Thinkful

The Thinkful UX UI Flex program was a great way for me to build my portfolio and receive mentorship throughout my journey. In fact, my mentor's moral support was the most positive part of my experience, and I am super grateful. However, something to keep in mind: If you work a full-time job, the completion dates for this curriculum are very tight and not realistic. Despite being called a Flex program, it is not very flexible, and your tuition reimbursement guarantee will be revoked if you request additional time.

Half of the instructors I encountered during assessments were very professional and helpful, while the other half were unprepared. If you do not get paired with a good assessor, you can try again, but this should not be a hit-or-miss situation put on students. I also noticed a few broken links and resources in the curriculum, but overall, very solid learning materials.

Don't bother unless you have the money upfront and are able to do the Flex program, and I hardly recommend that much. What they promise is not reality. In reality, they only give you a total of an hour and a half of instructor time. The rest of the time you are thrown weekly with a different group of people that may or may not want to do actual group work.  Also the modules are crappy once you leave the precourse. The Qualified assessments are always broken. Save your money and use Udemy. It's way cheaper and actually better taught. They also do not have job assistance. You have to network yourself and find your own job anyway. You can get the same resume and networking advice from Google. They claim 84% graduate rate, or similar. That number is inflated when you start with almost 60 people and less than half graduate. Ask them about the dropout vs graduation rates of all their cohorts. Bet they won't give you a straight answer before you sign your life away.

After doing some research on getting into the data analytics field, I was lucky enough to have found Thinkful’s Data Analytics Immersion curriculum. Overall it was a great program. I developed skills in Excel, SQL, Tableau and Python. During my time here I had three instructors, two I found very helpful and one not so much. The one instructor I felt talked down on us a little if we didn’t know or if we asked questions her response would be that she would answer it the following day but never would. I felt that I was not able to learn well with that style of teaching and I feel a lot of the other students felt that way as well. After graduation I had an amazing career coach who helped me get noticed more. Shortly after I connected with her I was getting phone screenings and interviews and in no time I was able to accept an offer with a great company doing data analytics. She truly wants to help you and was so happy to find out that I accepted the offer. Overall I would recommend Thinkful if you want to get into the field of data. I feel that they did a great job getting me to where I am today! 

     Thinkful offers a comprehensive, remote, full stack program in the Javascript family of languages and libraries. The curriculum traverses everything from HTML to CSS, Javascript, jQuery, React, Node, Express, PostgreSQL/SQL, Git, Postman, and DBeaver. The trajectory of the curriculum is solid if you keep pace with the program and keep up with practicing Javascript operators as you can get mired in the back-end programming module covering Node and PostgreSQL and lose your footing in JS while you get buried in database concepts and server-side programming which is long-winded and challenging if you're completely unfamiliar with it. 

     I think the biggest challenge of my program was communication and being held accountable for my progress. On the one hand, those aspects are completely within a student's realm of control: you can reach out, contact (or attempt to contact) your Academic Success Manager or mentor, you can linger around on the Slack channel to find help if you have many free hours a day, or you can use the ThinkChat feature to get one-on-one guidance with a technical coach. There were many times I would reach out to my mentor (any of the three I had) and three or four days could pass before we had our next meeting and they would say, "I didn't hear from you since our last meeting." That was ultimately ironic because I had posed a question and never received a response. This was the major reason why I had three mentors -- lack of communication.  I ultimately had four Academic Success Managers; one after the next had something that forced a change in their assignment to me. But my final ASM was pretty brusque in her communication, not offering options but giving me strict "do it or else" ultimatums pointing to being withdrawn from the program and failing rather than suggesting paying for an extension, for instance. The major issue I have with all of those channels and, maybe, the program entirely, is that nobody proactively tended to my challenges. While it is said with many of the assigned coding submissions, "your mentor should view this" or "you can use this as a conversation starter during your next mentor meeting," none of three mentors I had ever brought to my attention that anything I was submitting was missing the mark or needing clarification and I'm certain that I needed guidance on many occasions. There was no progress meter for the program and there was no review over time to see that the concepts were sticking...until months later. And at that time, once immersed in the more complex parts of the program, you just don't have the time to really backtrack and "catch up" on those concepts you may have lost footing on as you are pretty buried in full stack capstone projects and pretty intense mock interviews.

     Now, I will say this: COVID challenged my capacity to succeed at this program and the format of the program and the effect that the pandemic had on others may have contributed to its lack of efficacy. I can't speak to what others were experiencing, what the school itself was dealing with, converting all programs to remote, and handling a very different and, maybe, very busy student load. But for my part, a paying student begging for guidance that exposed more examples of coding with explanations, some how-to and how-not-to-do comparisons, and more consistent communication from the only person I was regularly in touch with about my questions and concerns being that I didn't have a program instructor (my mentor), this program was less engaging and inclusive than I expected. I think their screening process should assess incoming students better too. I had no introductory "placement test" to see that I should even be in the program and I could have used some introduction to Javascript, for example, so that I had a better base of knowledge going in. I did graduate! I'm super proud of myself, maybe even surprised! The career department has been immediately and thoroughly engaging just a couple days in! And their success rates for job placement is one of the main reasons I chose them over every other school. I won't say "don't" consider Thinkful. Just know that you have to be ready to operate mostly independently and I highly recommend doing some side-by-side application of concepts on other platforms if you haven't solved problems with Javascript before. 

As a old school designer of the early 2000's, and marketing grad I enrolled in the Thinkful UX / UI FT Immersive that started 10/12.  I was really optimistic and ready to learn the new technology of today to better assist my future clients. (I'm a known figure in my city so inventors and businesses are excited to collab with me to change the world for the better once I'm all up to speed).  I chose the living stipend as a single mom trying to rebuild after an unfair divorce. I initially found it appealing to work the FT immersive while earning a little to focus on my studies even though I saw more benefit to paying thousands less for the program with other financial options, but I needed that crutch of the stipend in my case of having been out of work.  

The problem is I found this school to be hypocritical in the fact that they preach how important human experience and empathy is key to UX without actually caring about their students or displaying those traits themselves. For ex in orientation they had it seem like there was all this support for you, but if you had one issue come up, even if it wasn't your doing such as a technical glitch they will put blame on you and count it against you to weed you the user /student out of their system.  I never got to meet my mentor today for our first check in meeting because I was automatically locked out of the program by her before that, while completing an assignment.  She emailed me never meeting me saying she didn't have record of my attendance even when I emailed the roster of confirmation to everyone I had on my list. 

I was a day and half in and counted as absent even though I attended, chatted, interacted in zoom calls, and communicated in every way I could with my team about minor tech issues about the video chat and needing a link to a tutorial to further my understanding of Notion platform to use it. Nothing really keeping me from class to count me out?!

Coming into the program only 1.5 days in knowing myself, and my years of experience in business and corporate allowed me to see the glitches in their platform and staff immediately. All staff were amateur's who felt threatened by sweet little me, it seemed which I feel is the problem. They put less experienced staff who lack in social skills on the front lines who have the power to do whatever to keep the influx of people away.  This all was a red flag as a pro and thankfully I was within my 2 days refund period to exit gracefully. 

The error or deliberate action of my team leaders blackballing and counting me out caused my ASM to kick me out of the program and the earnings I was expecting next week per our contract after 2 weeks of waiting to start the program. The things that need to change in the world are programs like this and the type of people who run them. Choose wisely! 

The Thinkful curriculum is great! I took the Software Engineering Flex and truly enjoyed every minute. The course is very challenging. Before coming into the course I had some experience in Computer Programming. But if you are passionate about learning new things you will be totally fine.

I was lucky enough to get a Web Developer position by a friend. Although I cannot talk much about Job Assistance, the curriculum did a great job fixing up my resume, cover letters, and LinkedIn.