Thinkful

Curated curriculum means most of the content is from FREE web resources.  So I guess you're paying for the Mentor, except my mentor never answered any questions but rather threw me some weblinks and told me to go on Slack or Stackoverflow.

Yeah, I know I can find the answers online but I'm asking YOU right NOW for the answer. She also told me to go to Codeacademy - again another FREE resource.  

I had high hopes for Mentor led learning but at Thinkful I got the impression that my Mentor was just trying to fulfill a quota of meetings and killing time just to reach the required 45 minute minimum.

I'll give Thinkful credit in that it got me to start using Github and Terminal but most of the technical learning I did on other resources like Codeacademy and even Lynda.com (my current employer has a company account).

Just finished up Thinkful's FrontEnd Development Course with a dedicated mentor.  In full disclosure, I conducted a signfiicant amount of diligence into how best begin exploring a career in coding -- and after reading many reviews, making calls, talking with references, I decided to choose Thinkful.  Importantly, my own personal experience over the past five months has been entirely consistent with the feedback I had received from a myriad of others before embarking on the course.  

My experience with Thinkful:  This was truly my first coding experience and while I was bit nervous, my assigned mentor literally assuaged each and every one of my concerns.  IN so many ways, Thinkful bridges an important, critical gap between asychronous, self-paced, online free learning and on the other end of the spectrum, jumping into a coding bootcamp, full-time (whether online or in residence.)  

With Thinkful, I got access to:

(1) a very strong online curriculum that allowed me to work on my own pace

(2) a strong, active and supportive community of both instructors and fellow students with ample opportunities to participate in workshops (think extra, live classes) 

(3) And most importantly, a dedicated "mentor" who was litearlly with me every step of the way.  

I cannot emphasize enough how important this mentor-relationship is.  While Thinkful calls its instructors mentors - I really thought of my mentor (TJ) as a super coach.  He is a professional developer with a ton of experience -- experiences that he shared with me that went well above and beyond the actual curriculum itself.  For example, there were multiple times in which TJ suggested fantastic additional, free learning resources that were outside the scope of the Thinkful online curriculum that I would likely not have found myself.  There were instances were TJ told me that it would pay off in dividends to invest the extra time and effort to learn a ton of Git shortcuts.  He was right.

Most of all, my Thinkful mentor served as an inspiring and encouraging coach. Not only were all of my 1-on-1 sessions with him instructive and incredibly helpful, but knowing that I had a meeting scheduled with TJ was super motivational to put the extra time in - even after a long & tiring day at school - so that I could be best prepared to a) try to impress him and b) make sure that I used the time most effectively to address questions or concepts that I had been struggling with on my own.  

For my "capstone" project - TJ continued to be super encouraging and incredibly helpful.  I wanted to go a little further for my FrontEnd project - so I literally developed and launched a commercial website that's now generating approximately $1K per month in revenue just a few weeks after launch.  My Thinkful mentor was not only open to helping me with my project as part of our mentor sessions together, but was incredibly helpful in teaching me how to do things like STRIPE API integration, leveraging AWS et al. Again, I realize that these things may seem both obvious and simple -- but remember, prior to starting Thinkful, I had absolute zero experience.

To balance out this review, I really wish there were some things I could point to for areas of improvement in regards to the overall Thinkful experience.  Fortunately (or unfortunately) there really aren't.  Ultimately, the litmus test for me is will I be returning for the next course sequence at Thinkful? The answer is yes.  I could not recommend Thinkful and it's mentor program more highly.  Truly.   

Thinkful has provided me with great resources to be successful in this program. I was able to complete the 6 month program in 4 months by working on it full time. A few things that I wish I had been prepared for were to do some additional learning and research on my own to discover new things, and to reach out for help much earlier and more often. I found myself scrambling to work on things on my own, and once I owned up to the fact that I needed help and asked for it, I was able to learn and do so much more. Some of the curriculum is slightly dated (for example deploying to heroku, rather than another deployment site), based on the jobs I'm applying to, but there are plenty of external resources and other thinkful mentors and students to get help from. If you're coming from a completely different background, like I did, be prepared for a steep learning curve.