University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Boot Camps

I recently graduated from Data Analytics Bootcamp in Toronto. In the beginning I had so much doubts about starting the program and leaving my previous career after 20 years! I questioned myself if I had made the right call to go back to school and challenge myself at age of 53! I was afraid but kept trying. Every week I learned something new and exciting that pushed me forward. Just one week after my graduation I landed an internship position with a growing Data Analytics company in Silicon Valley. The program was rich and gave me the confidence to take the challenge and do the job. The boot camp opened new doors and gave me new purpose in life.

Just completed UX/UI Design Bootcamp from University of Toronto. I decided to pursue this career path as it has been something I’ve been very fond (Webdesign and problem solving) of and curious if it can be a new career for me. From the beginning , I was already very impressed and pleased on the professionalism and understanding of the student advisor I had when I was just inquiring about the program. 
From there on, meeting the instructor, assistant instructors, and the whole Bootcamp team; my journey went from being challenging - working full time and haven’t been back to school for a really long time; to an enjoyable one!! The whole bootcamp team’s support gave me huge motivation and inspiration in seeing myself the designer I want to be! Beyond thankful for that!
If you are looking into getting into design - proper organization, time management and continuous collaboration with your instructors will definitely help you be successful! All the best!

I graduated Full Stack Web Development - Flex Part Time in July of 2020. It was a great and challenging experience. I could not have done it without the assistance of extremely talented and supportive instructing team in which I would take this opportunity to thank Edward Apostal. 

Ed has incredible knowledge and experience in this field and beyond, which he shared with the class to give us the real understanding into current work model and better prepared us to be employer ready. He was available even after hours to provide us ideas to solve a specific task which helped a lot when you are in a situation where nothing works and needed a senior advice. 

In addition, after graduation he informed us about job opportunities he is aware of, which is a great source when you are a new comer in the industry. He is a great instructor that will go an extra mile to help his students to reach the goal they set. I am very happy that I had the opportunity to learn from such a skilled and experienced instructor. I hope one day I will have the opportunity to learn more from him in the cybersecurity sphere!

Thank you Ed!

This program is for you if you are prepared to work hard and invest the time into the weekly deliverables. You will gain an excellent foundation in Cybersecurity. The industry professionals that make up the instructional team are exceptional, and I was truly blown away with the practical application of what we were learning.

This program is hands-on from beginning to end, with activities such as building a secure cloud network, performing a forensics based investigation on iPhone data, exploiting vulnerable websites and infrastructures and installing 'back-doors,' to name a few. The list truly goes on and touches on an incredible amount of content.

It's tough, but the instructional team set you up for success, even after the program the career support is very active and committed to your success. This program easily earns my highest recommendation!

Having a background in Business Administration I chose this field because Cybersecurity is an in-demand, fast-growing. It is one of the Information Technology domains which are becoming more and more challenging. One of the best things about the Cybersecurity is that you get an opportunity to work with top-class organizations after getting the required skill sets.  You will be a part of an exciting and challenging field. My UofT's experience so far has been amazing! It is evident that they go out of their way to make sure each student has a positive experience. The instructor is key in any learning classroom environment and my instructor was top notch. He has an excellent grasp of the subject matter and ensured that each student understood the basic and most advanced concepts. The UofT SCS Cybersecurity boot camp is no picnic, it takes ambition, persistence, commitment, hard work, re-doing activities and self-study to make this course worthwhile. The staff was very courteous and accommodating. I would recommend to anybody looking to get certified.

They do a great job of preparing you for the course starting with the pre-work which gives you a good start to understanding how to code. They make sure that you know that it is a very difficult course, but you end up having a lot of support from the TAs and staff. 

The homework is very difficult, but if you put in the time, it should not be a problem. If you need extra help, you can request to have a tutor to help you. 

Not only do you work on solo projects like homework, but it also requires you to complete group projects. The course not only prepares you to understand how to perform in the industry, but also how it is like from going through interviews to working with other developers in a group.

Learning the various languages (Javascript, React, Node, MongoDB and many more) in this curriculum will set you aside from competition in your future endeavors, whatever those may be. I was extremely young going into this program, still in the middle of my undergraduate degree, but with hard work and the great support of the instructors as well as the academic support worker, I had no doubts that I could complete this program to the best of my ability. I highly recommend this program to anyone looking to set themselves apart in not only the coding and computer sciences but in any path, you decide to go down! 

Instructors:

Instructor and TAs were friendly and knowledgeable. The instructor we had was an expert with many years of experience in the software industry and it really showed with his depth of knowledge in many aspects of computer science/programming/web technologies. The TAs were enthusiastic and always managed to point me in the right direction even if they were sometimes unable to answer my questions.

 

Curriculum:

I found the curriculum on the easy side but I may be biased because I have some prior experience in coding. I noticed some of my cohorts struggling so YMMV. The good thing with many of the activities/projects were that they included bonus challenges, which was great for people who found the base curriculum easy.

In any case, the activities and projects give you a good starting point but to be really proficient and get the most out of this course you need to be creative and go beyond the basic requirements for the projects. This means fulfilling the bonus requirements as well as adding in as many features as possible to your apps. This will force you to learn to use new packages, APIs, and language features. It will also help you to learn how to use Google, StackOverflow.

 

Job assistance:

From the material I have seen and the one career meeting I have had, I think the careers service is pretty good. They also have many seminars with interview tips. Unfortunately, I was not able to fully utilize the career services due to a personal crisis, so I feel it is not appropriate for me to judge this aspect of the program. My former classmates tell me that they had a good experience.

 

Overall:

Pros:

instructor, curriculum, flexibility due to the online/remote nature

Cons:

cost, people with prior programming exposure may find it too easy

This course will push you to your limits  and then some every week for 6 months. You will experience doubt every step of the way but each week you’ll build something new that will increase your confidence. Before you know it, 6 months are up and you’ve just built a full single page application and backend yourself. You’ve also tried applying some in-browser machine learning to your application in your final team project.

You’ll still doubt yourself. But you will have gained something important, an understanding of your unique ability to work through that doubt and fear and complete the problem before you. 

The instructors and TAs in this bootcamp are phenomenal  the TAs might be precious students; so they’ll know exactly what you’re going through and can give you excellent tips and advice for the future. 

If you’re wondering whether you need to look elsewhere to learn the currently popular full-stack web development technologies, don’t because the team at trilogy really knows what they’re doing. 

And a big thank you to Andy Watson, who is a phenomenal instructor. 

I just finished 6 months of Full Stack web design through the University of Toronto School of continuing education. The idea of taking on Full stack web development at full speed may sound imposing, but it wasn't.

First, it is amazing what you will retain, and how you will improve your ability to learn ideas and concepts ou never thought possible. I have left bootcamp willing to embrace and challenge new technologies.

In order to be successful at this course, you must attend class, ask questions during office hours, watch a lot of YouTube videos, and try, try, try. Coding is the most frustrating things going as nothing works until you are 100% successful. The tools and support are available for you to be a success. 

So here is the deal,

You have to be mentally ready to take this program and make this change in your life. The first three months were very challenging for me personally, because i kept asking myself if this program was the right decision i made, but when i created my own web-app back-to-front i realized that my biggest regret was not taking this program earlier.

If you never coded in your life you need to put in the hours to learn and build your skills, because you will not learn by putting the minimum 20hrs/week requested. This program is not an easy one. It’s very challenging and physically demanding.

The weekly homeworks might take you more than 20hrs for each to complete. Why is that? because the material covered in this program is equivalent to three years program.

The classrooms are located in a new beautiful building in UofT downtown core, and our instructor Mr Uzair Faisal, is simply the best.