Northwestern Boot Camps

I graduated from Northwestern's data science Bootcamp in February 2020. The Bootcamp is a very fast-paced and intense learning experience. I had Python, Postgres, and the basics of HTML knowledge before joining the Bootcamp. However, Bootcamp helped me put that in practice, along with data science fundamentals. I particularly loved the support I got from Travis (Instructor) and TA(s), as well as batchmates. I am talking about my capstone in almost every interview I go through.

 I highly recommend this course to shape your career as a data scientist, especially if you come from a non-technical background!

I am currently enrolled in the Coding Boot Camp at Northwestern. My experience so far has been very positive given my non-technical background. I was introduced to the world of web development in 2016 while working at a digital marketing firm that offered website and application development services. At the time I was a content writer and curious to learn about code. My interest prompted me to apply to the Northwestern Coding Boot Camp.

This course does an excellent job of introducing beginners to the fundamentals of web development. Students gain extensive knowledge about data structures and algorithms and successfully develop original applications. Application development encourages creative thinking, a vital skill required for success in the field. Industry work ethics such as teamwork, time-management, and effective communication are also taught via app development projects. The program offers an impressive cohort of teaching assistants and tutors. These experienced tech professionals assist students with their projects and weekly assignments while providing an overview of trends and best practices in the workplace. The course material is challenging at times. However, there are great support systems in place to ensure student success. 

For those looking to transition to a career in tech, I recommend enrolling in Career Services. The Career Services team helps students create career materials such as resumes, cover letters, and portfolios. They provide opportunities to attend panels with engineers at companies like Google. Additionally, students participate in year-round recruiting events with firms like Deloitte, Bank of America, and Liberty Mutual. 

Every component of the Northwestern Coding Boot Camp is designed to help students achieve their academic and professional goals. From learning code to interview training, this program allows students to have a competitive edge in the field. 

I had a great experience learning at Northwestern's Data Science and Visualization Boot Camp. The instructor was knowledgeable and presented the materials in a way that was fun and challenging. Both TA's were wonderful and engaged with the students, very helpful with their guidance. Outside of the 10 hrs of classroom learning per week, plan on at least 25-30 hrs per week on homework, group projects, tutoring, and office hours. Its a very fast paced program, and there is a lot to learn. The materials were up to date, and the staff showed us real world applications. I can't comment on the career services portion, as I'm just starting out on that, but so far my contact has been helpful and responsive. 

I have worked for tech companies but more on the business, operations, and analytical side. I started my own income stream recently and wanted to learn some more technical knowledge to further enhance my capabilities so I can wear more hats. I was a bit hesitant at first but did a lot of research on Bootcamps before deciding to move forward. I am happy I made my decision. I worked alongside brilliant minds with interesting backgrounds. In 6 months, I went from not know how to code at all, to knowing 4 languages with levels of confidence, heavily advanced my mathematical knowledge, and now actively building apps, APIs, and machine learning models with datasets to further increase my skills. 

Before joining, where was I?:
- I am college educated (non engineering or computer science)
- Worked for innovative and fast paced companies
- No knowledge of coding
- Well above average understanding of statistics

How much work is there?
- Most of my work was outside the class. I spent countless hours outside of class daily to work on the assignments, read more resources, documentation, etc. It takes a ton of work, so you have to be ready
- Ability to learn on your own; yes there are a lot of resources from classmates, teaching staff, and tutor help. however, you will have so many questions that you have to learn how to answer them on your own. 
- Never lose confidence; They pack in a few years of advanced information with a 6 month time period. It can get overwhelming and stressful. Take it one step at a time. Trust me, it will all come together but you must work at it.

What am I able to do after?
- I am working on various projects. I am currently building an API for a product that I currently sell. I will be able to share that API with my business partners to sell my product digitally online outside of my own website, and collect necessary data to further enhance the experience. 
- Machine Learning models; if you are like me, I was looking forward to machine learning more than anything, but that is not something you can just jump into as a beginner. START STUDYING STATISTICS. This will help more than anything, the code is there, but the math is the most important. took me several months of a lot of research and practice, but now I am able to make models and neural networks in Python.
- Building visualizations was a pleasant surprise, while doing it learning and building in JavaScript. very necessary tools for so many businesses
- I didn't do this to find a job, but I have learned so much and fairly talented at it, so I am even debating on pursuing this side of things...however, I have classmates that found a job during, and others that are actively interviewing for positions related to what they learned. They have an amazing post grad career services. 

I'm in the homestretch of the Northwestern University (Evanston campus) part-time, 24 week bootcamp. I had originally signed up to help round out my graphic design skills, as many positions wanted some type of web development experience (from updating a wordpress site all the way up to SQL database maintenance). What I got from the course was so much more than that.

While the course FLIES by at a blazing speed, you learn so much every class. I've equated it to learning to speak Chinese in that you're learning one language, but also several dialects that go along with it. It's not an easy feat. The instructors and support are excellent and very knowledgable and enthusiastic. Many will go above and beyond when asked for assistance, be that in person or via Slack.

I have a couple of downsides, but they're not dealbreakers by any means.

• I do wish more time was devoted to the front end portion vs. the server/database side, but that's a personal preference, as it's where my interest is. We stop at Bootstrap, but it's widely considered that Materialize is a superior option. While we're equipped with the means to parse documentation, I would've benefitted from learning hands-on.
• I wish the activities were updated from time to time to reflect changes. For example, we're told early on to replace var with let and const, but all the activities don't. Sometimes our instructor would say "they have ____, but I would do _____ instead." While there's any number of ways to reach the same goal, it would be nice to have the sense that the instructional team and Trilogy are symbiotic. Sometimes the homework assignment instructions were a little convoluted or an important part was buried elsewhere one wouldn't know to look. A streamlining to the Gitlab materials would go a long way.
• And finally, while it's definitely a real-world application, as it's like 60% of any given workday, getting "Google it" as a response to a question is not the most ideal answer, considering the cost of the course.

Those elements aside, this is a very worthwhile course. Know going in there will be a lot of work and a large time dedication and what you get out of the class is what you put into it. Know that you may run into full-brain syndrome during any given class or coding session. It's normal and will pass. Rely on your classmates, Google, and other research sources and put in as much time as you can and need. 

I took the part time, 24-week fullstack web development boot camp. The course was a very informative overview for someone like me coming into it with no prior coding experience. It was definitely a challenge, but they emphasized the time and effort it would require when I applied so I was expecting that. I got what I had hoped to get out of the program, which was a software development job immediately following my completion of the bootcamp. My complaint would be that I wish even more time was spent on React. Forget the two days of python and just spend more time on React. The more learning and practice you can do on your own outside of the program, the better off you will be.

I graduated in computer science in 2004 but didn’t really work in the field. Now I wanted to pursue my career again and needed a fresh start. Northwestern boot camp turned out to be a great opportunity for me. The curriculum was very challenging but very up-to-date. You will get exposure to as many new technologies as possible.  I attended it part-time but still, it went so fast. They have all the help available, if you are willing to put your time and efforts, it is well worth it. The TA’s are helpful as well and they also provide one-on-one tutoring. They also provide video walk-through for most of the assignments which were very helpful for me. Each assignment was very well explained in great details. The instructors were very dedicated and experienced.

The career service is a great help as well and they offer different opportunities to showcase your projects. The team is very friendly and extremely supportive. You can sense they want you to succeed. Because of this boot camp, I am in the market again. Though I still feel I need to learn a lot, I feel more confident as the projects were very close to real-world experience. Most of all now I know WHAT I need to learn.

If you have a gap in your work and want to update yourself, it is a great option.  It is challenging and fast-paced but totally worth it. Overall I had a wonderful experience.

When I decided to enhance my skills to enter the tech industry, I was looking everywhere. After researching several different boot camps, I decided on Northwestern Coding Bootcamp for all the right reasons, a Northwestern University diploma backed with Trilogy's experience in this particular field. But, was it meant for me?

Like anyone from a non-technical background, I had my own apprehensions. Is coding right for me? Will I understand anything? What if I am just too dumb to do this? These all were valid questions and now I can answer these questions for you.

I enjoyed every single class because they are well structured and follows proper taxonomy. We start from scratch and build into complete exercises. This has helped me to understand the fundamentals of various topics clearly that I had no competency in before. My instructor is Ron Bailey, and I cannot tell you how good of a teacher he is. He understands different students' needs and guides us in our individual styles, he is engaging and is really funny! He shares his experiences from the industry and that is an eye-opener for many of us.

Each class has two TA's who are not only available during the class but also during office hours and sometimes even online via Slack. They are also a great emotional support. Yes! emotions are important because the Bootcamp will test you time to time. We also have excellent guest speakers and lecturers all the time.

We also get 1-1 tutoring every week and it has helped me ace many of the concepts that I couldn't cover in class sometimes. Although optional, I recommend everyone to take full advantage of this particular service. 

Career services are optional as well but are helpful. It is easy to let it go but if you will follow and work with your career success manager you will not be overwhelmed with all the "small" things that matter; it is easy to overlook things on Github, portfolio, LinkedIn, interview, etc, etc. But, career services can assist one to be on top of their job search while coding all the time!

I just graduated from the part-time Data Science bootcamp at Northwestern in October, 2018.  Simply put, the experience greatly exceeded my expectations.  The program administration was very organized and approachable.  There were multiple requests for open feedback indicating an intent for continuous improvement.  The instructional staff and TA’s were very knowledgable and experienced.  The curriculum and content was well organized and ideal for rapid learning.  I have dabbled in javascript for several years as a hobby.  I think the bootcamp is an excellent format to rapidily learn a wide range of new technologies in a short period of time.  It is not something you can easily pick up by reading textbooks on your own.  Instead, you are thrown into new topics over a span of 3-4 classes, with rapid assignments during class.  The homework for each topic is significant, requiring several hours to complete.  While there were times when I was extremely challenged by the content, I always had excellent support from the TA’s and instructional staff.  I was exposed to many, many technologies that I was simply unaware of, like maps using Leaflet.js, Social Media Mining, SQL and API Interactions.  The small interactive class size also created a sense of community which made the journey more fun.  The time flew by.  Like all pursuits, the greater effort, the greater the reward.

I have completed the Full Stack Web Development Coding Bootcamp at Northwestern University.  The support I received from Trilogy staff was simply put - awesome.  The program was challenging and I certainly had my ups and downs.  Throughout the duration, I definitely felt encouraged and cared for by the Trilogy staff.  

• My instructor took the time out on the side to check in with me and provide encouragement throughout the program
• I absolutely leveraged the help of the TAs during office hours.  In turn, they had my back and provided needed help and encouragement along the way
• My Tutor was awesome and I got so much out of our weekly calls - I had the forum to talk through what I was learning relative to completion of the homework
• My Student Success Manager was always there when I needed him to answer questions and provide guidance through the program.

In the end, it was a fantastic experience and I'm glad that I had this team around me.

I recently graduated from the Northwestern January 2018 cohort. I was extremely impressed with both Northwestern and Trilogy faculties. The teams did a great job recruiting the instructional staff as well as course applicants. My cohort and instructional staff were amazing. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to go through such a challenging program with.  I always felt there was more than enough support during the stressful program.  The career staff is also very helpful and willing to help you after the course is over with one on ones. I am still in the process of polishing projects and applying to jobs but with the support of everyone at Northwestern, Trilogy and in my cohort, this process should be as smooth and seamless as possible.  

Also, I started out with very little programming experience (self taught Java for about 7 months) and a background in event management. I feel I learned so much in the past couple months that now I will be able to find a job with these skills and even teach myself new languages from the way these languages were taught to us. 

I would recommend this course to anyone wanting to make a career change into the technology industry or anyone wanting to refine and learn even more about the MERN stack. 

Huge thanks to everyone involved in the Northwestern University Downtown Cohort and Trilogy staff!! 

 

I recently graduated from the full-time Full-Stack Web Development bootcamp at Northwestern this past April, and would highly recommend this program to anyone considering a coding boot camp. On first signing up, I was nervous about the lack of information and reviews I was able to find online. However, this was just due to the newness of the program, and I'm glad I didn't let it deter me.

The curriculum and especially the instructional staff were 5-star. CJ was a terrific instructor and very approachable, and so were all the TA's (Leah, Esdras, and Sabah). The teaching team truly exceeded my expectations, and I think my cohort was especially lucky in this regard. There was a good balance between project time, lectures, and class activities.  I always felt like I was learning a lot and was never left feeling bored or stagnant. I do agree with some of the other reviewers about the importance of commiting 25-35 hours outside of class to work on code, but also want to note that this is actually easier to accomplish than it sounds. I always wanted to spend more time out of class on the code we were learning - it didn't feel like work I had to make myself do most of the time.

I also want to mention that the main language taught in this program is definitely Javascript, which wasn't clear to me when signing up (I knew it was going to be taught, but Python was also advertised as being taught. We spent the majority of the course learning javascript and a couple days optionally learning Python). A few other things that the course stressed were learning how to use Git and Github while collaborating on projects, and Agile methods for developing a new product. 

Another thing that was great to see was how diverse the cohort was - I was expecting to be one of the only women in the class, and this wasn't at all the case. Students came from all different backgrounds (from CS degrees to no coding experience at all, and everything in between), but everyone was awesome and it was a very inclusive environment overall.

Attending this boot camp was a blast and I learned more than I could have imagined in a span of 3 months. I was definitely sad when it was over, but I left feeling confident that I now have a marketable skillset with which to enter the job market as a new developer.