General Assembly

I enrolled in the Web Development Immersive at General Assembly in summer 2014. Given my Industrial Engineering background  + work in consulting I was a bit skeptical of the program's promise to truly bring you up to speed in 12 weeks on being able to get a full time job. My headline for review is: WDI is incredibly valuable, there is 0 minutes wasted on useless topics, everything is practical and a necessary block needed in progression towards becoming a junior developer. 

Faculty: The highlight for me was the dedicated faculty (2 instructors per class + 1/2 TAs) who would come to class extremely prepared, run each session as a working session (vs. lecturing at you) and be prepared to stay through the evening as you are going through the daily exercises. The faculty really lives and breathes your success and holds that as a KPI. This is something I could never say about many of my undergraduate professors. They were also extremely good at their job and very up-to-date on what is being used and most relevant in the industry today.

Classmates: It is a very fun and engaging environment. The class sizes are much smaller than normal university which means you get to really know the people you are studying with. There's a lot to be learnt from your classmates throughout the 12 weeks but also during project weeks. 

Relevance: The WDI team constantly updates the curriculum to make sure students are equipt with the latest talent requirements in the industry. Don't be surprised if the curriculum you will take is a bid different than years before -- it is all changes made to student's benefits with the aim of getting us junior developer jobs. 

Outcome: Almost everyone in my class was able to find junior dev jobs 1-3 months post graduation. Others who were interested in becoming a more technical PM, also found WDI useful in giving them credibility needed to deal with engineering teams. I have since had 3 close friends enroll in the program and all happily found great jobs after. 

I have been looking for one of the courses that I can study during my visit to US and my firends who live in Boston told me that Generalassambley is a good option. I did not have a chance to apply to full courses because of my current studies and I have tried applying for part time. I have filled first document from their website and they replied me that one of their representetives will get in touch with me.This person send me an email to mark a day and an hour that both of us are available. I did exactly what they asked me for and I got an email that my apointment is confirmed. Hence, when the day arrived no body called my and I have decided to number that exist in the mail. When I called her I told that I have an appointment and gave my name but she told me that she already made an appointment with somebody else , however she can call me back half an hour later. I have waited one hour but she didn't call me. I called the other numbers that exists on their web side and I call same person also but nobody asnwered. Next day she send me an email that she didnt understand my name but she was waiting for me... It was a compelete lie because she got my number. if she wanted to call me she could.

  Finally, I tought that it might be a bussy day for them and I made another appoitment with same person another day at 2:30pm but samething happened one moretime. This responsible person called me at 6pm. I dont even remember wether it was the same day or the next day. In these two days I have already apllied for another school and same day called me and I applied for the school. 

 It is very unfortunate for companies that most of the people are fighting really hard to do something good and everyting goes wrong just beacause of one person. 

I walked away from the General Assembly course with a vague but imcomplete understanding of what data science could do. Many important subject were not covered, and those covered were taught poorly.

The instructor was often unfamiliar with the material and couldn't answer many of the students' questions. He would show up to class unprepared to explain his slides.

The General Assembly staff members took weeks and multiple follow-ups to reply to my emails - including about how to give them the money to reserve a place in the class!

Overall, I was disappointed and frustrated.

For me, General Assembly was an experience about which I have mixed feelings. Doing an immersive course with little experience and sitting next to people with vast amounts of experience with code was a nightmare. The curriculum cannot adapt to such a disparity of knowledge, and for the amount of money you pay this is not good enough.

The instructors were great, encouraging those with little knowledge to keep trying, but it quickly became overwhelming. The atmosphere was mostly convival with drinks and snacks to end the week, but - and this is probably indicative of the tech industry as a whole - GA seemed to be obssessed with youth. From their marketing to success stories, the age of those graduates was always heavily underscored.

My advice? Have HTML/CSS/Javascript down to an intermediate level. The pre course materials won't prepare you enough for how quickly and deeply you dive in once you begin studying. Alternatively, do a part-time course instead and build your knowledge over a longer period, this will allow more time to process and practice the skills you learn.

I do not recomend anyone to take any immersive bootcamp with no knowleadge. Honestly, this kind of knowleadge requires a lot of repetition and practice. My advise is do as follows:

1) learn Fast Typing. If you don't know how to type fast, a good free website is www.Typingclub.com It is veeeery important to keep your attention on the screen when coding, rateher that shifting your attention to the keyboard.

2)Finish ALL of the folowing free websites certifications: 

    a)All of the certificates of www.freecodecamp.com.

    b)After finished with freecodecamp, then start from scratch and do all of the tutorials at www.codeschool.com . Yes, do the same thing you did on the previous website, AGAIN; take the Javascript course as if it was the first time you have ever seen Javascript; be patient, it may seem repetitive and tedious at first, but it is worth it, it is practice. Remember the baseball players have to practice easy throws for many hours beforfe being able to perform good in a MLB game. Finish all free courses in the following order: HTML/CSS, Javascript, JQuery, comand line, RubyOnRails, learnGIT.

    c) My recomendation is to even take all the free courses on  www.codecademy.com as well; Yes, all of the from scratch. why? at that point you should be ablke to just fly through all the excescises and lessons and finish thye entire body of lessons in a matter of a week. On every website you will find a new piece of information that was not covered by the others. 

* it would be even a good ide if you are spending over $10,000 in a bootcamp to pay for a $20 membership at one of those site to get opremium access to other lessons that will prepare you even better. Trust me, payin extra $20 for a couple of months will make you take a really good advantage when you start you $10k bootcamp.

3)  Then, and ONLY THEN, enroll in a 3-month on-site intensive immersive bootcamp. 

4) Most likely, the school will require for you to work on a pre-course project to get you up to speed by the time the actual bootcamp starts. you should be able to finish the pre-course assigments in half the time of the other students. Normally that is a 40-hours period you must dedicate to finish the pre-requisite before starting class. If there is a waiting list and you can;t start right away,  keep practicing on sites such as www.codewars.com. Also learn how to work with the developers tools such as the inspector from google and mozila; codeschool.com has a really good tutorial on their website for that. 

Now let me warn you: what you learn in all the self teaching tutorials form those websites, is JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. By no means are you prepared to apply for any jobs. It requires A LOT of practice. While in school, make sure to prepare really good portfolio quality projects, that's why it is important you come already knowing the basics of coding on each topic by finishing those tutorials. It is hard, it is not easy, but if you come prepared to the bootcamp by finishing all the free online tutorial from those websites, it will be a very pleasurable and rewarding experience, otherwise it will be very VERY frustrating.  

So, plan yourself for 3 months preparing for the 3-4 months long bootcamp to really be able to learn what you need to learn to start a carreer as a developer.

I took a part-time General Assembly class, just 2 nights per week (for 12 weeks), and learned to confidently construct pixel perfect front-end websites. Having time between the courses left me with the freedom to thoroughly explore each lesson's contents while practicing my own implementations. 

The teachers (and teacher's assistants) were top notch! Soon after completing the course, I became 100% confident in CSS & HTML challenges, and I'm a bit less intimidated by the challenge of Javascript. In fact, I plan to take another General Assembly course dedicated to JS this coming summer.

All in all, the courses may seem a bit pricey, but they are well worth every penny.

Thanks GA!

Alex

I took the Digital Marketing Circuit online and the course fell way below expectations. As background, I came into the course with very little marketing experience or knowledge (I'm looking to pivot away from my existing, non-marketing profession), however, I am very familiar with the online learning landscape and have taken a variety of online courses through my undergraduate and graduate careers, as well as through MOOCs like Coursera and Lynda. Here's a list of my pros and cons:

Pros:

• Digital marketing, as a topic, is definitely a useful thing to have in one's tool kit
• Content was digestable
• Can be done online, from anywhere

Cons:

• Minimal downloadable course content. For $750 I expect more than a slim "review" sheet that reads more like a list of definitions with some pretty images, and the assignment worksheets.
• The course is trying to target too many audiences at once and, in doing so, is a very poor fit for most potential students. As a newbie, I found some of the assignments to assume I knew or had access to certain information that was outside the scope of the class (for example, market data). Yet, if I were a seasoned marketing professional, much of the content would have been useless for me. For example, spending an entire unit on KPIs and metrics, including explaining the virtues of using a bar graph versus a pie chart to capture certain data, seems really remedial for most people with any marketing background. In other words, it is at once too unrealistic and too basic given the wide swath of audience they say the course is appropriate for. 
• The PDF files for assignments are clunky. Moreover, they come across as schoolgirl worksheets. While useful for establishing ways to think about an issue and plan strategies, they DO NOT equate to a portfolio that can be presented to potential employers or hosted in an online portfolio as a substitue for work product.  Also, for ~$15/month you can have access to Lynda courses and download any worksheet like materials (and you can cancel your membership any time). Since this is the primary thing you can download from the course, they simply do not cut muster. 
• General Assembly makes a big deal about the 1:1 mentoring sessions. Here's the thing: it's the only interaction you'll get, and the content is entirely dependent on you. Therefore, each week you have one, thirty minute opportunity to ask questions related to marketing in general, get feedback on your work, and ask questions about the upcoming material. This strikes me as really odd, particularly for a $750 class. Feedback should be asynchronous. Follow up questions for feedback can be asked during mentoring sessions, but it is a waste of time to utilize scant instructional sessions in this way. I would also point out that the live versions of the GA courses have TAs present at the sessions in addition to office hours. 
• For a digital marketing course, it surprised me that new digital platforms weren't mentioned, such as Vine and Snapchat.  
• All of the assignments required a business and audience for you to work from (you use the same business throughout). You can ask the course produce to give you a model business if you don't have one you want to, or can, use. That's what I did. Funny thing is, the business wasn't well aligned to the assignments. Further, I was given no options or alternative selections. 
• There are only 4 educational units. The 5th is purely the "final project" which amounts to putting all your other assignments together in a brand new worksheet. Of course, you are encouraged to improve upon your work, or start over from scratch (!), but, essentially, the 5th unit is a bit misleading. Again, this "final project" cannot support portfolio use.  
• There's no in-course engagement. Participants are busy, so I don't blame them/us. But, neither the mentors nor the course produce facilitate conversation, comment on posts, etc.  
• Unit content and unit quizzes don't always align.  
• As an interesting side note, the number of enrollees who continued posting completed assignments decreased markedly from week to week. In fact, there was nearly a 50% decrease each week. This is significant for two reasons: first, the entire course started with 34 people, of which only 30 posted the first assignment. Second, you can't view course content for future units until you have posted the current unit assignment. For example, if I'm working through unit 2, I can't see the course content for 3, 4, or 5 until I post my unit 2 assignment. Until then, everything is locked. 
• There was something very grating about receiving email surveys requesting a brief review/evaluation of each unit after submitting an assignment when no similar feedback was provided for students (apart from students asking specific questions in mentoring sessions hosted via Zoom). I don't know, it seems like if I'm paying you, I should be guaranteed a few feedback touchpoints. If I'm paying you, and you're asking me for feedback on an assignment I've already completed, that strikes me as out of balance. This sounds awful, I know, but they would have been better off incentivizing me in some way if they were truly interested in my opinion (hey, I did learn something after all). 

Overall, I felt like this was a beta version of a course packaged as a high-gloss, cutting edge but tested program that would provide participants not only with immediately portable skills and knowledge but also true portfolio material. In many ways, it feels like a cheap money maker. I was told by a mentor that the course was put online recently. Having a bit of background in online education I know that you cannot simply translate existing material for live courses into online settings and expect the same functionality. Truly, though, my impression upon completing the course was that this was a low-cost way for General Assembly to expand their base of customers. Very little thought seems to been given to what online students would walk away with. The actual value proposition is low. You basically work independently, receive minimal feedback (which is entirely dependent upon the questions you ask), walk away with no reference materials apart from the notes you take, and have a pretty useless "portfolio" project that looks like worksheets from high school (sure, it may help you think through things but it is not going to impress anyone). In essence, you can acquire nearly as much, if not exactly as much, from Lynda. For $750, the return on investment is low. I really wanted to like this program. Sadly, I cannot recommend that anyone else enroll.    

For the sake of full disclosure, prior to attending General Assembly, I was an entry-level IT technician and I'd been coding as an occasional hobby since I was 11 or 12. I took an XHTML and CSS course in 2008 and a semester of Java in 2010. In late 2014, I got serious about having a career in web development and made a habit of studying and writing code for 3-5 hours a day. I started with free tutorials in HTML, CSS, and jQuery, then I focused on pure JavaScript. I also attended meetups and took on small coding tasks at my day job.

I applied to General Assembly in June 2015. The process included an interview and some prework: completing the Dash tutorial and making an 'About Me' page. The interview itself involved a logic problem, a typing test, and some basic questions like those one would encounter in a job interview. I did find employment shortly afterwards; I've been with my current employer since the Monday after graduation.

They assigned some prework in July; the estimated completion time was about 40 hours. I think that estimate was a bit generous. It took me a couple of days to complete it. YMMV, of course, but I believe that if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a little JS then it won't take long to complete the prework.

The first part of the course was HTML5, CSS3, Sass, and various front-end tools (Bower, Grunt, Gulp, etc). We were given three days to complete our first project. My first project failed miserably because I tried to do way too much, but I will say that I learned a lot from the experience. We were given more time for the other projects.

The second part of the course was PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails with .erb files serving as the front end, and quite a bit of Bootstrap. Most people in the course ended up with a preferred language. I came in loving JavaScript and I came out even more interested in it. Ruby, on the other hand, was almost counterintuitive to me. So I can't do that part of the course any justice.

The third part was more advanced JavaScript and 3/4 of the MEAN stack. We used Node.js, Express, and MongoDB for the back end. The front end was .ejs, not Angular. The corresponding project was a group project. I enjoyed this part of the course. I started applying for jobs and interviewing after the second project.

The fourth part incorporated Angular, along with more JS. For the fourth project, we were given a little more time and had the option to work individually or in a group. I prefer working solo, so I basically holed up at home for the last week of the course and worked on my project.

As an aside, it is possible to do well in this course and not have a Mac. They strongly recommend purchasing one, but I couldn't afford even the cheapest Mac that met their minimum specs. So I used my trusty Linux laptop with very few problems. The problems I did encounter were solved with some Googling. The good part of that was that I never had to worry about someone mistaking my charger for theirs or vice versa.

The good:

• A lot of meetup groups and companies hold events there, which is a good opportunity for networking.
• The course producers and instructors are helpful and genuinely want their students to succeed.
• I had a job offer less than 24 hours after the end of the course.
• Weekly outcomes (job search) workshops.
• Free Red Bull, food, and beer.
• Great classmates
• Accessible via public transit (but no MARTA student passes)
• Credit towards their workshops
• Alumni discount for future courses and workshops
• A tour of Atlanta Tech Village

The neutral:

• The guy in charge of Outcomes moved on to a different job a few weeks into my cohort, so the course producers had to take over for him and the weekly Outcomes one-on-ones weren't so weekly. His replacement was hired towards the end of the course, and she was extremely kind, helpful, and encouraging, which is why this is under the neutral category.
• General Assembly hasn't been in the Atlanta area for that long, so they don't necessarily have the hiring network that their more established campuses may have. But this is changing. I got my job through my cohort's TA, who in turn got his job through the recommendation of another GA graduate.
• I would have preferred to learn one stack in depth rather than covering two.

The bad:

• Carpal tunnel from the unergonomic tables. I went through a lot of Advil because I was going to finish the course one way or another.

It definitely would have been possible to learn the same material online and for less money than what I paid GA. This is not a knock on the instructors or the school itself; it's simply acknowledging the fact that there's a plethora of free documentation and instructional materials for virtually every major development tool, framework, and language out there. I didn't choose to attend a bootcamp solely for the technical instruction. I was interested in learning how to build a network, how to interview well, and the other non-technical aspects of breaking into the industry.

Overall, my experience with General Assembly was very good. I feel that the 9 months of studying I did before attending allowed me to get a lot more out of the course than I would have otherwise. In order to get the most out of it, I would strongly advise doing as much self-study as possible prior to dropping thousands of dollars on a bootcamp.

I am a student at GA's WDI program in Santa Monica.  I am currently on week 4 of 12.

Thus far, I can say GA Santa Monica has surpassed my expecations.  My background: I'm a digital marketer/content guy.   I wanted to learn a hard skill with a lot market upside.  So I started researching coing programs,  GA, has a lot of reviews on yelp and this website.  After some research I went with GA (Santa Monica).  

Going in I had fear I would not be able to learn code, that the $13,500 tuition (and time would be a complete waste.  After knowing zero code, after out first project sprint to launch a 2 player game using Javascipt/jQuery/HTML/CSS, I can say the program is working!  Without GA, there;s no way I could make progress I've made.  And I am really proud of my cohort, because we all have worked long nights to make it even this far.  Just know you will:  need to work your ass off, up 12 hour days; but this prgram will turn you into a developer.  Defintely do the pre-work, and get up to speed on Javscript (GA does MEAN stack).  

Outcomes Department:  I'm still a sudent, but I think very favorably on the department that preps us towards job placement.  They don't hand you jobs, but througought the program they guide you on your resume, linkedin, elevator speech; the best practices to get a job out of this program,

You can see my project 1 here: fleacircus.tv/moviepop

my Github: https://github.com/dskaiser82/proj1

**You want to read this!

I'm in a new bootcamp, an ACTUAL bootcamp because I actually feel the pressure and in a good way. The people are encouraging and MOST importantly the technology is new and in demand.

I found a lot of discouragement for new approaches, and the reasons were justified with "oh its just bad practice and not used in the industry" what lies. The current and certainly much more reputed bootcamp teaches the exact opposite.

There's nothing special in getting into GA, trust me there isn't, no offense to my classmates but some of them didn't know what "var" in JavaScript meant, and they managed to get in.

Towards the latter half, I constantly showed up an hour/maybe more late because i spent the equivalent time learning things that actually will make a difference to my job search (node,angular,react) - lets say i bought 18 courses on Udemy during my time at GA.

I'm angered by how the course,teaching and environment is fostered compared to my present bootcamp. Turns out i'm not the only one who came to this bootcamp after GA because they didn't feel confident enough!

You will get a job after GA, because the market is just that desperate. Most of the "projects" are you just following some tutorial and show casing it at the end hahaha! All the best getting support if you're trying to do something different!

If u complete codecademy/codeschool you've pretty much done about the first 6 weeks of the course, it gets tricky once back end begins, but then again if i reflect it was "made" hard, it really wasn't that difficult what we did. Yes, relational DB's are difficult for anyone who looks at it the first time but, not impossible.

I spent most of my time playing catchup , typing code blindly because the instructor was typing fast. So i decided to just listen after some time, and guess what - you're told what to do, not why.

You learn about "data structures" well touch on in, in the last week, they make it seem like some super hard difficult thing. It's not, it's linked lists,hash maps are tougher. Data structures are fun, not difficult and they're SO important in becoming a great developer.

You strive for greatness? don't do GA, its a waste of time, get serious and join some of the other top end bootcamps.

End of it, 80% of my cohort got jobs, that doesn't mean GA was good hahaha no way, it was WEAK in it's curriculum, the market is desperate as I said. While people at GA thrive to make todo lists, which we did haha, other bootcamps warm up with todo lists.

If u have experience with backend/LAMP stack and you're finding GA hard, i would suggest you re-evaluate your career choices (i'm never discouraging,not once in my life have i spoken negative about someone, but my distaste for this place grows each day i progress with my current bootcamp)

Want to hear a funny thing, we had our meet and greet, i met up with a recruiter, he called me and this is what he had to say "other than you and 1-2 others, I doubt anyone will get a job because they just don't have the skills". Let it be said that 80% got jobs, so the recruiters prediction didn't work, but you get what I mean, MARKET wants, you learn bare minimum.

TL;DR GA -> 0 to 40 , you may get a job based on your market, but you won't learn anything useful

The WDI class moves quickly, so I recommend going in with at least a cursory knowledge of the bash command line, git, and GitHub. They'll be covered in the first week of class, but you'll be less likely to panic if you've at least seen them before. Just do some Googling.

I also recommend Codecademy.com, which gave me a worthwhile introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby, all of which were used extensively throughout the class. Take your time and type through the lessons.

My instructors were a quartet of rock stars. Super responsive, never contrived, with cupcakes and sprinkles for all ;)

I suppose it helped that all our classmates were totally awesome. If you come to GA convinced that the world is ending, suspicious of the very technologies you're trying to learn, you're gonna have a bad time. But if you come to GA with an open mind and an open heart, you will find a community of real, live humans who routinely take a half-hour chunk out of their day, not even their lunch hour, to just sit around in groups and chat. I think that's righteous.

Having recently completed WDI, I'm considering branching out into related fields as I begin the job search. I enjoy web design, and it'll come in handy no matter where my path goes, but my first love is learning. Possibly the greatest emphasis was placed at GA on knowing how to learn—everyone is different—and in the Cloud, we are never truly alone ;)

The world is changing, and we have work to do.

Peace!