General Assembly

Overall, an incredible opportunity that you can and will see the rewards from if you are willing to put the time and effort in. Having absolutely no technical background 6 months prior to application/acceptance of the web dev bootcamp, I am now a full time web developer. It is one of the most difficult and time consuming thing I have ever done. It is 12 weeks of non stop work, realistically somewhere between 60-80/hrs of work per week. Very fast paced, and a TON of information, much of which you aren't even sure your actually learning until you've moved on from it and are applying the concepts in actual work.

Very relevant course work and curriculum, they definitely make an effort to stay ahead of industry trends to put you in the best position possible after graduation. 

You leave the course with the skills you need to be productive in an entry level position, which I guess is really all you can ask for from a school.

Job Assistance is kind of a joke, keeping in contact with your post graduation career coach is a hassel, they speak to you like a parent making sure their kid did their chores for the week. Many areas of improvement here, the class science fair should be a demo day for potential employers not the students in other cohorts, interview prep was minimal, and the job "leads" they give you are just jobs youd see searching on your own. 

A terrific course that covered off a lot of ground. The entire UX journey is part of the curriculum and in the most part was very interesting and enjoyable.

As this course was the part time version of UXD unfortunately there is not much emphasis given to assistance transitioning into a UX career, although in saying that I am now confident to conduct my own case studies and apply UX thinking to them.

The delivery of the course was by 3 people from the industry who ranged in the experience levels. George the main course facilitator was excellent, he was approachable, calm, insightlful and delivered the content in a really pleasent manner.

I came to GA with no programming background and I'm 47 y.o.  I started the 10 week course with one instructor.  I lasted two classes (of 20) before dropping.  The instructor was nice, but he had never taught before and it showed.  No preparation -- just winging the lectures.  He knew the concepts but not communicate them.  No go.

I re-enrolled in the next 10 week course and it was awesome.  Sarah Holden in the star in SF.  In every class she had 30 to 80 slides, a cheat sheet, little exercises, and lots of support.  Her lectures are superb -- night v day from the other class.  If you take the part time front end web design class in SF, take Sarah's class or don't enroll -- that's my advice.

Enrolling in the full-time Web Development Immersive (WDI) at General Assembly was one of the best decisions of my life. The people and instructors I met there were incredible; we have fantastic relationships to this day, and as a freelancer, my network has been utterly invaluable in building my own self-sustained business. I highly recommend the school and the course; do your homework, do all of the pre-work, and make sure this is what you want to do. Then, spend all of your time learning, experimenting, and making apps that truly interest you. Break code. Fix code. Learn code. Google everything. This course taught me how to ask the right questions, much like a new developer does on the job. The skills I learned here were absolutely transferable to a real-life job situation. The instructors not only introduced us to code, but the entire coding community. Our guest speakers were movers and shakers in the tech industry, and they never hesitated to teach us what was relevant in the world, even if that meant minor additions to the curriculum. We were tight-knit and eager to learn; our instructors saw our genuine interest and potential, and our class has remained incredibly close two years later. It wasn't my intention, but I made friends for life at General Assembly and learned life-changing career skills. 

The intensity of coursework seemed appropriate and I came out of the Immersive with what I feel is a strong foundation in web development. They may want to consider expanding the length of the course to better prepare people for the job market with further skills, as it seems getting in at the entry level requires more experience than the Immersive provides. Stronger internship placement would be a boon as well. The instructors were very good, dealt well with the varying skill levels in the class, and I would recommend the experience overall. 

I think GA delivered on what they promised. At times, it felt like glorified, guided self-education. A lot of it involves googling answers to problems. You know what? That's fine, really. That's often what you do in the real world. Sometimes, I felt like the instruction was a little too hands off for the price tag, though. I'd still do it again. No regrets.

The basic jist is it will prepare you for working in a web job. It's heavily technology-based, light on computer science and theory, which is fine. It doesn't help in some interviews where they'll ask a lot of computer science questions that you have no idea how to answer, but dammit, you've built web applications! And that should be good enough. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching programming and development. Their model is relatively good at making people into entry-level to junior level developers with some hands-on experience in current web technologies.

I had a good experience attending General Assembly - my teachers were knowledgeable and engaging, my classmates were awesome, and the material was good for the change I was making. 

I think my overall impression since having left is not great though. There is no interest or support for students after they leave and GA misses a huge mark by not pursuing alumni engagement. 

Lots of potential and good opportunities here, especially in the DC network, but I think this GA team is more focused on its own internal drama and not enough on growing a solid curriculum and network. 

I had a great experience at General Assembly's Web Development Immersive. I came into it with virtually no programming experience, other than the pre-work we were assigned after enrolling. It's a cliche, but it is definitely a situation where you get out of it what you put into it, and I worked as hard as I could tolerate throughout the 12 weeks (and I continue to do so), because I knew how much catching up I would have to do to be able to market myself and my skills.

The instructors were excellent, very knowledgeable and available, with varying experience levels between them. The course itself was very project-focused, so that we would have applications to demo for potential employers at the end of it, but there was also ample time given to covering concepts we might expect to be asked about in interviews, and what to expect upon entering the workforce. 

The only major complaint I have is the focus on Ruby on Rails for so much of the course, despite its apparent dwindling in popularity in my development market. I understand later WDIs incorporated more JavaScript/Node, which I wish I had had more exposure to throughout the course. 

It's important to understand how little you actually know even after intensely working for 12 weeks, but as long as an incoming students expectations of both the process and the results are appropriate, I'd recommend it. The real value in the course (for me, anyway) was in providing enough knowledge and experience to enable continued self-teaching with the vast supply of tutorials, articles, and other online resources.