Springboard

If you accept starting with Springboard be ready for 
-- No job assistance(You will have to find job yourself)
-- 6 months job guarantee is a liar.
-- There are lots of unemployment SP alumni.
-- 30 min mentor time once a week is not sufficient and satisfying.
 

I jumped in looking to start a new career and real world experience in terms of the tasks. I met a great mentor who was there to help me all the way and a very supportive team that is there to make sure you succeed the course. Overall great experience

From the mentors to the progression of course content, I felt Springboard was the best camp I could've selected to learn the essentials of UX and product design. What made the course so great was its see-then-do approach to learning, where you would learn course material in the units before directly applying them to your capstone project. It is also a case of getting out what you put in where Springboard and the mentors give each student all of the tools necessary to be great and it's up to the student's imagination to make something cool. I would definitely recommend this bootcamp to anyone who is interested in the UX domain. 

" I would highly recommend springboard best bootcamp for those going for a career change"  I had a wonderful experience at springboard as: 

• It was helpful for me to understand the basics of analytics and upgrading my skills.
• Well matched mentor was one of the best practice that springboard does.
• 1:1 mentor calls helped me throughout my course.
• Real life case studies helped me to understand concepts more clearly and use them in practice.
• Job guarantee and career coach calls helping me to get a decent job in my field. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 Springboard Review 

Positives:  ·        Mentorship  By far the biggest strength of Springboard, so big that others have copied it. My mentor was just the person I had craved for a long time in my educational career: smart, good people skills, and accountable. I learned as much from him as I did in my Master’s program. The 30 minutes a week were invaluable and gave me insights I would not have found on my own.  ·        Curriculum  For the most part, the curriculum is very good. It’s a combination of online resources Springboard doesn’t create themselves, but if I had to learn data science all over again, I would rather learn from these resources than random Google searches. Save the Google searches for the projects, where most of the learning comes from anyway. The curriculum is also more up-to-date than an in-person program. The projects stretched me to my limits, and I came out a much better data scientist because of it.  ·        Course Support  There has been an increase in course support over my time at Springboard. There is an option to have an additional mentorship meeting with a different mentor just to work on non-Capstone projects. Springboard also hosts an annual conference at their headquarters that is worth attending if you are a student.  Negatives:  ·        Job Support  Springboard is by no means a silver bullet to a dream data science job, but it’s close. You have to put in the work to landing a job to get that job afterwards. I found there were times where the career advisors were booked months in advance, but they seemed to have hired new staff. I have no doubt if you complete the course in six months that you would be ready for a DS role, but it’s an intense six months.  ·        Completion Time  I took much longer than expected and was given extensions to finish. This was more a human error than a Springboard error, and if I felt mentally the way I do now compared to when I started Springboard, I could have easily finished in the allotted time. Just be careful with grandiose capstone projects.  ·        Feedback  Outside of my mentor, I found feedback tough to get when handing in coursework.   Overall: Great experience, would do again. The positives are fixable and far outweigh the negatives and I found it paid for itself in salary raises, even with the extensions. This is the direction education is going, and I look forward to watching what Springboard does next. 

I had great experience with mentor and creating two capstone projects to explore Data science skills.

I have almost completed the Data Analysis Career Track, and I am grateful for the experience it has given me. 5 months in, I have landed a job in the field. I did come into the program with some experience in excel, python, and sql, but the course was a good refresher and taught me a lot in terms of real world applications and business sense.

Most valuable parts: 
- 1-1 weekly mentor calls, monthly career coaching calls
- in depth case studies
- building your own unique portfolio projects
Not-so-great parts: 
-Starting the course in November 2019 (when it was still fresh) felt a little like we were also beta testing it
- if learning communities are important to you, the community being online can be a challenge to adapt to
- some of the course material felt repetitive and some left me feeling like I needed more practice

The designers and educators are responsive to feedback, and the student support (student advisors, community advisors, career services, etc) are very helpful and respond quickly.

Pivoting careers can be scary, and with so many bootcamp programs out in the market today for UX/UI Design programs, I was considering several UX Design bootcamps. After speaking with past alumni from those several bootcamps, I couldn't discovered that Springboard was the right fit for me. It accommodated those who already had a full time job, while supporting you with mentorship, program community, career coaches, and a hands on student advisor. I personally had a wonderful experience with the mentor I was paired up with. He was hands on, supportive, and challenged me throughout the curriculum, based on my goals and expectations I discussed with him in our initial call. I appreciated how thorough Springboard was when it came to preparing students for what they might expect during a portfolio walkthrough or a mock interview. After speaking with others in other bootcamp programs, I was surprised to hear that some don't offer that level of thoroughness. 
Springboard is always open to feedback, and aiming to improve their curriculum based on student feedback. I can't recommend Springboard enough based on the experience I had, and from a cost perspective, they are one of the most competitive out there for how much they offer within a 6 month program. 

Well designed course made sure it covers all areas of digital marketing. Assignments prepares you for real life situations and projects. Also coaching calls and mentor were extremely helpful. My only con are mentor calls can be too short.

I finished a Springboard UX career track course, it was a great experience. I would like to highlight the mentoring experience and Industry Design Project experience. First the mentors you have in the course are helpful,  supportive, I feel they offer extra helps on guiding you into the career track that they don't have to. They care about your thoughts and help you move your thoughts into your capstone project.
The Industry Design Project is the very best study that SB offers, that it brings you to a real company to help them solve some problems. It can give you a jump start to the career that helps you test what you have learned and horn your skills.

Springboard is well though-out, but there can be some improvements in the overall curriculum (which are being made). 
Pros:
- Good support system. Curriculum has a good set of professionals that are able to communicate terms very well. 
- Mock interview are a good idea and do give you insight of what to expect. They also booster your confidence with the overall process.
- Capstone projects can be challenging if you decide to put the extra work and do help improve you portfolio to showcase it to potential employees.

Cons:
- Some courses need a revamp, for example the statistics part of it. While I was working through it, this specific course got updated and I really like the new version. I see that they are putting work on it, but I also think that some other aspects need to get updated sooner than later.
- No course regarding big data or cloud computing. The 2nd project we have to use Deep Learning components where we might have to handle 100K+ rows of data. For a normal computer, training a model can take a couple of hours (in my case 37 hours). Leaning how to use AWS or Azure is a requirement now a days.
- Better guidelines for at least the first Capstone project. It is very intimidating to start typing in a blank notebook. Getting a guideline to have an overall idea on how to start will help the student.

You'll complete this course with solid understanding of how to apply UX by the book and your mentor will hopefully fill in the context of how things work in real companies. In my experience, the 1:1 mentorship was what made the experience worth it. 

I really enjoyed the UX Career track. My mentor was great. She not only helped me with the curriculum, but she also gave me insight and resources outside of what Springboard offered. Calvin really seems to care as a career coach. He helped me with my resume, cover letters, and LinkedIn. They’re also available as resources once you’re finished the course.
The Industry Design Project is a highlight. It pairs you with a real world startup for 4-5 weeks. I think this sets Springboard apart from competitors.

I had a great experience learning UX design with Springboard. I like that the course takes you through all of the stages of the design cycle and you produce a lot of deliverables that you can add to your portfolio. My mentor was very helpful and gave excellent industry advice and encouragement during our weekly calls. I highly recommend Springboard. 

Pros: Free access to Sketch or Adobe XD for a year. Financing through Climb Credit helped me only pay around $25/month while I was in the curriculum (if you're a disabled military veteran, it is possible to have this program qualify for Voc Rehab, and get tuition reimbursement). Access to mentors, career coaches, and student advisors is really helpful in building your professional network, which you'll learn is a helpful way to make your name known as you transition careers. The Springboard community in San Francisco really tries to coordinate in-person meetups which helps foster the community of UX Designers, Data Scientists, and Machine Learning Engineers up in the Bay Area so you can meet your Slack channel peers face-to-face. There's at least one major event or conference that Springboard students are invited to join for free too!

Cons: You need to be highly motivated to finish the curriculum in the recommended six months (they offer an extension if you need more time). Some people may not prefer the curation of materials because it may not match how other people have learned on the job, and there isn't a dedicated instructor you can default to for questions. You'll just have your assigned mentor and access to a random mentor call to ask for help. The industry partner project is a random match, so you don't have any say in who you'll be working with for those four weeks/forty hours. The job guarantee requires hard work from you and stepping out of your comfort zones to really network and find your right fit.

Overall my experience with springboard's UX/UI Career track was amazing. There was a lot of curriculum to take in and learn from to help you prepare to what's coming up ahead. The projects you will be doing through out this course are the ones that will give you a lot of practice with your UX/UI skills. These skills that you will earn and develop will help you gain more confidence about your transition as a UX/UI designer. 

My experience with Springboard is exceptional and I found the staff super helpful. The curriculum has a wide variety of collections (Videos from Harvard, exercise from Datacamp, etc) towards each topic. Mini projects alongside each chapter gave me hands-on experience on certain topics which I found super helpful. Career coaches and on-demand mentors are knowledgable and patient. If there is one thing I have to be picky about is the quality of the assigned mentor, some of them can be more passionate about our work.

Easy to follow curriculum, great guidance from my mentor, support from amazing online community, career coaches and student advisor made my journey with Springboard very enjoyable. It was a wonderful learning experience and I am so glad that I enrolled in it. I would highly recommend this course to anyone looking to transition into the world of data science.

I'm a UX Consultant that wanted to bolster my credentials with a formal education. I took their UX Design course and gained valuable insights in Visual Design. If you asked me 1 year ago that I'd be able to design a mobile application through user-based research I would have said it was impossible.

I'm more competend in design apps like Balsamic Wireframes, Invision, Sketch, Whimsical, etc. Thanks to my mentor I was able to grasp difficult concepts easily. The course was fairly priced and the projects challenged me to always do my best. Would highly recommend Springboard!

I wanted to try something new and posibly switch careers. Although I haven't yet found a job, Springboard allows this new perspective.

This was also an awesome way to expand my portfolio and skills for future job prospects. If you want a job in the User Experience world, you need a portfolio and Springboard provides a curriculum that makes this process easy and hassle free. On top, you’llget skills and knowledge essential for UX.