University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Boot Camps

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.

Basically, you get what you put into it.

From reading some of the negative reviews, I get the feeling these individuals do not understand the industry. There is no specific bootcamp that will make you a master of any language in 6 months. By taking this course you will develop the skills do develop web applications using today's technology. You will learn how to teach yourself which is a required skill of any developer. You will also learn how to work with other people of varying skill levels. It gets you ready to enter the industry.

I'm taking the remote course and it is fantastic. My instructor has been coding for 20 years. The career services aspect of the course is very good. Again, you get what you put into it. If you want a computer course with little practical experience I suggest take that course, spend way more money and see how it goes in 4 years.

I recommend this course for anyone with a passion for developing web applications. If you have taken any time learning on your own and found it a little overwhelming, I highly recommend signing up for this course as it will make everything clear and less cloudy for you and you will find your progress accelerating at a rate that will provide you much satisfaction.

First of all I think UOFT should be ASHAMED of affiliating with Trilogy and offering this disgraceful program. There are several negative reviews online and not a single positive review so I'm not the only one that feels like I've been ripped off. All of the reviews are accurate the curriculum is terrible and rushed. There hasn't been a single class where we have actually completed all of the planned lessons. The instructors shouldn't even be refered to as instructors none of them have prior teaching experience or are qualified to teach. The staff at Trilogy pretend they care and want to help you but they don't. The worst part about the program is we were lied to about receiving a certficate, 10 weeks into the program they broke the news to us that we actually won't be receiving a certificate! I feel like this program should be shutdown and everyone should be reimbursed, what they are doing does not feel right at all they have deceived several students and pocketed over a million dollars in tuition and have not delivered what they promised. Please do not fall for this scam.

First of all, 90% of the students in the class are computer illiterate, they can't even figure out how to use GitHub, install an operating system or do anything beyond browse the web. The school should do a better job at determining a student’s skill level before admitting them to the program, the students that have no computer knowledge just slow the class down and waste the instructors time with the stupidest questions. Second of all we have had 3 different instructors within 6 weeks, first instructor was fired and replaced with someone very young that tutors high school kids and has no real teaching experience. Third the curriculum itself is very basic and disappointing, JavaScript and html is not real programming in my books I feel like I was swindled by the school we were promised a full stack dev program not a html/js class. If you are thinking of going here rethink your options, the course may be hosted at UOFT but don't be fooled you will not get the same quality you would get through other UOFT programs.

The bootcamp provided me with an incredible opportunity to enhance my coding skills and grow as an individual. Balancing this rigorous program alongside my university studies was undoubtedly challenging, but it proved to be an immensely rewarding experience. The intense schedule, combined with project deadlines and assignments, pushed me beyond my comfort zone and taught me the importance of perseverance and time management.Completing the bootcamp opened new pathways for success, and I am proud to have secured an internship as a Data Analyst—a testament to the skills and knowledge I gained. This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my instructors, peers, family, and friends, for which I am deeply grateful.For anyone currently pursuing a bootcamp, my advice is simple: “Finish what you started.” It’s natural to encounter challenges along the way, but persistence will carry you through. Make the most of the resources available—attend office hours and seek help from tutors, who are both approachable and incredibly supportive. Also Use Xpert Learning platform to check your mistakes and ask for guidance how to complete assignments, as it helped me a lot. The bootcamp experience was transformative, and while it tested my limits, it ultimately equipped me with valuable skills and confidence to pursue my career goals. It’s a journey I’ll always cherish and recommend to others.

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’.