General Assembly

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.

I can't speak for campuses across the country and world, but the New York campus I experienced was a tremendously helpful/open community of people interested in learning web development and growing in the tech industry. I never experienced (though I have heard stories) of people who felt ostracized or put down by those with more knowledge/skills. Overall, I think the community as a student is a good one for fostering learning.

In terms of the coursework, we had very experienced instructors who had taught multiple immersives and TA's who had taken them themselves. We primarily focused on Javascript over Ruby (I believe we were one of the first classes to do so at GA), which I felt at the time was a good decision considering the movement in the industry towards using JS across the stack.

In terms of my background, I was coming from a tech role (I was formerly a product manager at a tech company) so I had had some experience in coding in my free time. I think due to that I felt frustrated at times by the pace of the class which spent a good deal of the first month on beginner aspects of web development. While I understand why it's structured that way (not everyone comes from tech), I wish a few of those weeks had been moved into pre-work. I think moving that work into pre-work would have helped prepare students for the rigors of web development and allowed us to get into more advanced topics quicker. One of the things I heard while interviewing is that students don't come out with enough exposure to the computer sciency aspects of development that some companies don't feel confident hiring grads because of that. There's just too much unknown that the student can pick up those concepts.

On that topic, I was somewhat disappointed with the career placement services. I felt it was a lot of resume and cover letter re-writing, as opposed to introduction to hiring managers and advice on how to continue your growth following the class. I actually felt I got better advice from a handful of recruiters I met who openly told me that they didn't have any jobs for me, but helped out of the goodness of their hearts. I felt, at times, that I was left to fend for myself when it came to meeting hiring managers and given GA's considerable size that it should have been able to leverage its community more productively than it did.

That being said, I did get hired within 3 months of graduating as a developer so all in all I'm a success story!