Springboard

If your goal in going to Springboard is to get a job, as was mine, then you may be in good hands. I scored 3 job offers within 3 months of starting the program. That's about all I can say positively about the program, and the success in landing a job came more from the psychological impact of the program name than it did from the program itself.

Unfortunately, the curriculum is one of the laziest curriculums I have ever seen in my education experience.

Most of the useful parts of the curriculum are outsourced entirely to third-party resources that you can get for a very affordable membership outside of Springboard. I did not learn Python or SQL from Springboard. I learned it from Datacamp, as part of the Springboard program. Springboard charged over $6,000 for the program, while Datacamp charges $25 per month. You do the math.

Everything that isn't outsourced is subpar. YouTube is superior - literally.

You are given a very introductory glance to a lot of topics, then forced to plod through busy work that you clearly don't need to be doing. Springboard instructions are clear and off-putting in this regard - "This entire unit is mandatory, even if you are already familiar with the content."

For nearly every assignment, the instructions are incredibly unclear, requiring huge amounts of student time just to understand what they are actually being asked to do. The time is not spent to ensure that assignments provide a good educational experience. Instructions are literally given in very-poorly formatted Excel documents, with students being expected to go a Slack chat just to discuss with other students what is being asked. So you don't really spend time learning data science skills. You spend time learning how to interpret Springboard's odd approach to education, and then slap a Data Analytics certificate on top of it.

Overall I am glad I got some job offers. Looking back, however, I don't think Springboard helped me as much as they would claim they did.

Sadly, still a much better option than college! But the world can, and must, do much better.

First of all, course advisors, mentors, and career coaches were great. I really liked the support from advisors, because I was working from home and taking care of my children while doing homeschooling because of the Covid19, they really helped me by understanding the situation and gave me the necessary time and courage to finish the program. Career coaches were great. They gave so strong advice for the career path. Mentors were very good and gave very strong technical feedbacks and advice for projects and make you think about what can be next. I have some negative opinions with course sources but positive opinions are higher than negatives. Overall I am very pleased about attending the course. I could have not learned the data science subjects in this kind of limited time by myself. I am glad I participated.

It was very helpful to learn skills hands-on by starting the capstone project so early in the course, then slowly working on it for a couple months as each skill is learned. My mentor was particularly amazing (gave thoughtful, expert, challenging, and encouraging feedback), which made every penny worth the course. I hear most mentors are great, though I'm sure experiences can vary a bit. 

My main small complaint about the course is that most sub-projects are still fairly large/involved, but there's not much bite-sized practice beforehand. Everything (for the most part) goes straight into the capstone (until the next big project).  Since the capstone will be displayed in the portfolio, it can be easy to spend inordinate amounts of time working on (and stressing about) making the very first attempt at each assignment "perfect," or "impressive."

Recommendation: schedule at least one extra mentor call each week, whether you have questions or not. Extra mentor calls can help you stay on track and know when your work is "good enough" to move on.

I really enjoyed Springboard's UI/UX Career Track program! It is a hefty curriculum, but easy to follow and left me confident that I gained a solid foundation in the field. I also really enjoyed the UI exercises added throughout the curriculum to help me learn and refine my design skills! I studied full-time and completed it in about 9 months (so this is not a quick-fix course, especially coming from a non-design background). I would recommend it to anyone looking to commit to a career change!

I did a lot of research before finally deciding on Springboard's UI/UX Design Career Track. The deciding factors for me were the flexibility of the self-paced curriculum, mini internship (industry design project), and the reasonable tuition.

Overall, the program was paced well and covered a lot of material (both theory and practice). I finished the course with four projects on my portfolio website and tons of practical advice from career coaches (salary negotiation, portfolio/resume critique, networking, LinkedIn help and more). The required mock interviews also gave me a sense of how "real" UX interviews would be conducted.

As with any new experience, it is what you make of it! Put in the work and utilize all the available resources!

If you decide to apply, here is a referral link for a nice discount!
https://www.springboard.com/invite/BFH8M

The biggest pro for me was the self-paced, very independent curriculum. I was working full time when I started the program, so it was nice to be able to work through the curriculum at my own pace rather than having a set schedule.

Weekly calls with a mentor are very helpful in checking up on progress and making sure any questions you have along the way get addressed. My mentor was very knowledgeable and thorough in his explanations of any questions I had.

I found the projects and assignments more helpful than the videos. I typically learn things best by doing them rather than hearing about them, so often I would still be lost at the end of the videos and then figure things out while doing the assignments.

I enrolled in Springboard’s Data Analytics Career Track upon completing a two-year contract with Teach For America. I always had an interest in data but never felt confident in acting on it until I had to figure out my next step after teaching. I studied international relations and communication/writing in my undergraduate career so had no formal quantitative experience upon applying.  From the moment I applied to Springboard, everything was incredibly professional and straightforward. In fact, after submitting my application, a recruiter called me within 5 minutes to talk about my interest - completely opposite of another boot camp I was considering who didn’t even contact me despite confirming an appointment. This quickness made me think they were desperate, but the recruiter wasn’t pushy but friendly and even gave me an informal interview to make sure I was someone who really wanted to sign up. After that call, I was required to take a roughly one-hour long quantitative aptitude test to further verify that data analytics was a path I could reasonably pursue. I mention this because I was worried that I would fall trap to simply enrolling into a program that took anyone and everyone who signed up. In truth, I’m not sure if they decline students from enrolling either way, but I felt confident that this interview and assessment were evidence that they were at least slightly selective in their admissions process.  Curriculum  The curriculum is mostly a curation of online resources. These resources come from YouTube videos, articles, and other websites related to business and data analytics. A couple of units are specifically dedicated to business education like economics, financial analysis, statistics, accounting, and other business fundamentals. The cycle of the projects also follows that of a typical data analyst workflow, somewhat similar to the scientific method in crafting a hypothesis, gathering data, exploration, etc. I found these concepts helpful as I was someone who steered away from anything business-related up to that point; I simply had no interest back then.  Most of the projects simulate a real-world project utilizing the things you learned earlier in the unit. These are not typically from online resources and are created by Springboard. Given that I don’t have real-world experience with these kinds of projects, it’s hard for me to stack them up against practicality, but they tended to help structure my capstone projects which require you to make up your own project and find the data for it, so it was helpful in that regard. Otherwise, sometimes the projects were poorly worded and it could be slightly cumbersome in finding out exactly what you were supposed to do. But these were usually minor and you could always clarify with your mentor or other students about the assignments and get clarification. They also release new versions of the curriculum to improve a particular assignment, section, or even whole unit based on student feedback so they really try to be responsive to what’s working and what’s not for students.  Towards the final stages of the curriculum, you’re required to do a series of interviews that would mimic a real interview you would get. For example, you do a behavioral interview, a presentation interview in which you create a presentation from a project in the course and give that presentation as if you were “working” for the organization, and a technical interview in which they ask you questions about statistics, business, SQL, or whatever else might come up in a real technical interview. Your career coach helps you prepare for these, mostly the behavioral ones as they aren’t data specialists themselves but you can also do preparation with your mentor to prepare for these. They are pass/fail. You’re given a couple of opportunities to pass it but if you fail too many times then you have to redo a couple of units I believe. At first, I found this kind of scary, but the pressure it adds to those interviews is really helpful in simulating what it will be like when you’re doing real interviews. They tend to be anxiety-inducing, you’ll be nervous, and the stakes are higher. The fact that they try to build this pressure into these mock interviews was pretty cool now that I reflect on it. At the time I didn’t think it was that cool! But if you’re someone who struggles with interviews, these mock runs are helpful not only in getting practice but also feedback from those interviewers. They go into detail about how you could do better or other things to think about when you get to a real interview.    Mentors and Community  Each student is assigned a mentor who is a data analyst/scientist in the field. You have weekly calls with them and they’re mostly there to guide you through the curriculum but you can always talk to them about other things like job searching or how they use tools/techniques in their own jobs, etc; at least my mentor was open to talking about whatever. I hadn’t ever come across anyone who had a bad experience with their mentor, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. My mentor was incredibly relaxed, easy to talk to, and helpful when I needed help in the curriculum or needed encouragement on something I found difficult. One thing that made me like my mentor more was also his ability to sometimes question minor details in the curriculum. I appreciate someone who can point out weaknesses in something even though they’re part of the organization itself. It let me know that this person I was assigned to by Springboard wasn’t necessarily a 100% kool-aid drinking member of the club, but an independent person who, though still agreed the curriculum was a good one, was capable of sometimes saying “well I’m not sure I would do it that way but it’s valid.”  Upon being accepted into the program, you are also invited to the Slack channel for your specific course. This is where you can communicate with other students in the course who are all at different stages of the curriculum, though you do have a channel for people who are in your specific cohort. There are also Springboard faculty in the channel as well, including a person who helped write the curriculum. They are really helpful in clarifying kinks in assignments or helping students who are having a difficult time on something. There are also various channels for different types of things like job searching, motivation, resources, recorded lectures, and all types of things.  Throughout the curriculum, you also have career units in which you learn strategies about job searching. You’re also allowed to choose a career coach, who appears to be contracted with Springboard (I could be wrong about this) to provide 30-minute coaching sessions. These range from resume critiques, to mock interviews, to general strategies, to sharing resources, and really anything that they feel would be helpful to you. You also aren’t required to stick with one career coach, you can always select from a whole list of people at any point and they have descriptions of their background to give you a sense of what to expect. I stuck with the same one the entire time because I didn’t feel the need to talk to a different coach.   The Job Search  The job search process was not a totally pleasant one, as anyone who has gone through it can attest. But my career coach and the Springboard community in Slack were really helpful. You could see where other people were struggling as well and my career coach would always give helpful suggestions or resources to help in my search. I applied to a little over 90 jobs and had 3 total interviews. Again, I don’t have any kind of formal background in data, business, or STEM besides the Springboard certificate and some projects to showcase my aptitude, so I felt that that was a bit of a barrier for me.  Despite this, I did get a job! A friend of my partner referred me to a role at her company which landed me the interview. My career coach did a mock interview with me, reviewed Google Docs that I drafted interview responses to, and answered any other questions I had during the process. I can honestly say my experience in the boot camp really gave me a leg up. They loved that I had that experience and projects to show for it. During the final round of interviews for this role, I had a technical assessment and didn’t do too hot on it, but I was able to redeem myself by talking intelligently about my projects in the course. I think this made me come across as someone who understood general concepts and use cases for specific things and even if I lagged on the technical assessment, I was someone who could get better quickly. My title isn’t “data analyst” but “marketing specialist.” Much of the role is data related though and even though some of it isn’t, it allows me to use skills that I’ve built over the years in undergrad and as a teacher so I’m not 100% shifted into a totally new technical profession. The other roles I interviewed for were pure data analyst jobs though. I made it to either the final or next to final rounds in those interviews and made some mistakes that I think cost me the job. You learn from these though, and your career coach will help you diagnose what happened and how you can do better the next time. I finished the course in mid-November and just recently got a job offer on March 29, so a little over 4 months after completing the course.  Another cool thing that Springboard offers is post-completion assistance. You’re allowed to meet with another mentor who can help you be accountable for keeping your skills alive and building more projects to showcase to prospective employers. You have access to this mentor until you get a job and can be really helpful when you complete the course and then start to find that your skills are slipping.   A Potential Downside  One potential downside to this track might be the curriculum. Though this downside is innate in the way the course is structured. It’s set up as a part-time, 6-month learning experience. They want you to get familiar with a wide range of tools that you could potentially use in a data analyst job, mostly the more popular ones as there are TONS of tools that you could potentially use in the field. In this regard, there’s more breadth than depth in the things you’ll learn. They are still helpful. After a unit and a project, you can honestly say that you’re proficient in that tool or concept. You’ll also learn that each tool could be its own 6-month course. If you haven’t used Microsoft Excel professionally before, or maybe you have, you find out that Excel is more powerful than what you were familiar with. This was the case for me anyway. I’m not sure that any boot camp can really overcome this downside though when the curriculum itself is designed to be completed in a relatively short period of time. You might become interested in diving deeper into a tool after completing a unit on it, but have to move on to the next tool introduced in the next unit. This is just part of being in tech. I recommend seeking other online resources if you become really interested in getting better at a particular tool. However, I still believe, along with many other practitioners, that the curriculum is still helpful in allowing you to understand the essentials and then get a job with them.  In Conclusion  I think the number one thing that you get out of the course is structure and community. Of course, you could learn everything in any boot camp online for free, but you to be someone who can muster the discipline and structure to stick to it long-term. I have a habit of constantly looking for new resources to learn from, even after finding what seems like a good one, I’ll complete half of it and then start looking for something else. Springboard’s curriculum allowed me to stay on course and I trusted that what they put in front of me was going to be helpful in learning and ultimately getting a job. The frequent connection with my mentors, career coach, and other students was really helpful in knowing that I wasn’t alone. It gave me a psychological edge in that someone I was meeting with at the end of the week was expecting me to complete assignments and be able to discuss them. This was a total career pivot for me and, so far, I’m glad that I did it.  I welcome any questions about my experience and the program!