University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Boot Camps

I was a visual design student already and wanted a career path to enter the corporate world or even start my own business and boot camp from UofT served a great purpose in achieving my goals. I had a great learning experience with the Instructor and the TA's. They were highly supportive and always provided with real time job market update. My advice for upcoming students would be to prepare themselves using Youtube before the class every week and always attend office hours that is the precious time throughout the course. 

I read another review here that says <5% of 2 x cohorts got a job. i think they are talking about my cohort bc a year later, most are still not employed in cyber. The good bootcamps will tell you their successfully employed percentages. 

I read the response from the bootcamp to the negative reviews. You guys assume that those people don't know how to work hard or network and i think that's pretty rude. I hated this bootcamp for the exact same reasons as the negative reviews -- but I got a job in cyber at 6 fig before even graduating so please don't respond w/ the same lecture about how getting a job is more than applying. I also muted the instructor (who was a trump fan and decided this was appropriate class conversation), I did my own projects that involved actually figuring sh*t out, and I networked. When you're interviewing, nobody cares about your class projects. They want to see that you took initiative on your own and that you have the proven ability to "figure sh*t out". This was the biggest issue w/ class. What do you have to show for it afterwards other than the ability to follow instructions?

Another part of this bootcamp's responses to the negative reviews that felt disrespectful to me me (beyond their assumption that the negative reviewers are unemployed ppl with no work ethic) is that they don't actually address what the negative reviewed says. It reads like GPT4 wrote the response. Come to think of it, the form-response is kinda on par with the content of the bootcamp. 

Here's some examples of why I hated this class:

- When I gave feedback to the "student success person" miguel/mike or whatever that I was extremely bored and unchallenged, you know what his response was? He told me that i will eventually less less intimidated by all this difficult CLI stuff. He clearly wasn't listening. I felt really disrespected by this treatment.
- Bc i often came to office hours before class, the instructor literally called me a kill-joy for interrupting their small talk with actual questions. Sample topics of convo from him: "Is climate change real? i dunno...", "Trump seems like a good guy you know?", "Did the big bang happen? Really dont know eh" << thx, 2U, for employing a freaking anti-science CREATIONIST to teach us.
- instructor was offended when I asked if I should learn Bash or Python in depth bc I had heard bash was less useful these days. Literally got offended.
- no feedback on homework.none whatsoever. They thought i was advanced. I had zero tech exp before this, I just put in A LOT of work.
- the tutor they assigned me literally did not know how to use Linux and was not able to answer a single question I had. He did the course 2.5 years ago and still works at a phone sales place. That's the calibre of their tutors. You'd do better w/ $20/month GPT-Plus sub for your questions.

TL;DR - they do NOT listen to feedback (see point 1) and their calibre of instructors amounts to trump-loving climate denying creationists. I actually met an instructor from the Berkeley class who said, I quote: "The Toronto class is always the dumbest when I sub there." She's been CISO and has their own consulting company / has worked for major tech companies so I'm not going to dismiss what she said. But I also don';t think it's possible a city is just dumb. It's the sh*t instructors and tutors. TAs were solid. 

PROS - listen, if you can afford to pay 12k just for structure, then it's ain't so bad. It is what you make of it. Prioritize your own projects and networking.
CONS - Go on linkedin. Search for ppl with this bootcamp. Make your own observations of how many are currently working in cybersecurity. ;)

PROs:
- TAs were helpful and available 
- homework extensions are easy to get
- everyone got an A

CONs:
- everyone got an A
- course material could be found online easily
- classwork and homework can be completed with google because they were that easy
- 6 months after graduating, less than 5% of two simultaneous cohorts is employed in security OUTSIDE of the bootcamp ecosystem
- instructor was rude
- very superficial depth which is fine except that the instructor really sold it to the class that this was advanced lmao
- zero care to feedback
- tutor they assigned was unemployed 2 years after graduating the course 
- basically an MLM scheme where they employ graduates at $20-25/hour
- student check-in person has inability to listen to each individual, assumes you're struggling 

Let's just say that I benefited more from muted the instructor, googling the homework, and networking. The people who got jobs heavily prioritized networking over pretending to learn basic IT concepts that cover less than hackthebox (which is $10/month).

As a beginner, I could not keep up without cutting my work hours in my day job. The curriculum was very satisfying that I can see in almost every job description in my field it matches.  my instructor was awesome. At the end of the day, we even do not know  how what to ask about class or subject he eliminated unnecessary questions and helped us to focus on what we needed. There were some topics that we wasted too much time (this is not my opinion, everyone's opinion) such as Java and I agree. This Bootcamp exceeded my expectations and I do not hesitate to give it a 4.5 out of 5. Just focus on what you are doing and keep learning. Before the course If you can finish some beginner python course to have some idea, it helps very much. 

- There were no questions that Instructor or TAs (Teaching assistants) left without an answer.
- Finish your homeworks and come up with questions this is the best way to keep up with course and eleveate your motivation

I am a U of T graduate who works as a software engineer and I enrolled in the part time cybersecurity bootcamp, ostensibly offered by the School of Continuing Studies, without having done my due diligence because it worked for my schedule and because I had some trust in the U of T brand and its general commitment to quality (and I am generally aware of the many issues, especially administrative ones, that it has). Most of the class came in with zero background or experience in tech or IT and it seems some percentage of these students, namely the few who write the curated testimonials that will go up onto the relevant SEO-optimized websites, are easily impressed by extremely low quality content. 
The very first thing you need to understand is that neither U of T nor the School of Continuing Studies have any involvement whatsoever in providing staff, assistant instructors, curriculum development, or administering the program in any capacity of consequence. The program is run by some American company called Trilogy Education Services. I would strongly advise you to do some research into Trilogy and its questionable track record before you commit any time or tuition to the program. They are obliged to disclose as much, but they will do so in the first class after many students will have made a commitment in tuition and scheduling. And then they will go right back to pretending that they are part of the U of T School of Continuing Studies; men and women who are staff at Trilogy, who you can look up on the internet, who are based in the US and have no connection with U of T will be sending you emails from non-U of T domains and putting “U of T SCS” in their signatures. Make no mistake that "partnered" means the School will advertise Trilogy's bootcamp using its brand and connections and Trilogy will claim no affiliation with U of T; said more simply, a convenient setup where U of T gets to dip into that lucrative bootcamp money at no risk to its vaunted reputation. Trilogy’s program costs about one and a half times as much as a full year of full time studies at the actual University of Toronto and gives you 10 hours per week of low quality instruction for six months. Oh, there are some services you get on the side, like some career services that will tell you to put certain words on your resume to get through an ATS and how to complete a LinkedIn profile. But they cannot pretend to promise results and they will not share job placement rates. They can tell you that your success depends on you (as it always has). So why are you paying $11k for this scheisse?. 
But enough poisoning of wells.This ‘intensive technical bootcamp’ takes six weeks to get to “this is what a script is.” The instructor shows up to class unprepared; I don’t doubt he had a hand in deciding what topics and activities are covered each class, but he insists on demoing things on the commandline live and spends an enormous percentage of lecture time trying to remember which flags to pass to which command in which order and troubleshooting issues in real time (a big nope if you have any experience with technical presentations). The assistant instructors are not people with industry expertise, but random people who passed through the previous cohort of the bootcamp, so the troubleshooting itself is often not productive and the activities are plagued with minor mistakes (oh so the ‘f’ in ‘rm -rf’ stands for ‘file’ now, and the command doesn’t work on directories???). They have some quite specific and quite bizarre hardware and software requirements for the program and homework activities. You will find yourself doing things like spinning up a full GUI-enabled desktop Ubuntu virtual machine... to complete an activity where you copy-paste the command to create a user and set their password into a text submission file. About halfway through there is a ‘pwn th1s m4ch1n3’-type activity... where step 1 in the setup instructions is “type ssh root@$IP_ADDRESS” and use this password to login to the target machine as root. Oh apologies, step 1 is ‘use this Vagrantfile to spin up *two* full GUI-enabled Ubuntu virtual machines’, one as the ‘attacker’ machine and one as the ‘target’... and the only reason you’re spinning up an ‘attacker’ VM is so you can open terminal and type ssh. For all the talk they give you about how important it is to deeply understand networking you have to wonder if anyone on the team noticed the bloat of extra virtual network adaptors Virtualbox puts on your machine during installation, or understands that host machines can talk to guest machines over a network. To be fair though, the reason we somehow have root credentials to the machine we’re trying pwn is because the team designed a ‘capture the flag’ where you navigate a filesystem and use grep to find the hidden password… and the instructor spent an hour solving the CTF for you on class time. Every single homework activity is *less* complex than the already very basic examples the instructor walks you through on class time. Altogether the activities take very little time to complete and have very little value in terms of learning or practicing concepts; but they are, however, very good at keeping students (and assistant instructors, just keeping it real) who have no IT experience busy with unnecessary and time-consuming troubleshooting woes. Their customer service people will tell you that later in the bootcamp the pace will pick up and you will learn more advanced tools and techniques, but believe me when I say it does not get better. 
The only things of value that you could possibly walk away from this nonsense with are industry certifications and to be sure one of the deliverables Trilogy will give you for completing their program is a certification voucher.. Surely it couldn’t be one of the very same discount vouchers you’d find in the back of a CompTIA textbook? If you’re willing to put in money and time to go down this career path I’d strongly advise skipping the bootcamp nonsense and just focusing on certifications. For the cost of this bootcamp you can buy anywhere from like 20-500 reasonably priced certification courses from places like Udemy if you need structured learning, or from places like Coursera if you’re looking for the deep insight of experienced industry professionals or university faculty. From what I understand from students who graduated from the Full Stack Development bootcamp (a different program), the situation there is similar, it just does not compare to other bootcamps in Toronto. Quality matters, and knowing nothing about which courses you’re looking at from those sources I’d still bet money theirs is much, much, much better than Trilogy. 
Shame on the School of Continuing Studies for this ‘partnership’.

Please do not even think of registering for this course IF YOU HAVE ZERO BACKGROUND IN CODING, they will take any fool who is willing to pay 12k (including me). The interview process is a joke and the test they give to gauge your knowledge about computers is like asking a high school student to spell "father or mother".  They tell you to self-study and search material on google for which they charge 12k (this will the most expensive google search you do in your lifetime).  The material they have on their platform is to the point and gives very little explanation on the subject matter. They tell you that you have one week to drop off if you don't like which is ridiculous since in any program they teach the very basics and you cant judge how difficult the program is going to be within that week. After that say goodbye to you 12k. This is daylight robbery.
 I want to make sure no one else wastes their money on this useless course. Furthermore, this boot camp is done by an educational institute called trilogy in partnership with U of T. I don't think the university is regulating the course, and this results in tarnishing the reputation of this prestigious institute. I will make sure this taken up by the U of T and at least not to con people into registering for this program. I want to stress again, this is purely from the perspective of a person with NO CODING BACKGROUND.  

This course is quite challenging and needs to be taken seriously - definitely not low maintenance and more difficult to balance if you're already working full-time. However, it's 100% worth taking because of the quality of the work and the teachings you will be exposed to. I learned so much to help further project my self-learning and ideas. Even though it was difficult to keep up, I was adequately challenged which in my opinion is more valuable. There is a lot of support available along the way as well and lively discussons on tech, it's not all about the code, you also learn the reason why behind the technologies you are being exposed to. Keep your instructors and teaching assistants engaged with the areas you are having most difficulty in so that they can adequately assist you. As long as there is incentive to learn, you will enjoy it! The career option is very useful but you may find that you barely have the time to focus on it. The career coaches will work with you as well to ensure that they bring you up to speed and there is time after the course to polish your career material and portfolios.

Took the full stack development course at UTM. Like a lot of you reading I wasn't sure based on the reviews if this course would be worth it but after graduating i can definitely say i dont regret it.

If you are someone who needs a structured learning environment this program is perfect. The instructor and TAs are a great support as well as the fellow students. Although the program is challenging it is definitely doable. You get out of this program what you put into it.

The curriculum is great and gave me a lot more knowledge about web development and its practices. Working in groups helped me to understand how it works in real life. Some minor problems I did have with it was introducing more modern practices (ES6) towards the end of the program. I also felt along with other classmates that we didn't spend enough time on React. 

Overrall, I had a great experience with this program. I would 100% recommend it.