Thinkful

I have been enrolled in Thinkful for about 1 month now, so very new and very new to coding itself. I am a true beginner coder, changing careers. I was between Viking and Thinkful and did a lot of research to see what would be best for me. The cost, length of course, mentorship and career help was what led me to Thinkful ultimately. I knew that I would need help along the way with the intensity of the program and so mentorship was key for me. My mentor Marius is a superb mentor that has been doing web dev for a considerable amount of time, so I knew I was getting a professional. 

I will say, the course is hard (is for me) but very much worth it. As much as I struggle is as much as I thrive and motivated to go the next challenge and see my coding create sites. You will struggle, you will doubt yourself and you will wonder if you will get better and YOU WILL if you stick with it and do the work involved.

I know I'm only a month in, but I have already learned so much! Only 5 months more to go!

I am currently taking the $300 a month Frontend Web Development course. 

Pros: 

1. Quite a bit of course material.
2. Course material can sometimes be in depth.
3. Good mentorship
4. Breaks down learning into easy steps.
5. Good amount of projects to work on.

Cons: 

1. Course material 95% of the time is extremely vague.
2. No video's.
3. For the most part you have to look other places to actually learn about what they cover.
4. You get the feeling that a lot of the course work was just mashed together from other free websites out there.
5. The price they charge for the course. Not worth $300. $100 a month or less seems a fair price.

Overall I am very unimpressed with this course. The course material is altogether very vague. Going through it almost feels like you have to decipher everything line by line. I believe they do this so that it takes you longer to go through it so that they can charge you more. 

If you are willing to drop money on an online course I would honestly look any where else but here. In all fairness I am going to complete the course and then look else where to continue my education. I would not recommend thinkful.com to anyone.

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.