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Prime Digital Academy offers an intensive, 20-week full-stack coding bootcamp and an 18-week UX design bootcamp in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Working directly with Twin Cities tech employers, Prime Digital Academy has created programs that equip emerging engineers and designers with the skills they need to make immediate contributions. Prime students learn modern technologies, practical methodologies, and critical behavioral skills through carefully crafted curriculum and real-world projects for pro-bono clients in the community. Prime’s immersive programs empower learners from diverse backgrounds to begin their new careers in months, not years.Prime’s full-stack engineering course prepares students with the skills and hands-on experience to develop complex software to solve businesses problems. Prime’s user experience design curriculum prepares students with professional practice in research, design and prototype software that is usable and meaningful. Prime graduates have been hired by nearly 200 companies in Minnesota, and the tight-knit learning community continues long after graduation, with students participating in mentorship, community education and ongoing alumni career support.
I do believe that for many Prime Digital Academy is a place where someone could learn life changing skills that allow them to find a great job in an industry that they love. I wanted to write about my experience because if I would have had the opportunity to read a more critical review as I was doing my research before attending Prime I would have maybe put more thought into if this was the right choice for me.
Before attending Prime I was able to meet with a member of the sta...
I do believe that for many Prime Digital Academy is a place where someone could learn life changing skills that allow them to find a great job in an industry that they love. I wanted to write about my experience because if I would have had the opportunity to read a more critical review as I was doing my research before attending Prime I would have maybe put more thought into if this was the right choice for me.
Before attending Prime I was able to meet with a member of the staff. We had a great conversation and this person made me feel like Prime would be a great place for me to gain some training to work in an industry I am very interested in.
After meeting with this person I became convinced that Prime was the right choice for me and I filled out my application. After being accepted I was told that the application process was quite rigorous and that many people apply with few being accepted. I was hopeful to learn a little bit about the metrics behind the review process but I told that it was 'complex.' I genuinely wonder how many people have applied and been turned down. It would have been nice to get an actual number.
The first section of Prime's curriculum was called 'pre-work.' We recieved e-mails that told us to use tutorial websites to learn skills that we would then use in class once we began attending the campus. We were also able to meet with the instructors over Skype once a week to just talk through our at-home assignments. The instructors even made YouTube videos for us explaining some of the concepts. I can't say enough about how gracious and compassionate all the instructors were during my time at Prime. Doing something new can be extremely scary and Prime's instructors were nurturing and supportive of everything we did. During this pre-work I started to feel like I understood a majority of the material and began feeling confident about my ability to get through the program. I'm not sure if this is intentional to build a sense of confidence or if I was just able to understand the material a bit easier than perhaps others did.
After pre-work you begin attending Prime on a daily basis. Because of how confident I was from the pre-work I felt like this was going to be a great chance to build on what I had learned and hopefully gain the skills I felt like I was going to need as I began to look for a new job in the industry. For me this was not the case. During my first week it was proven to me almost immediately that the understanding I had gained during my pre-work time was nowhere near the level needed in order to be successful once you begin attending classes. I spoke with one of Prime's staff members and shared with them my feeings of incompetency. This was when I was told about 'imposter syndrome' and that in reality I was doing just as good or in some cases better than other members of my class and that I needed to learn how to accept my ignorance. I think back to this moment many times and wonder if this was the time I should have trusted my instincts and left Prime. I wondered if this 'imposter syndrome' thing was real or if it was just a convenient way to keep people enrolled. I had all my years of life lessons and instincts telling me that I should leave but because someone I had never met before convinced me to continue I chose to take their advice.
As I continued through the program my disconnect from the group, or cohort, grew stronger. Every assignment I was given I was always the last to finish if I even finished at all. That's something else about Prime that I would definitely highlight. Prime does not have any sort of grading at all. Not even a pass/fail. There are 3 headings. You either exceed expectations which I never recieved, you meet expectations which I did around 1/3rd of the time or you 'need improvement' which was the majority of my scores. I feel like if there was a type of concequence attached to my assignment submissions that someone on the staff would have realized my lack of comprehension and helped me. We also had group projects and in those I was mostly left out of any participation with my group due to my lack of understanding of the material.
I noticed that there were some cliques that were forming between students and staff and because I didn't really fit in very well I felt as though people mostly avoided interacting with me. I don't think this is anyone's fault or was done intentionally. I just feel like when you spend as much time with people as we did you begin to favor interacting with some people over others and I found that I mostly enjoyed spending time by myself. It was at this time I was also beginning to notice how students and staff were assisting one another with classwork. I asked someone in the industry about this afterward and they shared with me that many websites/web applications are built by using the code written by someone else. I don't understand why this wasn't discussed in more detail during my time at Prime. I think about the time I spent trying to understand very complicated concepts and if I should have just copied the code instead of trying to learn how to write it myself.
Once the second phase of classwork was over we were given a solo project to complete. In order to maintain anonymity I won't go into specifics. I will just say that most of the projects were extremely well done and in comparison mine was something that I think a person without any knowledge of coding could have accomplished. I reached out to a staff member that I had grown to trust and asked them about this and the staff member shared with me that they felt like my solo project was very well done and I should be proud of my work. This really caused me to grow suspicious of any praise provided and if I should have been looking for outside evaluations of my work from the beginning. Many times during my Prime experience I would be told by staff that I was going to find a job in the industry. I now feel like this was meant more to make me feel like things were going well at the time instead of preparing me for the reality of the job market that was most likely not going to employ me.
Around this time Prime begins to prepare you for the job search. There are weekly meetings with a career councelor but for the most part these meetings go over some fairly basic concepts/ideas that were obvious to everyone in attendance. Around your solo project is when the career counceling becomes more frequent and Prime's staff starts to help you write a resume and you go through some mock interviewing. I would often inform Prime's staff that I felt grossly underprepared for any sort of job interview and I was told that I needed to just trust the process and that companies would want to hire me even with my ignorance. I shared with Prime after attending that this was definitely the low point of my experience. I really hope that Prime decides to put a significant amount of time into the preparation of the students for the job market instead of attending events like Toastmasters or watching various documentaries about the need for equality in software engineering. I'm not saying that Toastmasters or equality is not important. I just wish that perhaps they were offered more as optional attendance for those who may be interested instead of mandatory. For example I am actually quite glad that I was able to gain some understanding around the need for equality in software and I wish I could have maybe learned more about it instead of watching one video and then completely ignoring the subject.
After the solo project you are given a non-profit to build an application for. The non-profit explains what their need is and you as a team put together a business case for the application you are going to develop for them. I was very happy to work with a large group and felt like we could hopefully cover for each other's weak points and together we were going to build a great application that was going to benefit a very needy charity. This defnitely did not happen. What did end up happening for my group was that the inadequacies people were feeling became amplified once the individual failures began to occur. Often these issues were easily solved once the group was consulted. Also people in my group took it upon themselves to try to build functionality that was beyond their comprehension. This caused massive issues that were very difficult to come back from even using version control software. Group participation levels varied from completely checked out to trying to take over the entire project. When I would reach out to the instructors and share my concerns I was told that I needed to take everyone's feelings into consideration and not just worry about myself or what I wanted this group project to look like. There seemed to be an acceptance of the idea that many of these group projects were either not fully completed or finished but needed to be drastically improved by another cohort. You have to present your group project to all students and staff of Prime as well as the non-profit businesses that you developed your application for. My group put together the best presentation they could and thankfully at least our application didn't crash. In fairness I feel like due to the very large need the non-profit had given us our group gave back the best possible application we could with the time and experience we had. I just feel like perhaps we could have done more or at least gotten some help from our instructors to turn our project from good to great.
Around this time is when you have mock interviews with both technical recruiters as well as companies hiring for headcount need. The recruiters' interviews went very well but after following up with the recruiters I was told that they didn't have any entry level needs at this time. After 2-3 e-mails they would stop e-mailing back leaving me feeling like I was not someone they could place with a company. The company interviews were a bit more mixed. I had a great interview with some of the companies that attended and had some interviews that were incredibly awkward. After Prime I did end up having follow up interviews with some of the companies I interviewed with but I was not selected. When I tried to get feedback on what I needed to work on the companies chose not to e-mail me back. While attending Prime I did not have my 4 year degree and I was told by companies that without it this would be something that would prevent any company from hiring me. This would have been something that would have been good to know from the beginning.
Since graduating from Prime I am still attempting to find a job in the software development industry. The statistics that Prime uses state that 97% of people find a job and that job pays 150% higher than what they were previously making. I am very surprised that Prime still chooses to keep this statistic on their website due to how fase the advertising is. I would say the true number of graduates who find work is around 50% and the wage increase greatly varies based on what the graduates previous background was. Prime does have 'alum scrums' which are meant to be ways for alumni to connect and talk about their job searching experience. These are led by members of the staff and honestly I feel like if these were led by actual students in combination with staff members that there would be a lot more value from the experience. I'm not discounting the information provided by the staff members but after attending a few of these scrums I began to notice the stories that other people from other cohorts were sharing and there seemed to be 2 distinct brackets. There was either the group of people who were able to find employment and how they were having very productive interviews with companies and there were people who were eventually unable to find employment and how often they were experiencing extremely negative responses from various companies. If there was a way to tailor these scrums to the specific needs of the students instead of a weekly topic that is picked by the staff perhaps more people would find value in attending. There is also an e-mail sent out periodically with companies that are hiring but these can also be fairly difficult to interpret. I would respond to these e-mails and try to get interviews with the companies listed but many times the job that was being offered and what was described in the e-mail were drastically different. I ended up interviewing for a job that I thought was going to be a great opportunity and I found out later was an unpaid internship that already had multiple software development people on the team with years of experience. I attended this company's intial intership group and after meeting with the leaders of the internship I decided that this was not the opportunity for me and discontinued attending.
In all I would say that if you are someone who already has a 4 year degree and you already have experience with a technology company or a personal portfolio of your work then Prime is definitely a great place to expand your knowledge and get to a higher level at a different company. If you have a 4 year degree and zero software experience then I think that with a lot of hard work and determination that you could find a job in the field. It is possible to find a job in the software field if you don't have a degree but you do have experience building websites/application, although definitely the most challenging path. If you do not have a 4 year degree and zero experience in software development I would highly recommend giving some consideration before attending Prime. I'm not saying it's impossible and I do know of people who worked very hard after attending Prime and were eventually able to find jobs with companies. I'm just saying that the barrier for entry is so great and the probability of failure is so high that even with Prime's instruction the success rate is far lower than what is advertised.
How much does Prime Digital Academy cost?
Prime Digital Academy costs around $17,000. On the lower end, some Prime Digital Academy courses like Full Stack Engineering - Full Time cost $15,500.
What courses does Prime Digital Academy teach?
Prime Digital Academy offers courses like Full Stack Engineering - Full Time, Full Stack Engineering - Part-Time, User Experience Design.
Where does Prime Digital Academy have campuses?
Prime Digital Academy has in-person campuses in Minneapolis. Prime Digital Academy also has a remote classroom so students can learn online.
Is Prime Digital Academy worth it?
Prime Digital Academy hasn't shared alumni outcomes yet, but one way to determine if a bootcamp is worth it is by reading alumni reviews. 121 Prime Digital Academy alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Prime Digital Academy on Course Report - you should start there!
Is Prime Digital Academy legit?
We let alumni answer that question. 121 Prime Digital Academy alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Prime Digital Academy and rate their overall experience a 4.88 out of 5.
Does Prime Digital Academy offer scholarships or accept the GI Bill?
Right now, it doesn't look like Prime Digital Academy offers scholarships or accepts the GI Bill. We're always adding to the list of schools that do offer Exclusive Course Report Scholarships and a list of the bootcamps that accept the GI Bill.
Can I read Prime Digital Academy reviews?
You can read 121 reviews of Prime Digital Academy on Course Report! Prime Digital Academy alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Prime Digital Academy and rate their overall experience a 4.88 out of 5.
Is Prime Digital Academy accredited?
Prime Digital Academy is licensed as a private career school with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education pursuant to Minnesota Statutes.
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