Springboard

My experience with Springboard was overall really great. It is competitively priced and one of the longer boot camps out there (9 months). The self-paced model is definitely not for everyone, but it allowed me the flexibility I needed to continue working full-time as a bartender while learning UX and building my portfolio. The curriculum is compiled of articles created by Springboard and curated from around the internet, as well as exercises that build into capstones that can be utilized as portfolio projects. There are weekly calls with an industry professional mentor that help keep you on track and guide your learning. Additionally, there are periodic coaching calls to make sure your resume, portfolio, and social media are coming along with your course progress. This turned out to be a huge advantage as I had all the pieces to begin job hunting once I graduated. The mandatory mock interviews at the end of the course helped build my confidence and prepare me for the interview process, including salary negotiation, portfolio presentation, and whiteboard challenges- all of which I utilized in finalizing my offer. My experience with their customer service and student advising was always pleasant and prompt. One thing that really helped me get my offer was the IDP (Industry Design Project), where students are paired with a start-up and get the chance to work on real-life UX problems. From what I heard, this experience can vary depending on the company and team you are assigned to- for me it was monumental in gaining the necessary experience and having client-facing talking points during interviews. As previously mentioned, the self-paced model is not for everyone, and if you were to nitpick the curriculum, yes you could in theory find these articles on the web and teach yourself, but this model is good for those wanting a curated learning experience with real-life support. With the growing number of boot camps out there, I think it can be difficult to take the leap and jump in, and I recognize that there was a bit of luck that went into my success, but if you are curious about the field of UX and able to work hard to develop your portfolio, I think Springboard is worth looking into.

Springboard’s mentor-led UX career track is so in-depth, engaging and challenging. I loved the content in the curriculum and the projects I had the opportunity to work on. I was set up for career success and landed a great job even before finishing the coursework!

The Springboard curriculum is well organized and put together. It covers key concepts like statistics, economics, Microsoft Excel, Tableau, Power BI, SQL and Python. The community and mentor help are definitely valuable resources. The one thing I wish could have been a bit better were the projects. I felt like a lot of the resources were too much handholding, I feel like I could have progressed faster and learned a little more with a bit more rigorous projects.

The curriculum and the mentorship are amazing. I got an offer less than 1 week after I graduated. I learned both FrontEnd and BackEnd skills that I will use every day on my new job and I feel confident that I can do a good job even though it will be my first job in the field.

Pros:
- Curated program that gives a great structure to your learning
- Invaluable 1:1 mentoring sessions with industry experts
- Best in class career coaches who help you get job ready
- Lots of opportunities to network with present students and alumni
- Highly responsive staff members

Cons:
- Not all the topics are in depth; one needs to use other resources to get a better understanding of the subject

The Data Analytics Career Track overall was a great experience that helps you get your feet wet in data analytics, presentation, and cleansing including many other skills that are great things that you can add to a resume. I studied Economics and IT in college and when going through the earlier units in this course, I felt that they were repetitive for me. For the SQL and Python units, I learned a lot of things that were good to know but not necessarily will be helpful to a data analyst job and for Python specifically, I felt that more practice would have been great to have since some people experience trouble with learning coding. 

The springboard data science career track has a great curriculum that I feel really prepared me for my job hunt. The career coaches are great and really help nail down your resume and linkedIn profile to ensure you have the best chances at getting a job after completion.

Had an awesome experience, the curriculum was engaging and thought provoking. My mentor was the best, he showed excellent knowledge and experience and helped me brainstorm project ideas for my capstone. The career coaches are always available to help with resume and updating LinkedIn profiles to match the job market.

I had an amazing experience at this bootcamp. Curriculum was easy to follow and instructors are very helpful. Anyone looking for this type of bootcamp, well here it is!

My experience with Springboard was extremely educational and balanced.  Heading out into the working world, I feel prepared with all of the knowledge and tools that I need to stand out amidst the crowd and am confident I can find the job that I want.  

Overall I think Springboard is a wonderful program and well worth the time spent.  However, it should be known that I found the estimated time to complete the course to be far from reality.  I was told it would take 9 months at 3hrs/day of school work.  However it took me close to a year at around 5-8 hours/day to complete all of the assignments.  I think the timeline to complete the curriculum is dependent on several factors, including your mentor's dedication to your learning, the complexity of capstone projects you choose and your experience with design when entering into the program.  

In retrospect I would suggest anyone considering this course to expect to spend at least twice as much time getting through it.  Additionally, it helps to have a base knowledge or working experience with design when starting the curriculum, though it's not necessary, it'll save you a lot of time.  Lastly, the mentor you're paired with is crucial to your success.  I was lucky that my mentor was willing to go above and beyond our weekly 30min call times.  If it wasn't for my mentor taking more of a teaching role I would not have been as successful or feel as prepared as I do now.  Though unlimited mentor calls are available, it is difficult to receive consistent and actionable feedback from multiple people who haven't been following your learning process from the beginning.  Luckily it seems that Springboard hires mentors that are dedicated to their student's success.

I sign up for the UX design track in August 2020. This is a 6 monthly course and needs to give 25 hours every week for study and lots of readings. The beginning of this course was overwhelming for me as there were so many theories, articles, and mini assignments. But once you start the capstone projects, it all seems to be very helpful in the project. 
1:1 mentor call was the major thing I chose this course in Springboard over other boot camps available for UX design. Also, unlimited mentor call availability was very helpful during capstone projects and presentation preparation. 
Follow all the steps and trust the process. Prior to joining Springboard, I didn't know how to approach recruiters and talk to them. Now after finishing this course, I have more than 500 connections in LinkedIn and connected with many UX designers who work in the industries that motivated me to be the best UX designer one day.

Thank you Springboard!

I spent about 6 months working through the data analytics career track, where I developed technical skills in advanced Excel, Tableau, Power BI, SQL, and Python techniques. The course also develops skills in problem solving, presenting to different audiences, and networking. 

Pros: 
- 1 on 1 mentor support
- support team for when you get stuck on assignments
- structured curriculum that shows progress
- work at your own pace
- networking/job search support team upon completion
- job guarantee 

Cons:
- significant time commitment 
- I found the Python unit to be a difficulty spike in the curriculum (I've received feedback that the Python unit is getting some restructuring, note: this is my personal opinion) 

Overall, the content of the course was superb! Colt breaks down the concepts into small engaging videos to keep you entertained. This also makes it easier to reference if you need to later. There are  provide a lot of exercises to help cement the concepts. 

The TAs online chat was very handy when you get stuck on a concept, which I utilized almost too often. Also the mentor is handy and can also serve as a recommendation if you and the mentor click and they like your work. 

The biggest issue with the course I have is that I spent almost twice the amount of hours they estimate it should take to complete the course. Although the capstone projects I selected were pretty intricate and required more time, I feel many other students also spent over the estimated ~800 hours to complete the course. I feel this can be misleading to students who are juggling a full time job and the course. 

Berkley Olmstead 

Great curriculum and mentor support. I learn skills i could use immediately in my current role as a supply chain analyst. I would recommend this course to anyone who is trying to break into the data world. I wish the course had more excel related exercises. Apart from that, great course. 

The training is intensive with case studies and 2 capstone projects. I learned analytics and visualization tools in Excel, Tableau (or Power BI), SQL, Python, also I had chance to review finance, economics and statistics. I worked with my mentor weekly, and career coach bi-weekly. Also, I can have chance to use unlimited mentor access to contact mentors anytime during the week. My student advisor was very supportive, and the slack channel was helpful to help me catch up with the training. In sum, it was a great experience joining in the Data Analytics Career Track program with Springboard.

Springboard is one of the more affordable data science bootcamps ($7500 upfront cost, compared to $10k or even $18k in some other bootcamps). They're able to do this by not having in-person lecturers. The curriculum is completely online, self-paced. Much of the curriculum is actually videos and articles from other online resources (see "Cons" below). But they make up for this by their mentorship program (see "Pros" below). On the surface, this looks like a really good deal--it's cheaper than other bootcamps, it's self-paced, and you get a tuition refund guarantee if you don't find a job within 6 months of graduating. However, in practice, when you have a 6-month deadline (instead of in-person classes with an instructor to keep you accountable on a daily basis), it can be really easy to fall behind. Fortunately Springboard has a number of student advisors and other support staff who can help with setting a schedule for you to follow and giving you extensions (both of which I've used). But I think the people who can best thrive in this kind of program are those who can set clear goals for themselves on a weekly basis, in spite of all the other things going on in their lives. I had a lot of trouble balancing my bootcamp assignments with my daytime job and family obligations (your job and familial needs will feel very immediate while the bootcamp feels less urgent because of the 6-month deadline), and I quickly fell behind and needed extensions. This might all sound very obvious, but it's something that I and others I know often overlook. If you're not the kind of person to set hard deadlines for yourself, don't do a self-paced bootcamp. But if you are, and you don't mind not having an in-person instructor, then Springboard is for you.

Pros: The mentorship program is the highlight of this bootcamp. Every student is matched with a mentor who they meet with once per week, 30 minutes at a time. You can also schedule additional unlimited 1:1 mentor calls with any mentor that's available, but I've found my weekly mentor to be the biggest help. I was able to ask my mentor for guidance on capstone projects, discuss questions I had about the mathematics behind certain algorithms, and ask for career advice (they are people in the industry, so they have insight on the field and job searches and whatnot). Springboard also has career coaches to help us with job searches, but it's still helpful to hear directly from the mouth of a person in the industry.

Cons: Much of the curriculum is material that you can find on your own online (like articles on medium.com). Springboard organizes it all into a nice package for you, with many of their own project assignments sprinkled throughout, but this can make some of the material feel disjointed since it's a conglomeration of many different sources put together. Springboard goes through many updates with their curriculum though, so they've been making improvements to their assignments and curricula. To sum it up: you get what you pay for; Springboard is one of the more affordable bootcamps, but they're able to keep the price low by not building their whole curriculum from scratch and instead using other resources already available on the web.

Springboard offers so many resources and the availability to mentors and career coaches surprised me. You are basically offered unlimited resources

As I'm working through the curriculum, there are many broken links, links to the wrong material, resources for the capstone are very disorganized. They also chose paperspace as the platform for students to work on their mini projects on, but unfortunately paperspace is not production ready, and the students have no direct way to report bugs. We have to report the issue on slack or email to springboard, then they'd supposedly contact their paperspace contact to resolve the issue, but the process takes multiple days to just reach the springboard contact.

This course helped me build a strong foundation for my design career. I would recommed it if you are self disciplined and manage your time well.

Working with mentors was the best part of the course. It helped me apply skills I was learning to my job and move up. I highly recommend the program.