Springboard

Springboard's data analytics bootcamp came along at a perfect time for me. I had just finished my MBA but then the pandemic hit and I found that I was missing the data skillsets that are de rigeur in the Bay Area. I highly recommend this bootcamp for upskilling and broadening and deepening your data and business understanding. Also know that a bootcamp isn't a one-and-done. A bootcamp serves to build your foundation of skills on which you continue to build your practice. Outside of a traditional college program or the rare company that is heavily invested in training, this is the best curated experience to help job changers. You have to do a lot of work but you have tremendous support, too, which is everything.

I highly recommend Springboard because the curriculum is extremely comprehensive and you learn a ton (and then there will always be a ton more to learn after that, and then after that).
For my program, there are 18 units that cover everything from strategic thinking to technical interviewing for a data analyst.

This is a valuable curriculum because you learn so much about how to use the tools, use cases, best practices, design principles, and are exposed to numerous resources to build your data practice.

Tools and curriculum

1. You learn strategic thinking, framing business problems, problem statements, issue drivers etc. 
2. Excel - you learn most useful features in Excel
3. SQL - you learn basic SQL to get going on using Tableau and learning about relational databases
4. Tableau (Which is underpinned by SQL) - you learn how to build nice visualizations and much of your portfolio will be in Tableau (or Power BI but I only used Tableau). 
5. Python - There's a ton to know with Python but it is really exciting to be able to get help to debug and talk through your code as your understanding deepens or have questions. The Mentor on Demand feature is one of the greatest aspects of this program and the staff are very kind and patient.

Tying it back to your career - You learn how to reposition yourself in the job market with all the help you need!

1. Career coaching - figuring out the kind of roles and companies you are interested and then how to position yourself to move in that direction. 
2. You get guided help to transform your resume
3. Linkedin Profile
4. Cover Letter
5. Networking
6. Building and managing your portfolio 

Bootcamps really help get the skills you need on the map but there is no magic work around for the time it takes to practice and really learn how and why tools work. Springboard also helps you to understand the kind of work you will continue to do to build your practice once you've finished. Finishing the bootcamp is actually only the beginning but you get so much help and support on the way to beat back the feeling of imposter syndrome. I cannot recommend this enough. I was able to pitch being in this bootcamp as a reason to hire me for the role I am currently in (I was able to successfully reposition myself). 

Prior joining Springboard, I had some technical background and experience with Data Science but struggled to actually get a job. After going through the process judiciously and with great dedication, I can confidently say  Springboard has helped me build a robust and very competitive portfolio. 

The curriculum typically covers everything needed to succeed. My favorite part of Springboard is the one-on-one mentorship where you could brainstorm, learn and typically create a connection with a professional who is willed to help you succeed. Also, the career coaches are really helpful.

The underestimated section where many students miss out is the Springboard slack community where you get all the answers, motivation and collaborations on almost any topic. 

However, I would suggest  Springboard encourage collaborations between students by adding a group capstone project. This would benefit on many levels -- technical skill like git usage and soft skills like teamwork, collaboration etc.

Overall, I have enjoyed my time at Springboard. It was a different experience for me to attend online courses, rather than in person, but a good and necessary one especially for these times of the pandemic. I like the self-paced learning that it has because there are times that life get's busy. This really helped me to just dial in what I was learning. If I wanted to spend more time in one subunit, I could and if I wanted to breeze through it, I could as well. The only con to this is that you get 9 months to finish the course, though that is a lot of time to finish the course, it does take away from the statement at your own pace because you have to finish in 9 months. My suggestion is to follow their schedule guide of how long you should spend in a subunit and keep to it. Some suggestions are longer than others and that is good, because if you finish a subunit early, then that just means you have more time to finish the other ones that take longer. Another suggestion I have is to look ahead at what you will be working on (both for Springboard and in your own personal schedule). When you get a bigger picture of what you have to do, you can easily manage your time accordingly. 
I like the mentor lead aspect of Springboard. It's good to get feedback from a professional and very helpful when you get stuck in certain areas of the course. My mentor helped me gain a better perspective of visual hierarchy and made me a better UI/UX designer. The downside to this is that you have one meeting a week with your mentor to check in with you which is a 30-minute call. So you'll need to know exactly what you want to talk about in those sessions. Also, Springboard gives you unlimited scheduled calling with your mentor, but it's scheduled and sometimes you need answers to questions you have at the moment. To get around this, you can simply email your mentor and they usually respond within a day or two.
Another great aspect is the coaching calls. You’ll get the first-hand experience with real hiring managers in the field. My coaches have helped me look at their perspective of what they would look for in a UX/UI Designer and what pitfalls to avoid. Through the mock interviews, they have given me great feedback that will help me in interviews and with their keen eyes, they have helped me craft both a great resume and portfolio.
I love Springboard and all that it has done for me, I am thankful to be a part of the Alumni grads.

I took the on-line course of Springboard Data Analytics.  The curriculum covers a broad range of the industry's best practices.  The student is allowed to explore new methods of structuring the scientific inquiry, mapping the field of investigation, providing solutions, discussing their validity and limitations, and sharing their presentations in elegant and effective ways with diverse audiences.   

I had to be disciplined to keep the pace, studying in the evening and the weekend, in addition to being a single father and a full-time government professional.  Mentors, Coaches, Advisors and other colleague students were very supportive.  I am very happy I made it successfully, and more, I am grateful for the professional guidance I received challenging me to succeed even when I could have been tempted to drop my hands. 
I can now read, write and speak confidently about economics and statistics.   I can use critical thinking frameworks like HDEIP, MECE, and technology tools for programming, research and analysis like Excel 365, SQL, Python, and for visualization like Power BI and Tableau.  I am confident exploring any topic of interest with data.  My two Capstone Projects illustrate it perfectly: "Manufacturing Recovery Economic Recovery" and "More Monies More Polarization".  I was allowed to explore one topic in economics and one in political economics successfully!  Though my background is in physics, engineering, environmental and social sciences!

I belong now to a community that likes to keep learning and sharing with alike professionals.  This is huge!  

I definitely recommend Springboard to other professionals, colleagues and friends!

I completed Data Science course recently. I would recommend this course, because I really like the way the course is structured and support that I had. I got all needed knowledge for this industry and understood which direction I most interested in being productive.   

Pros: 1:1 Mentoring. They will guide you through the curriculum, help you set goals, keep you accountable if that's something that you want or need. The program has also an active Slack community, On demand Mentor Support, Career Support, Career Lessons and 3 different types of specializations, to meet different needs. It also has a lot of hands on case studies and 2 Data Science Capstone Projects.

Con: I have to say that I started to really appreciate the program in the second part of it. The mentor change, the 2 Capstones and joining a group study with weekly meetings made the program more enjoyable.

Overall, it was a really good decision to pick Springboard. 

This was one of the websites that I initially looked at when deciding which boot camp to pursue. Springboard was highly rated, and with good reason. After finishing the curriculum, I can say that I feel confident in my abilities in implementing data science methods. The boot camp provides access to the platform DataCamp, which has become one of my favorite resources to practice my coding skills. The staff and my mentor were also very helpful throughout the journey. I never felt intimidated about reaching out because they were all so nice. As long as you pace yourself and commit to improving yourself daily, you will have no trouble achieving  great feats with the course. 

I really appreciated that Springboard's course setting, I have chance to learn fundamental knowledge but also able to have real-world project. My mentor is a design manager from Facebook which she always share her professional view. Most importantly, it supposed to be a 6 months bootcamp, but Springboard gave me extra five months extension for free. Their Industry Project helps me to land a full-time UX design job after I graduate from bootcamps for a month. All three of my teammates landed a job, and now we're also building a great relationships. Highly recommended. 

Springboard is an excellent curated program which provides all of the resources you would need to land a job in ML/DS. They do not hold your hand however, you get out what you put in, and you can go as fast or slow as you want. They simply conglomerate the best material out there for you to study, and the best resources for perfecting your application and interview skills for the industry. The material is not their own, but it is so well organized and you know you are learning something valuable instead of guessing what videos/articles are useful to consume. Your mentor can guide you to better understand the industry and develop an impressive capstone project, and the career coaches are indispensable (I owe my interview performance to my career coach). Then the mock interviews at the end of the course are helpful for easing you into that intense, highly demanding interview process. I was coming from academia (mastered out of my physics PhD program), and this was the perfect solution to help me become industry-relevant. Of course my degree contributed to my ability to land interviews, but I can tell you I would not have been able to do any of it without Springboard. I was able to secure a DS position at a top tech company after 6 months (full-time) at Springboard, and I would highly recommend the program if you are looking to break into tech.

Springboard is an online learning platform that prepares students for the tech industry’s most in-demand careers with comprehensive, mentor-led online programs in software engineering, data science, machine learning, UI/UX design, cybersecurity, and more! This school is amazing and prepares students to make the rubber meet the road.

I began at Springboard two months before the pandemic. IT rocked my life and Springboard made graduation possible. The circumstances were truly, unique. They provided enough flexibility and advice to direct me towards completion on time. The principles learned and results of cumulative work that lead to a portfolio was the foundation I needed. Even if it's not perfect when you finish, you will learn that iterations are part of the process. Design is a moving target and Springboard can give you the support to attempt and stick it.

Ever since I enrolled in Springboard's UX/UI Career Track, I started to recommend this course to everyone around me who is interested in tech or design. The curriculums are well put together, the 4 projects really makes up a great portfolio and the 1 on 1 mentorship was super helpful. It took me 10 months to complete the course and I spent way over 20 hours per week, but it was worth it. I ended up landing a job just 2 weeks after graduating.

Really enjoyed my time at Springboard's UX Career Track program which helped me start my job as a UX/UI designer after having worked professionally in marketing/visual design for nearly 10+ years.

Pros:
—The career services module was easily worth the price of admittance. It helped keep me sane during my 9+ month job hunt and helped me stay on track during this arduous process.
— My mentor was fantastic and I am still in touch with her today and am benefitting from hearing her stories and how I could best apply lessons she learned to my current job situation.
— The IDP project was great and helped teach me to work alongside other designers.

Cons:
—The school aggregates its curriculum from various online sources which are available for free, so it could theoretically be self-taught. However, having the proper learning structure in place still really helped.
— It teaches UX from the traditional waterfall perspective which not all companies follow. It was a bit of an adjustment for me to adapt these principles to more agile processes, which many companies use nowadays.
_ It's up to the student to figure out how to standout from the rest of the crowd/graduates. Your portfolio will look quite similar to others upon graduation so it's up to the student to figure out how to best find a solution to this.

I had a good time with Spring Board's ML course.  The certificate is under the UC San Diego Extension name, which is great.  The course itself is overall good, however I do want to point out a few things: 

1. It's only as useful as the amount of time you put into it 
2. Take notes constantly or you won't learn anything 
3. Use mentor to keep you on track 

Their material are all freely available online like YouTube videos, while this sound bad it did not distract from the learning experience negatively.  HOWEVER, there are a few parts that is behind paywalls, which definitely was a negative experience.  Some material could be rearranged, you need to go back and forth or you will be confused.  Also their sales people seem to think everyone and their dog could pay them $10k and graduate as a ML scientist but in my experience you really do need to be in the software industry already to make the most of it. 
The best part for me was the career help,  you should definitely take advantage of that and do everything they tell you.  Overall would recommend.
I also enjoyed conversating with my mentor, I highly recommend leveraging your mentor as much as possible every week. 

 I had a great experience in the Software Engineering Track. I feel like the curriculum prepared me to be comfortable in any part of the stack and covered a great deal of content throughout my time with Springboard
Pros:
Thorough Curriculum on all things related to software engineering and web development
Taught by Colt Steele 
Access to knowledgeable mentors and career coaches 
Cons:
TAs and support can be difficult to access when you need them due to volume of students.
Lack of community if you don't seek out people to group up with.
There are no opportunities to pair program unless you seek someone out. 

Having just completed Springboard's UX Design Career Track, I am walking away with a whole new set of UX skills and thanks to the rigorous curriculum  I feel very confident in my ability to execute them in a professional setting. I come from a multi-disciplinary design background, and I've had an interest in transitioning into the UX/UI field for a few years, so I was slowly self-learning and taking Coursera courses prior to starting the Springboard course. Unfortunately, Coursera courses and designing some apps for your portfolio just won't cut it. Springboard guides you through a range of key methodologies and best practices in UX design, with projects heavily focused on user research and usability testing, as well as plenty of mentoring from real industry professionals. It's the real deal and it's worth it.

The fully online, largely self-paced program made it possible for me to learn while coping with a demanding work schedule. Overall, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the curated program and the 1:1 mentorship. The mentorship is where I’ve got the most out of this program. It really does give you an in-depth insight into how data scientists works, and their industry best practices.  This program would be a great choice for those who: - wants to have direct interaction with career data scientists and learn about the industry best practices - can only or prefers to do a 100% online bootcamp - prefers a self-paced, self-learning type of program rather than a classroom style/ group work type of program  Call outs: - if you reside outside of US/ Canada, certain career development topics/ opportunities may not be as relevant. Find a career coach you resonate with though, there are still a lot you can get out of the career coaching sessions - if you are in the Asia timezone, it will likely be difficult for you to enjoy the office hours and networking events. It’s usually scheduled in the afternoon US Pacific timezone  For those who are wondering if you can manage the program, my suggestion would be to try out the Data Science Prep Course.  During the course of selecting which education provider to go for, I’ve tried the prep course from a few bootcamp providers. It was the early interaction with an industry mentor that convinced me this learning journey is worthwhile. 

From the Software Engineering Career Track Prep course to the full-on Software Engineering Career Track, I was met with genuinely kind and overall cool people. As a DJ looking to switch careers, the Prep course was very helpful in providing me a very basic understanding of web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). In addition to a very user-friendly course, Springboard gave me a mentor (Adam G.) to help me if I ever got stuck on anything. We met weekly until I finished the course and passed the exam at the end, and Adam was so cool that I was sad that he wasn't going to be my mentor for the next 9 months of the Career Track course. Although I was a bit sad, my next mentor (Paul S.) turned out to be the perfect mentor for the next 9 months. He dedicated a significant amount of time to help me with any and all problems I had with assessments, projects, capstone projects, etc. He even let me shadow him for a work-day. Springboard has a user-friendly platform and I had no trouble navigating my way throughout their site. Not only did they provide the curriculum and tools to teach me about Software Engineering, but they also provided Career Coaches that guided me in making my resume and LinkedIn profile stand out. I could go on about how grateful I am for Springboard and for giving me the opportunity to meet some amazing people through them. I would highly recommend Springboard to anyone looking to make a career change in the tech industry.

Pros: Lots of opportunities to learn about unfamiliar material. Lots of homework so I could practice what I learned. It was helpful to build a project-based portfolio to show what I learned and could do. I'm planning on going back and improving my portfolio as much as possible.

Cons: After I completed an assignment, it would have been useful to view another's (A+) completed assignment so I could compare and learn from my mistakes.

Springboard is great.  It helped launched my Data Science career just 4-5 months into the program.  But this was with 30-60 hours a week of studying and 10-20 hours a week fixing/updating my resume and CL as well as job searching and preparing for interviews.  

Mentors were always there when needed and are really smart.  The career coaches helped tremendously and was vital to me getting me first job even with little experience.