to improve the situation. Even more than the course quality, the customer service really disappointed me and spoilt the overall experience

As a summary, it’s rather for you if:

• You are not self-disciplined to learn through an online course that will cost you 1/20 of the price
• You desperately want a data job, but not necessarily a data scientist job (that is you are ok with an internship, or a data analyst role etc as this is likely was you will get), and are ready to invest 10000GBP for that
• You have some coding experience and are ready to work very hard for 12 weeks straight: people who got most from the course had already coding experience, and little or no exposure to machine learning

It’s rather not for you if:

• You have very limited coding knowledge, or have family commitments preventing you from working a lot, including on weekends : there is a high risk you will give up as the difficulty will be too high
• You have some prior knowledge of machine learning or other data science related topics that you want to strengthen: you run the risk of being disappointed by the shallow level of what is being taught
• You expect both excellent courses and customer service for the price of 10 000 GBP

My advice to GA:

• Don’t brand the course as “Data Science Immersive”: it’s actually an introduction to data science tools, but not an actual data science course
• Require deeper prior coding knowledge from participants
• Review in depth the feedback collection and handling processes
• Be thankful to students providing constructive feedbacks and not defensive

If you are expecting a six figure salary after a three-month crash course in Data Science, stop dreaming. The course is crammed with difficult concepts by individuals who are not educators and rather former professionals who are best at telling you to "just google it." Although there are many takeaways from my experience at GA's DSI program, my most coveted takeaway is that there are no shortcuts to becoming a fantastic data scientist. The for-profit institution that GA runs will not enable you to become an overnight statistician, programmer, and data scientist. Sure, GA lays a foundation of what is expected of creating a career in DS, but don't expect their provided hiring statistics to be as honorable as they claim since many of the hires come in-house by GA themselves and not in real-world conditions. After networking with past graduates who GA did not bring in to speak to my cohort, I got a massive sense of dread and regret as they are still struggling to find work after GA. The past GA DSI graduates that were brought in to speak were already heavily involved in engineering, computer science, or data analytics. Not individuals who, as GA claims, were not required to possess any prior education or experience in the data science field and to look to pivot careers in a 12-week full-time career accelerator program. 

Come in with realistic expectations and applicable education or experience to get what you would anticipate paying $15,000 for a three-month course. My only regret is that I'm still in the program and didn't drop like some of the wiser individuals did at the beginning of the course after seeing the disorganization, deception, and undisciplined learning environment that the DSI GA staff puts together. Now, I'm left completing a program that I have diminishing hope and returns for, along with a hefty loan under my belt after predatory advertising and claims by the GA program and staff. I would not recommend anyone attend GA for any program. It would be much more cost efficient to attend community college classes to fill the gaps in your knowledge paired with online resources than pay $15k to a for-profit business that is reminiscent to the ITT Techs of yesteryear. 

Entering the data science boot camp at GA was one of the best professional and academic choices I have made. The material I was exposed is directly applicable to the demands of the industry, as I have found many leading tech companies using them. The time and money I invested in this boot camp have been worthwhile.

The boot camp is indeed heavy on the math and stats - as it should be- after all, data scientist deal with quantitative matters. It combines practical applications of machine learning algorithms. In fact, when the instructors introduce a new method, they take their time explaining the mechanics (math and stats) behind, before they start coding them. The type of datasets they used to describe the new methods range from your traditional "Titanic/iris data set" to more complex ones "NBA players performance" and others, which helps to make the learning process move from simple to complex.  The instructors were fantastic at creating a healthy - collaborative - atmosphere in the classroom where students felt free to ask as many questions as they need. They made sure we had a hands-on experience implementing the new models during the labs and made themselves available to us during this time. Beyond this, the instructors also offered their time after school hours to go over the materials with students that had a hard time grasping the new concepts. Also, the evening and in-class TA(s) were super helpful, as they were prompt to answer my questions and provided me with extra materials to complement my learning.

As far as my classmates, many of them had stronger math and programming background, which was not my case. I invested my free time (which was not much during the boot camp) to become better at programming. I decided to be more proactive and took the initiative to get to class 15 min early and master one or two new Python methods. Also, every other night, I asked the instructors and TAs to provide me with math and Python materials that I used while implementing the machine learning algorithms or cleaning the datasets.

Before the boot camp, I considered other online courses like Coursera, edX, DataQuest and others, but I didn’t find in them the depth of explanation I received at GA. Honestly, I got the returns I expected from the boot camp.