UNC-Chapel Hill Boot Camps

I just graduated from the UNC Coding Bootcamp about a week ago and it's one of the best things I've ever done for myself. The class was HARD, no joke, when they tell you the pace is fast, believe them...it's FAST!

However, if you hold on for the ride and just embrace it, you will come out at the end with a huge foundation of knowledge. I've talked to several developer friends who are very impressed with the material I've learned (the volume and also the fact that the material is actually relevant and currently in high demand within the industry).

My instructor was great...personable, knowledgable, funny, easy to talk to, he was always available to answer questions or re-explain a concept. He really made the class fun...I always looked forward to it. Plus, we had two TA's in our class, and I had a personal tutor I met with on Zoom every week (included in the program). I also really loved the connections I made with my fellow students, we bonded quickly and were always helping each other out as well. Plenty of resources were made available when we needed extra help.

I am not yet an expert (I had zero experience with web dev when I started), but I have a really solid foundation now. There are concepts I need to review again, I need to keep learning, but there's A LOT that I know how to do and that feels amazing!

This experience will be what you make of it...you will need to put in a lot of work outside of class time. Everyone is different, but I would have had a very difficult time keeping up with class if I had been working full time. Do yourself a favor and get a head start with webistes like W3Schools.com and freecodecamp.org...especially if you're a newbie. That is something I wish I would have done, it would have really helped to atleast be familiar with terms and concepts before day one. 

The only not great experience for me was career services...but again, this is what you make of it. We never got a chance to meet the career people in person and that doesn't work with my personality. I felt they were removed and not really a part of the whole experience. Because of this, I didn't participate fully in this aspect of the class. I'm sure if I had tried harder, I would have gotten more out of it...but I just never felt a connection with those folks, so it wasn't all that helpful to me.

Overall, I am 100% glad I took this class, zero regrets. I have gained SO much knowledge, met so many great people and I know that I have the skills I need to get a job I love and earn a great living! 

These bootcamps are a scam. I graduated the coding bootcamp at UNC - Chapel Hill which I learned after I registered wasn’t a UNC instructor led program at all but an outside company called edx. The stuff they teach is introductory website development but when you enroll you’re under the impression that you could be a software engineer. In classes of 50 at the start dwindles down to 20-30 by the end with no more than 5 actually landing a job. The number of people who are 15k in debt with nothing to show for it but a piece of paper, myself included, makes me sick. In my experience of the job search no one wants a bootcamp graduate without an comp sci degree and the tests they make you take before they’ll even consider interviewing you are light years beyond anything you learn in the bootcamp. They claim they offer job assistance but it’s basically useless. The only job you can get with ease is with edX as a teaching assistant to the next groups of poor souls who take the course. It’s like a pyramid scheme. And they have you rate your experience of the career placement/job help before you even receive the service/graduate cause most people don’t go back in to rate what their experience actually was. Only what the student experience folks leave you believing you’re going to get which is a super shady practice. Unless you’re a computer science grad or mathematically inclined the chances of you getting a job or slim. 

This is a challenging yet rewarding program.  We started with the basics so you were able to see the return on your time investment right away.  While some weeks are harder than others, there is a great opportunity for growth, development and pride in knowing you are now doing something you couldn't do just a few weeks ago.  I put in 15-18 hours a week with class time, prep time and project work, which pretty much turns it into a part-time job.  However, I have learned quite a bit, and am already using it in my day to day work.

If you are looking for a challenge that will help you grow as a professional - I highly encourage you to look into these programs! 

This course was incredibly well-ran. We covered every technology to make us competitive in the job market, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, APIs, React, MERN, MySQL, MongoDB, and quite a few more. The instructors were largely graduates of the bootcamp who are working in the field. On top of teaching the curriculum, they would discuss getting a job after, what their day-to-day was like, timelines in regards to getting a job, and salary expectations, while providing their personal experience in the subjects. By the end of the course, I accepted a job that was double what I was making. I can't say that the bootcamp was directly responsible, considering my previous work experience was related but, the bootcamp definitely helped and opened opportunities for me within the new position. 

The UNC-CH Full Stack Flex Bootcamp was a challenge but it has changed my life. I entered the course with little-to-no knowledge of HTML & CSS and left the course with a wealth of knowledge in everything from how to manage Github branches with a team to full stack React applications. It will be challenging and it will take a lot of personal time to digest the course material and make the concepts make sense to you. I personally had to spend 15-20 hours a week outside of the course to fully feel like I had grasped the concepts so make sure you're able to do so depending on your level of comfort with learning new things at a blistering pace. That being said, the level of support from instructors, TA's and tutors along the way were what made this course feel like I had made the right choice when things got difficult. The staff was nothing short of patient, kind and caring from when we were learning how to center div's in the early weeks to when we were connecting server and client sides of an application and troubleshooting deployments at the end of the course. 

UNC Chapel Hill Bootcamp is the ultimate guide to enhance your information technology skills and so far one of the best bootcamps out there. If you're planning to change your career, this bootcamp is a great place to start. One of the thing I would like to mention here is, you need to be consistent, you will have to give your 100% as its a bootcamp and it is a fast paced course I am glad I chose this one because the other courses are 14 week and this one is 24 week (part-time) that give to you time to breathe. My instructor and TAs always made sure that my doubts were clarified and that they assisted me with any question I had. They also assigned a tutor to me for the duration of my bootcamp experience, and I received one session per week, which was a huge help outside of class. They also have a BCS (bootCampSpot) support team that can be reached on live chat as many times as you need help. I conducted some research and discovered that this bootcamp provides a wide range of curriculum, which is something that not many bootcamps do. I enjoyed working on solo and team projects. If you're planning to go for a bootcamp, GO FOR IT!!!! It will be stressful, you might get irritated, there's a lot you will go through as far as reading, understanding new concepts that you've never heard of, homework due dates, being active with class activities, getting Employer ready and employer competitive. There will be times you would not see your friends and family for weeks, because you're trying your best to accomplish your goals. Don't give up, keep going because it is WORTH IT !! Take advantage of the resources they provide, be consistent, don't give up, be happy and proud of yourself because you will complete this milestone in your life soon and practice practice practice. 

Thanks to my instructional team and TA's Alper, Joshua and Carl for the help and my Tutor Samuel. 

This was a fantastic program from start to finish. I am adequately prepared to apply the skills and knowledge I obtained during the course to my own business and the new job I am starting next month. The material was thorough and challenging, but I felt I had plenty of support to get through the program from the instructors and classmates. I would say the most rewarding aspect of the course was my overall change in mentality and outlook to creatively marketing any product. I now can confidently execute a marketing plan with ease and be able to track the results after setting up all the necessary checkpoints along the way. We covered SEO, paid search, Google analytics, website design, and retargeting strategies just to name a few of the helpful topics. After the course was over I earned a job placement in my favorite city and have a group of fellow classmates and instructors that I bounce ideas off of for the rest of my life. I highly recommend this course to anyone looking to get into the digital marketing/content creation space. 

The UNC-Chapel Hill Boot Camp is everything that is advertised. You will learn how to build a full stack application in six months and it will prepare you for work outside the class. The instructors are knowledgeable, the TA's are incredibly generous with their time, and you have an hour of tutoring each week. All that said, it is a big time commitment to really study, comprehend and put all of this to memory. If you have a busy schedule already I strongly recommend balancing it BEFORE starting the course. Once you start, the curriculum does not stop and you will fall behind if you're not completely dedicated. All that said - my experience was great, albeit challenging. I'm walking out of the course with a new job as a technical account manager with a fully remote tech company that just got their series b funding. I would not have been qualified for the job without taking this course (HTML, CSS, Javascript and knowing how to pass data from client side to backend was a must). Again... difficult... but doable and worth it if you have the time/bandwidth to commit.