UNC Charlotte Boot Camps

In the fall of 2023, I had never even opened the terminal before.   After six short months, I have gone to developing full stack web applications.   As a college dropout, I was worried I would not be able to complete the bootcamp but thanks to a friendly and informative instructor as well as a well structured curriculum, I was able to tackle and overcome the harsh challenges presented and hold my head high as a graduate.   Now for the first time in years I can see a hopeful path forward for my future and the career I might be able to take, for that I can only say I am grateful to the full stack bootcamp of UNC Charlotte.

I am a career changer transitioning from 22 years in healthcare to cybersecurity. For the past 3 years cybersecurity has sparked my interest, so I decided to take the leap and enroll in UNC-Charlotte's cybersecurity bootcamp. It was the best decision and an experience that I will remember for a life-time.  I enjoyed the instructional staff and making new friends through the program. The instructional team and my peers were very supportive. I enjoyed working with other students to complete projects, and I was challenged to think in new ways.   The benefits of this program included office hours to ask questions before and after class; utilizing tutors; and 24/7 live support.  My advice to future students would be to set a study schedule, practice exercises, utilize tutors, and bring your own skills to the table. Everyone has skills, no matter your background, that will contribute to the cybersecurity experience. 

Please avoid this bootcamp. As I'm sure most of you reading this post have found elsewhere throughout the web, that the UNC at Charlotte "Coding Bootcamp" actually has no affiliation whatsoever with the actual UNCC, other than paying them a portion of their revenue as a means to utilize the schools name & image. The actual company of this bootcamp is "Trilogy Education" or "2u", and a simple google search of either of the 2's "coding bootcamps" will give you a rough overview of how reprehensible of a company it is.

Their "Pre-Screening"
This is honestly this most comical portion of the process. The constant phone calls/emails/ and sales pitches this company does alone is a red flag. Upon your application, you are given a simple "assessment" with the difficulty level of a middle school math quiz, and are congratulated on your acceptance moments later. Is it virtually impossible for you to "fail" the assessment. It's simply a cover up to project the assumption that spots in the cohort are scarce. When they are in fact not, at all.

Price
Price wise the bootcamp is on the cheaper end. As it should be. After the first week of the bootcamp, there is a no refund policy & you are entitled to pay the entire amount regardless if you complete it or not. Grading in the bootcamp is relatively simple, the "grading system" & "graders" make it nearly impossible for you to fail an assignment (or the "bootcamp") unless little to absolutely no effort was put into the assignment.

Content
The content is basic front end & back end technologies with you only spending a couple days on each tech. Nothing you go over is thoroughly reviewed, and is mostly just skimmed over. Some of the technologies taught are extremely outdated and not handy in todays age of tech. A more desirable & modern skill of React is only briefly covered, in a total of 2-3 days, towards the end of the bootcamp.

There was one seminar with a career services representative towards the end of the bootcamp, but it was only a stunt to butter us up as we neared the completion of the camp. Most, if not all, if what was preached to us during that meeting, turned out to be extremely exaggerated expectations on how they would cater to our needs throughout our job search, in which I describe below.

"Career Services"/Post-Bootcamp
Post-Bootcamp Trilogy/2u's career services are absolutely horrible. They are "unable" to help you with your job search until you are "employer ready" which is only after you have gone back and forth with your career advisor, multiple times, on edits to you resume, GitHub, and portfolio. With response back times as long as an entire week/s, the entire system is honestly no help. Throughout this time, you will be emailed "job recommendations" for positions you have no business applying for. Everything from Senior Java Developer roles (Java isn't even taught in the course...), Data Engineering roles, and so on, will be sent to your email multiple times throughout the week.

Personal thoughts
Throughout my cohort, around 20/25 people were enrolled. around 5-10 failed or dropped the course, and out of the remaining 15/20, only 5 were able to land full time positions. Keep in mind this company does not publicize its job placement percentages publicly...

All in all, if you simply want a fast-pasted overview of a certain group of technologies, then this bootcamp should suffice. However, if you are looking for a bootcamp that actually offers you viable opportunity to begin your career change into the tech field, then I would search elsewhere for a more reputable bootcamp. Again if you don't trust my words, a simple google search on the company should corroborate everything stated here. Save your time & go else where.

There are a ton of positives and negatives to the Full Stack Web Development coding bootcamp at UNC Charlotte. I will address both of these from my honest perspective as a full time student in hopes that it provides future students a true insight into what to expect as well as hopefully assist UNCC and Bootcamp Spot with improving the program.
My starting point for context:Prior to starting this course I had written ZERO lines of code. I didn’t do the pre-course work either, which honestly you should do. I am naturally a little above average at learning speed, so don't go into this thinking you can just breeze through it.
Overall Course Experience:I had a great experience with this course and I would highly recommend it to certain people. I do not think this course would be great for everyone. You need to truly have a passion for learning to code, A LOT of time to dedicate to learning outside of class, and be a decently fast learner. You have 20 hours of class time a week, and it’s suggested you need to put in 40 hours outside of class. That’s not an exaggeration, I was putting in close to 90 hours a week in the second and third month of the course. 
Instructors:I only have positive things to say here. Our instructor was Anthony Cooper and I cannot speak highly enough of him. He is a very experienced coder and understands the entire full stack for web development. He was incredibly relatable and approachable, which I find to be extremely important for an educator. He was so incredibly patient with every student that struggled and we all certainly had moments where we struggled. There was never a moment that I encountered a problem in my code that Anthony could not solve. He even tried to adapt his teaching styles for each student’s learning style, which is incredibly difficult. He went above and beyond to help any student even outside of class hours, including weekends. He is truly a brilliant individual and my class was so lucky to have him, and UNCC is equally lucky to have an amazing educator such as him.
Our Teaching Assistant was Maxwell Allee and again, I can’t say enough great things about them. Max was so much more than just a TA, they were basically a second instructor. Their knowledge was incredible and I do not think I could have completed this course without their help along with the help from Anthony. They were so incredibly passionate about coding that it was infectious, just speaking about code to Max got me amped to code even more frequently. I don’t know when they actually had time to have a personal life or sleep because they were always helping a student. A difficult part about getting help with coding is that you don’t know how to phrase the question for someone else to understand the situation, Max was exceptional at understanding what someone was asking and getting you to your solution without just giving you the answer. Max facilitated learning above all else. They also had to help students through personal issues that came up throughout the course, which takes a lot of compassion. I can’t speak for each student, but the consensus was that Max was incredibly understanding and helpful in those moments. UNCC was so lucky to have them as a TA for 2 years, and they’ll be lucky when they decide to hire them back as an instructor (Max has moved on to a corporate job right after our course ended).While Anthony and Max were both incredible individually, they were even better as a pair. Both are truly full stack developers, and understand the course work inside and out, however Anthony excels at front end development and Max excels at back end development. Their expertise brought so much to the class and gave different learning perspectives which helped so much since everyone learns differently. I do not believe it is possible for there to be a better teaching pair out there. I feel bad for prospective students because you will not have this pair of incredible educators. I wish I could more eloquently describe just how incredible these two were.
Student Success Manager:The SSM role in this course is basically the in between person between the students and the university. A student advocate in my experience. Ours was actually a substitute SSM, I believe she was on loan from another university, her name was Gemini Sanford. She may be the kindest most compassionate person I have ever met. In my dealings with her I can say I felt so incredibly comfortable, safe, and heard. She went above and beyond any normal expectations of an SSM, and without her I would not have completed this course. I’ve spoken to a lot of my classmates about this program prior to writing this, it’s not my place to say their personal and private issues that came up, I will say that every one I’ve talked to has only the highest praise for Gemini. She was always the most positive and excited person on presentation days, she genuinely cares about your growth and happiness. She helped so many of us through so many different issues, she is the ideal person for a job like this. I hope one day to be as good at anything as she is at her job. 
Curriculum:I am giving this 5 stars but I do have negatives to point out in this section.

Anthony Cooper did a wonderful job presenting the curriculum and it is well designed to take you from not knowing how to code to being able to make a fully dynamic web application. 

You will learn the MERN stack, please research what that is and the pros and cons to that stack vs other stacks. You will be learning javascript, it will be your programming language. You’re not going to learn Python, C#, or Ruby… etc. You’re not learning to make mobile apps, or video games (I did end up making browser based games though). 
The course is well designed to amp up along the path. It starts out slow teaching the basics like HTML and CSS. As you get into javascript it is designed to not overwhelm you by throwing you directly into something like React, each unit is a stepping stone to something further down the line. I feel like they taught us Handlebars just to make React a bit easier to comprehend. 
The curriculum is designed for the part time 24 week course, and this is where a lot of negatives come in. The full time course is the same curriculum but just the time cut in half (I don’t think they even change any wording, they refer to things being an odd or even week for homework when that makes no sense when you have 2 homework assignments per week not 1). Where this becomes a pretty noticeable problem is with homework. In the part time it’s pretty easy to just have it due on the same day each week. In the full time it ends up changing, and you typically have homework due one day after you finish the unit it’s related to. There were many homework assignments that I spent 20+ hours on, trying to do that within a day and a half is tough. Homework should be due the day you finish the following unit. 

There are no days built in for catch up if your class falls behind. Adding a day or two to the schedule and being more fluid to adjust the schedule would help a lot. Possibly even making it a 13 week course, I know this hurts the marketing and increases overhead but one additional week would really help the students.
The assessment for entry to the course is not very selective. This can become a problem if everyone isn’t dedicated and able to put in the extra time outside of class, they can slow down the entire class or not contribute to group projects. A more selective process for the full time course than the part time course would really be a great benefit. 
Job Assistance:I will say they have a lot of assistance for your resume building. They provide great feedback and have a lot of example material to assist you. That is about where my positives end for job assistance.
Their sales staff are incredible, and I say that with a ton of sales experience. They certainly built up their career services department in our discussions. They claim to have a ton of industry contacts which will help you get a job post graduation, I have not found that to be the case. They have a job board but no referral system. They build up events like demo days where you’re supposed to have interaction with potential employers, however the last one had maybe 2 companies there. 
Most of my interactions with their career services staff have been copy and paste emails where the person doesn’t even change the signature name.
Do not take this course with the expectation that they will find you a job or even be a big help in the endeavour. 
Where I am at currently:I can make any website my mind can think up. I can create a backend server with authentication, and databases. Probably the most valuable thing to employers, I can work with React which allows a much more dynamic web experience. I can’t believe how much I learned in 12 weeks.
Synopsis:If you truly have a desire to learn coding to advance your knowledge and begin your journey, this is a great course. You need to be able to put in over 60 hours a week though! I just hope you get as lucky as I did with my instructor, TA, and SSM. If you are thinking of taking this course because it’ll get you a job right after graduation, this might not be the course for you.

I am a Computer Engineer but I stayed away from software development for more than a decade. I was looking for training programs in data analysis to get adapted to current technologies and I found this Data Analytics Boot Camp at UNC Charlotte, which seemed very complete for my current needs.

 I have really enjoyed this Boot Camp because I have been able to recall concepts and of course I have learned many other aspects that I did not know. I love the fact that everything is explained incrementally, there are many helpful resources available, I can re-watch the class videos, and there is even job search advice.

My advice for other prospective students would be at least to attend all classes, ask many questions and do your homework on time. Apart from that, try to go beyond the scope of classes and assignments, go the extra-mile because this program gives us the tools to success.

This CyberSecurity boot camp was outstanding! I went into it knowing I loved the field (without any previous work experience in it) and grew even fonder of the subject throughout the course. I was notified of this course through a school email, and was very interested. As I had just been terminated early from a temporary position due to Covid, I knew I wanted to do something in my time and this turned out to be the perfect fit.
Our instructor, Aaron, was phenomenal. He is such a smart person, and has a very wholesome way of teaching material that it is very easy to absorb. He's funny and engaging and he felt more like a classmate than a teacher. By far my favorite aspect was getting to learn from him. The material was good, although at times it was tough. But throughout the whole course he was fantastic and never wavered from his helpfulness.
I have just 2 pieces of advice for anyone interested in a boot camp course. 1: network, network, network. Even just messaging your instructor, or classmates, or being engaged in class discussion can go a long way for making positive connections that can turn out to be some of the best. 2: as any former student would say, do your homework ASAP. Don't let it sneak up on you. If you start the homework sooner, you'll have more time if something goes wrong. This also allows your TA's plenty of time to grade your work.
Overall this whole course was nothing but the best experience all the way through and I'm so happy I did it, and was lucky enough to have the instructor and classmates that I did.

The instructor, Johnny Wales, made this class very rewarding and enjoyable. His deep financial institutional knowledge, skill as a developer, and patience in class was the perfect combination for a professional and enjoyable environment. I was looking for a course to help me in my own position at a fintech startup, and I feel much more prepared to analyze data, evaluate technology vendors, and build my own solutions. This program was certainly challenging enough to make me feel like I was learning, especially skills in need today, not academic presumptions. Ultimately you  will get what you put in to it. Very worth my time and money. 

I joined this program because I wanted to gain technical skills in the finance industry. This program did just that for me. I started with no coding background and learned everything through the course. My instructor and TA were great. Those two were very knowledgeable and each had backgrounds that added a ton of value to my experience. The program is tough. So much material is covered and you may not intend to use all the skills they teach. I’d recommend only taking this course if you absolutely plan to follow through, invest the proper amount of time and be comfortable with not getting “it” right away. There is one on one tutoring available and the Student Success Manager was very accessible and responsive. I am currently working with the career services provided and it already has been very useful to me in learning how to gain an edge in the job search. Overall I had a great experience and gained a ton of value from the program.

The cybersecurity boot camp provides a fantastic opportunity for all students to accel in the cybersecurity field whether a senior professional or a novice much like I was. I was a former criminal investigator with law enforcement who had minimal knowledge of information technology when I walked into Aaron Trusky's class. I was in the midst of a daunting career change with no understanding of the expectations for success in the field. I found comfort in the class as Aaron taught with expert knowledge but provided confidence in the class for all to succeed. Even though some of the material was tough and the tools used would not always run optimally, the class led by Aaron would troubleshoot any problems and would always find a solution. This class was one of the best learning experiences I've ever had and has given me a foundation for success in the cybersecurity field.