App Academy

The intensity of App Academy is well reported at this point. The reviews you read are mostly true - certain weeks it is reasonable to expect to spend 90+ hours on your computer. That said, you learn a lot and you learn without realizing just how far you've come, which is cool. The staff is excellent and approachable and the curriculum is well thought out. My main complaint with the program is that you are treated like a child, which might be helpful for some but I found irritating. You are required to submit daily reports on your progress with questions like "what did you learn today", which are never responded to unless you appear to be struggling (i.e. failing an assessment). Additionally, you'll have to check in three times a day by clicking a little button you can only access while on the a/A network. These are minor things but they seem like needless added stress to me.

Let me say in advance that I think the program itself is superb. The Teaching Assistants all know what they're talking about, and are very good at answering your questions and clarifying your understanding of things. The course material is all excellent, and by the end of the course, you'll have a strong understanding of vanilla javascript, ruby, rails, and using it all together to create an app or service from scratch. AA does a great job teaching ruby, rails, React + Redux, and putting it all together in a final package.

However, while the material is all superb, the downside is the extreme pacing and difficulty. You will easily do 12-14 hour days of non-stop coding, studying, etc (with the occasional breaks for sanity, of course). I would only recommend this program if you feel that you are completely prepared for the sheer intensity of the program. You learn a lot, and you have to learn it fast. If you fall behind, material quickly snowballs, and you'll be left behind. I cannot stress enough how important time management, and being prepared for the workload, is for to get the most out of this experience.

Having a very good grasp of ruby, javascript, and a basic understanding of how the internet works, will help a lot to prepare for what you'll encounter. Prior experience helps a lot. If you aren't good at typing at a decently fast pace, practice. Make sure you're fully prepared before coming in, or else you might be in for a rude awakening.

Ultimately, you get out what you put into it. There is not a lot of leeway for slacking off. You spend the time getting prepared and getting ahead. Every day builds on the last, and missing one or more days can easily snowball into a miserable weekend trying to catch up. You do not want to be playing catch-up. Having said that, everyone learns the material at a different pace. Get comfortable with the struggle, but don't get lazy about it.

Tips: Ask questions. Review the next day's material and get a good grasp of what's coming. Let lecture fill in those holes so you are prepared to tackle the day's projects.

I'll try to add something that may or may not have been told by some students. Now the question we all as prospect students are, are all these reviews true? well yes. You will get an outstanding education from a/A and I'm saying this as I have attended a bootcamp a few years ago and graduated without knowing much except building a quick website.

NOW I'm gonna say this hopefully clear, if you don't have that strive to want a job, come out being one of the top students in the industry and that includes putting nearly 15-18 hours a day, including weekends just to get there, then please do yourself a favor and most amazing teachers/possible colleagues a favor and do not apply. This isn't a kids program or for someone who says oh I just want to be able to build a website or two. There are many of those bootcamps that you can go to and have honestly a less stressful time.

BUT for those willing to succeed, put the grit and time to come out as one of the top programmers from a bootcamp, I'll say apply and get ready for a crazy ride called learning. It'll be intensive, you'll have sleepless nights and possibly have an unhealthy diet, but it'll be an amazing experience, one you'll never regret. Looking forward to meeting all of you hopefully one day who makes it till the end.

My experience at App Academy definitely lived up to the intensity that others had described. Be warned, it really is intense. It’s physically and mentally draining. If you have any kind of background related to computer programming you may have a better time. As someone without a background I had to work constantly just to hang in there. Nearly everyday I was confused by what I was learning and that was definitely something hard to get used to. I’d never felt so impotent in my life. I averaged 5-6 hours of sleep at night and was slowly enveloped by a thick fog. The longer I went without sleep the more confusing and difficult things became. It got to the point I could barely remember the conversations I’d just had with people. Luckily I was always able to catch up on some sleep during the weekend and get back to ‘reality’ for a couple of days. If you are planning to take the course you should know that if you want to succeed the course will have to be your life. This is difficult to maintain, but it is possible.

            In hindsight I believe I may have taken somewhat of the wrong approach to the course (although I don’t regret the way I accomplished it). I did everything they told us to do. I did all the readings and all the homeworks every night. This is the reason for my lack of sleep. I tried to do everything, and many of my fellow classmates did not. I think I allowed myself to get so tired that the work I was doing wasn’t helping as much as it was hurting me.

            If you’re looking just to pass the course, I believe it may be pretty easy. All the exams were very very closely related to the given practice exams. If you know how to memorize a practice exam and other topics that may appear on the exam, the exams are easy. You should be able to take the practice exam in half the expected time. If you can do that, I believe you will pass the real exam. There weren’t really any curveballs.

            That said we did lose many classmates from the exams. A student was even sent home on the last exam. I believe we lost a total of 12 people, and started with 62. I believe that those students probably had tried to do too much and weren’t able to effectively learn the practice exams.

            It’s a tough course and it’s important to make good friends throughout the program. Don’t count on being comforted by the staff. It’s required to fill out progress reports every night, but then you are given the impression that no one ever reads them. It’s like shouting into the wind. I was never once approached to discuss my ideas or encouraged to keep up the good work.

            But the community is great and you feel an unspoken bond with everyone in the course. We’re all suffering together.

            You will learn the curriculum that they advertise and you will become a fullstack developer.

            I am about to start the job search curriculum of the program and hope that I will be able to find a job. I do feel that I have learned a lot since I started and look forward to continuing my education.

            The rating is hard for me to give because I am yet to know how effective I will be at securing a job. 

Before coming to app academy, I taught myself coding over a period of two years. In that time I used free resources such as Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, and CS50 EDX. After joining App Academy, I can confidently say that I learned exponentially more in app academy than I did in the two years that I spent with those free resources. App academy provides a curriculum that keeps you engaged and challenges you to reach past what you thought you were capable of and bring more to the table than ever before. While the program is tough, if you stick with the work you will learn a lot and make it through. 

Pros: Good TAs and fast paced curriculum. It's pretty unbelievable how much you'll learn in 9 weeks. If you're a self-starter and enjoy the fast-paced learning, you will get a lot out of the program. 

Con: Unforgiving pace and schedule. It's easy to fall behind if you don't put in the time/work. The learning style might not be suited for everyone. The near weekly assessments can be stressful  (around ~15% of each cohort ends up getting asked to leave for failing assessments). 

General tips: Do the prepwork! You're not starting with the assumption that you don't know anything day1. You're expected to be able to do small object-oriented programs from the very beginning, and you definitely don't want to start off behind. It's a big commitment, so don't plan on doing anything except the program for the 3 months. 

DISCLAIMER: I will be getting a hoodie from App Academy for writing this review, but the content of the review will not be influenced by this ‘reward’

I came to App Academy with a limited background in Computer Sciences and STEM fields and, 9 weeks into the program, have come out with a complete entry-level knowledge of full-stack development. The resources that have helped me from getting from point A to B in such a short amount of time was the rigor and depth of a/A’s curriculum. The most important reason is that the curriculum is so effective is that class-time enforces students to be immersed in programming and coding challenges for a maximum amount of time. The pair-programming aspect of the curriculum is a strong way to enforce communication skills and forces students to have a deeper understanding of new lessons when they are encouraged to explain their thought-process to their peers. The quality of said peers is also generally excellent in terms of character and ability. While pairing chemistry will never be perfect between every student, it was always evident to me that my peers took their time in the program very seriously and were always concerned with learning the material deeply, preparing for each class adequately, and producing high-quality work. The teaching staff is also generally excellent. I found that the quality of individual instructors would often correlate to their time in the program, but because the curriculum is so intense, the more junior instructors themselves also appear to improve quite rapidly. While there was sometimes a quality gap between new and veteran instructors, the actual time-difference between the former and the latter was usually only a cohort or two. And generally, I found that the entire package of TAs, who do all of the teaching at App Academy, was excellent and foundational to my own learning in the program.

As for the cons, the largest is definitely the intense and disheartening aspects of the assessment structure of the curriculum. Personally, the assessments were the most important reason that I spent so much time working and studying outside of class hours. This is because if you fail two assessments, plus a single retake opportunity, you are dismissed from the course. With a weekend full of intense studying, I personally found the assessments to be fair and the course will give preparation materials that strongly correspond to the actual assessment. On the other hand, sometimes peers cannot make it through the grind of assessments: I believe that these individuals that were dismissed from the program do have the potential to be good programmers in the working world, and it was likely the pace of the curriculum, more so than its sheer technical difficulty, that was the largest hump to get over. Overall, my advice to prospective future students is that if you are confident in your programming abilities coming into the first week of the program, expect to still spend a lot of time on assessments and digesting the enormous amount of material from the week prior. If you are coming in less-confident, or even worse, having rushed through the four weeks of prep work, then expect to spend an extraordinary amount of time (and lack of sleep) on keeping your head above water. While the assessment structure does force students to master the material, for the most part, the stressful atmosphere that it creates through the whole school is an unfortunate trade-off.

Finally, I wanted to comment on the quality of the facilities, which is important because students spend most of their hours here. During my cohort, the New York office got a significant upgrade in amenities and privacy. Before, both concurrent cohorts shared a single loft space with poor water pressure, mediocre bathrooms, and sometimes inconsistent internet. Now, each cohort gets their own floor to work on, and the office space includes a decent kitchen setup outfitted with utensils, plateware, drinking mugs/glasses, and a dishwasher. Most importantly, the coffee and teas offered by the building were significant upgrades over Folgers and Lipton. These small touches, for me, actually made a tremendous quality-of-life improvement; since most of our time will be in front of screens in the office, it’s good that the peripheral comforts are well-appointed.

All-in-all I would recommend App Academy to those who want to make a tremendous career shift to a good field in the least amount of time possible. My warnings are regarding its pace, difficulty, and the toll it can take on your personal well-being.

I will start out by saying that this coding bootcamp was the toughest program that I have been a part of. 
I am sure that the other reviews all say very similar things and that you don't have to know that much about programming to be able to finish this course. I agree though I would add an asterisk. There are 3 ways to successfully complete this course: 1. You can be an insanely fast learner, 2. you can already have experience in the field of software development, or 3. you have to be almost bulldogged in your persistence. Everyone in my cohort was a joy to work with and they were all super smart and super helpful. The test structure forces you to learn the test more that learn the fundamentals. While this causes stress, and the experience of losing classmates to the rigid testing system was awful I feel like it is in place to maximize the schools success rate. If you are smart you can make it, if you are a coding enthusiast already you can make it and if you are super persistent, you can make it. Those are the people that are most likely to get jobs and be successful. Overall I feel like I have learned a lot and that I have at least the ability to continue learning and improving.

I would like to leave you with 2 main take aways. 1. if you are ready to change your life and are committed to taking advantage of every resource you can then prepare and be committed, otherwise go to a different program. 2. the program was super stressful but also the most enjoyable learning experience that I have ever had. I feel that this has everything to do with the selection process, the other students and the TA's.