General Assembly

Ladies better mind their p's and q's and keep your heads down. But isn't that always the case? I was sanctioned and told I'm hostile for asking for help, for asking why things were structured the way they were (and I was top 3 at the head of my class). It's not my fault or any woman's fault that you feel threatened when you don't know as much, or get called out on it. That's not mine/a woman being hostile. That's sexism and intolerance feeling insecure and threatened by women.

You will notice there are around 0 women teachers (in technology). You will see they will try to tell you it's like 30% because design school. Not sure there are many more female staffers.

Had to write a gender-balanced review here.

This is one of worst and most over-priced courses in London. I decided to take this course as it shows a solid content structure including a project development over a 10-week period, rather than the whole UK digital marketing course market, which are based on 2-day or 1-week workshop courses.

Learning online optimization is really difficult due to you cannot monitor and expect immediate results as it is a long process and significant self-study time-investing to dominate it. So, why did I pay for a course if anyone can learn FREE surfing online?

I said to myself “I have no time to spend exploring and learning digital skills by my own, so I need to pay for the best time-effective learning experience so I can apply knowlege efficiently & immediately”. So, I made a big effort to enroll to this course, as It has similar cost than university fees, almost 3000 pounds and over this if you take a funding option.

What a disappointment!!, I feel legally scammed!!! The course is simply REALLY BAD, as It is running as it was a 1 day-workshop basis, i.e. the explanation is broadly and over-exploratory and backed-up for links to check. Therefore, What is the difference between this course and watch videos in YouTube? NOTHING, except I was so stupid to pay a lot of money for this.

During a 10-week period, the course should have focused in learning quickly how to perform all minimum procedures requested to execute a digital marketing strategy, but this course does not do it because does not teach you fundamental steps to execute procedures.

For example, there is a SEO chapter where it must be taught things as how to perform effectively a keyword research or competitive analysis. All you have is an overview chat and a link to a 1000-page book to learn!!!! Or the Google Adwords lesson is pure theory, you never can put an Ad if you do not have a site which a previous Ad movement. So how can you learn effectively? It is the same to sit myself in a course video where I am not going to participate interactively. Poor value for money.

The course dynamics consists on an online pre-work (which is mostly run for a self-corrected software), a 2 x two-hour lesson per week and a weekly homework. The homework is based on the project but It is not corrected weekly, so you could have done a lot of work for nothing, as It may be wrong….this is not time-effective learning method at all.

The course teachers are a team: one is a field professional, another one is a class assistant and a coordinator (you will never see her/him in the course so omit her/him). I cannot criticize their professional knowledge about the study field, but they clearly did not have a good understanding of how to deliver the content syllabus of the course, making the learning experience deficient.

They do not revise course materials prior lessons as they just copied slides for another past course at other GA branch. Therefore, there are several contents that are not updated or simply they do not know to operate some tools indicated at the syllabus. In my opinion is an excessive relax approach to a teach a lesson, it is ok for a class to have a kind of fun environment with some music but I am not satisfied to pay to see teachers take it easy.

The project is another joke as there is not a project!!!!, it is only a slide presentation about how It should be developed the project!!! This is really poor as I came to the course to learn “HOW TO DO” things instead of that what I have got was “LOOK THIS IS THE LINK, LOOK THE VIDEO AND DO IT”. Hence, What do I pay if I can do and commit the same mistakes by my own?

Stay away for this course that clearly is not worthy for what is teaching, with the same money find a 1-on-1 education or pay for an internship to a professional agency, you will learn more and will have a better material for CV purposes. This course is not going to give you a real life-change career or help you how to execute a correct digital marketing to your business. IT IS THROWING YOUR MONEY TO THE TOILET!!!!

This course costs $13,500 as of this writing, and lasts roughly three months. That makes it roughly comparable to one semester at a state-run university. That’s in terms of both cost and time span. (Though regarding the time span, General Assembly is very honest when they say the course will consume your life for the duration. To continue to compare it to a traditional college, imagine a semester where every week was finals week.)

So, this isn’t like spending a few hundred dollars on an “Introduction to Web Development” course at your local community college. It’s a major commitment of time and money. Is it worth it? Here’s my analysis.

When it comes to the course content, let’s be honest: you can get the same content free, or so cheap by comparison it might as well be free, from several web sites. GA is really offering “value added” material to the content. What are they adding?

To get a trivial one out of the way, they’re providing a physical classroom. It’s in a reasonably nice area of DC.  The spaces are very “utilitarian”, nothing fancy. The classrooms are serviceable; maybe a little “cozy” if the class is full, but not too bad. They can have noise issues occasionally, if an adjacent room is boisterous, or the construction across the street is intense. The floors, annoyingly, are bare concrete. They need carpet. I mention that since I experienced the heart-stopping experience of watching my laptop drop off a desk onto the hard floor. It didn’t break, but a little carpet would have lowered my panic level.

More directly related to the course, they’re providing instructors. I found them all good to very good. I did find one to have an style that was overly laid back, but that’s a matter of taste; someone else might find him more approachable. I’m very grateful to one who was incredibly patient with me when I got behind in the class due to some health issues.

To my knowledge, they’re all self-taught, more-or-less, with some professional experience. They are not academic college professors, they’re teaching real-life programming. That’s not criticism; that’s exactly the point of the class, to teach students enough to get intro-level development jobs. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the merits of various sorting algorithms, this isn’t the place  

I never found the instructors lacking in knowledge. They know their material. I’m one who likes to ask probing questions in class, and they were happy to discuss them, even if they asked me to save it till after class. The class does reflect their knowledge; we only got a brief introduction to PHP, and they were honest that they all disliked it.

I do take issue with some of the course content’s structure. Pretty much all of the content is on-line, in the form of a class calendar with links to the day’s material. The problem is that’s the only way to access it. I repeatedly asked for a master index, and was told it was in the works, but never got one.

GA also gives you the ability to say “I completed this program”, which I assume would carry more weight with an employer than just completing a free on-line program. On the other hand, no matter how you learned web development, your own portfolio will speak the loudest.

But speaking of finding a job after class… another thing GA provides is “Outcomes” support, what might be called Job Placement Services at a typical college. This is where I have serious issues with GA.

I will admit that I became contemptuous of the Outcomes process, and I let it show, much more than I should have. I’m going to try to keep this focused on systemic flaws with Outcomes, not my personal issues.

Roughly a half day of each week is devoted to Outcomes. What they do varies from week to week. The best in my opinion were the guest speakers, people who work in the industry. We also got two weeks where we did site visits to companies that hire web developers. They were both to companies that might have been good places to work, but at least one has not been hiring web developers since the class ended! It’s still an interesting tour, but I think it would be more worthwhile to tour places that can say, “we expect to be hiring when your class finishes”! The Outcomes team was also somewhat arrogant in their scheduling. One site visit was scheduled for the day a major project was due. I pointed that out, and one of the Outcomes team informed me that I should schedule my time better. Pardon me, but no -- with what I’m paying for the class, they need to schedule better.

The rest of the Outcomes sessions were run by the Outcomes team themselves. There was lots of resume work, appropriately, but I feel it included an inordinate focus on a “vision statement” to put at the top of a resume. They never offered anything more than resume tweaks, students conducting mock interviews with each other, and other such things. They were also fond of surveys that were often repetitive and included questions I found silly. They’d occasionally add a little variety in the forms of “games” that would be good subjects for parodies in satires of corporate life like Dilbert or The Office. The sessions increasingly felt like a waste of time to me, and I considered “opting out” of the Outcomes process even before the end of the course.

The after course material was what led me to finally leave the Outcomes process behind. They have several requirements to continue to receive support from the Outcomes team, but I’ll just mention two. The first is to require to apply for ten jobs a week. That’s a little on the high side, in my opinion, but they also suggest the graduates be selective in where they submit resumes. No matter how much they insist otherwise, being selective and submitting ten resumes a week is contradictory.

They also initially requires graduates to come back to General Assembly once a week for Outcomes sessions, which consisted of a classroom portion, then a “small groups” session with one of the Outcomes team.. (They have dropped that requirement -- the classroom presentations are still held at GA, but are optional. Small groups can be conducted on-line, but are mandatory.)

The after-class sessions were complete wastes of time. We had two guest speakers that I can remember,. Unlike the speakers during the course, these were not worthwhile. The first was a woman who worked in recruiting for, I believe, a construction company in one of the western states, and ran a career coaching business on the side. She was a nice, pleasant speaker, but how much could she offer when the knew neither the technology industry nor the DC area? The second was a younger man with experience in junior level web development. All I remember about him was that he seemed very smug and arrogant.

The rest of the post-course sessions were more resume tweaking, mock interviews and pep talks, all of which I found a waste of time.

GA also promotes their network of employers. It is nowhere near as impressive as they claim. It seems to be limited almost entirely to employers located in DC. That ignores two major high tech areas nearby -- the high tech corridor along the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia, and the biotech corridor along the 270 spur in Maryland. (Despite being biotech focused, they have plenty of software work.)

They also have almost no network in the Federal sphere, either with the government agencies directly or the Federal contractor companies. I realize that many of GA’s students and alumni might view Federal work as something they’d never want to do, but ignoring Federal work in DC cuts out an extraordinary selection of jobs. It would be like ignoring the financial industry in New York City.

Ultimately, I feel GA was a waste of my time and money. The content of the course proper is worthwhile, but can be found much cheaper. The “Outcomes” support is of no use.

The data science immersive course at General Assembly was an awesome, mind-expanding, and super enjoyable experience. The curriculum is industry relevant and very practical, taught through both formal style lectures as well as hands on in class assignments and outside homework and capstone project. The course is definitely intense and fast-paced, you'll be writing code and learning all day long, so expect to work hard but have fun too! 

In my cohort we started with learning python fundamentals and quickly learned much more advanced techniques as well as some object-oriented programming. From there, the course dives into foundational predictive modeling techniques like regression analysis and continues to build in complexity with more contemporary machine learning and big data topics. The instructors I had (David Yerrington and Kiefer Katovich) are exceptional teachers — highly experienced professionals who clearly love what they do. They were able to make very challenging topics approachable and highly engaging, motivating me to push myself outside my comfort zone and learn way more than I had ever expected in only three short months. I also can’t stress enough how much I learned from my fellow classmates, even if it was just learning from their mistakes! But real talk: Data Science is a broad field so you won’t learn everything but trying to emulate this kind of immersive learning environment by teaching yourself on your own or through a MOOC will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

In terms of career support, even as a seasoned professional any job search has it's challenges. GA does a decent job of helping you with your resume, job search strategy, and some interview prep but at the end of the day it’s up to you to find a job you’ll be happy with. Having said that, since completing the course I have had several recruiters reach out to me completely unsolicited regarding analyst and data science positions. My capstone project also got me noticed by an awesome non-profit organization (that uses machine learning to prevent deforestation and poaching in tropical rainforest!) and I’ve recently started working with them as a part-time consultant.

I highly recommend UXD course I took in General Assembly. The school is very professional so staying there was a really nice experience.
From the e-mail contact with TJ, providing information, organization and experienced team of instructors and mentors to the end of the course I was impressed how they were prepared. I met passionated people there. The school is open until 10 pm, which I found very helpful. I could stay there everyday and finish my projects. They have a huge lounge room where many of the students can chill, do their homework and chat. There you can eat your lunch, drink coffee etc. 

I also have to say that the course is very intensive, but I felt very comfortable at the same time. The advice, additional materials, videos etc. - everything was exactly on time :) I am going to take next course in GA, because it will save my time and shorten preparation. After this course you will have at least one completed presentation of your ux design process which you can add directly to your portfolio. They also can help you with resume and staff.

These people are very passionate about what they do and I would recommend their courses to anyone who is looking for new skills from people who are really supportive. This course triggered to open my mind, see perspectives and aims.

I'm leaving this review for anyone considering the Android Development Immersive. I don't know much about the other courses offered by GA except that if you want the highest chance of getting a job you should take the Web Development Immersive for reasons I'll explain later in this review.

As things are now, if you really want to take this course and are able to comprehend a very basic amount of html for the code challenge required before your interview you will be admitted. Honestly, if you are willing to get a loan or pay for this course you are obviously serious about learning this skill. I came into the program with very basic prior experience in mobile development and the coding languages used. This would be my recommendation for others considering I am one of the two students out of five in the class that has a job 100+ days after graduation. The other student with a job also had some prior experience with Java, which is the main language used for Android development. They will let you into the course without any prior knowledge and suggest that you take a Java primer before starting, but I would think hard about going through an online course beforehand. There are so many free resources out there, there's really no reason not to learn as much of the basics as you can before you start to this expensive course.

One of the biggest obstacles to learning to develop software is getting over the hurdles of beginning to learn a new language. I went through all the hair-pulling beforehand of just wrapping my head around coding languages and object-oriented programming structures. You don't want to have this struggle coupled with the logic learning and architecture you have to learn as well during the course. Having some prior knowledge allowed me to consume the course material at it's very fast and condensed pace.

The course material itself is still being perfected and tested at the time of this review, but that does not mean it is not effective. I have been able to secure a position at a large and growing development company that handles apps for clients with 10+ million user bases. I count myself very lucky, and I have worked very hard during the 12-week course and the 100 or so days after that it took me to get hired.

What really helped in regards to the actual course material was having two amazing instructors. GA hires professionals who have proven themselves in their field and this really allows for practical, real-world-applicable learning that is hard to get in a college classroom. These instructors know the ins-and-outs of the industry and the resources you need to always be up-to-speed on what's happening in the developer community.

GA also has a well-developed structure and connections to get you involved in the community (at least at the Austin location) which is another major reason the program was effective.

After the course, we were given job assistance, but since the ADI is so new, GA is still working on solidifying relationships with companies that need Android developers. As I alluded earlier, this is one of the reasons WDI students get jobs so quickly and at high percentages (the WDI program has been around much longer and GA has much deeper roots with companies in this field). Don't let this deter you too much though, because the job hunt really is on you and GA didn't completely leave us hanging. To further our education, GA set up each student with mentors (in our case two each because of our small class size) who are senior developers at major companies in Austin. This is how I got connected with my current job and gained some very important insight into becoming a professional and contributing developer. Use the mentor program as much as you can. This is how you raise your skill level exponentially after graduation and can compete against others with years of experience.

It is possible to succeed with this program, and you can do it if you really want it. It's all on you though, and of course nothing is guaranteed. But GA is good about doing their best to give you what you need to succeed. Many people take their courses for a reason, just be prepared to work very hard for it.

I took the data science immersive 12-week bootcamp during my work sabbatical in SF. It's a combination of programming statistics, problem solving, and modeling. Class size can vary from 15-22 students for roughly 3 full time instructors, with additional late-night support from teaching assistants. The students had college to 9+ year backgrounds.

Instructors: the SF instructors all have had multiple years of experience in PhD level research, tech startups or data science companies. Our instructors lead the bootcamp for the love of teaching, and to take a break from doing startup work. They were excellent! They taught the standard 40 hours of class, and made extra time to assist students outside of class, or grab a quick meal afterwards. They covered the standard materials + because of our class' interest: elective lectures on reinforcement learning, neural networks, image recognition, advanced NLP. They were open to feedback, and tailored the class to ensure that everyone was learning, with some one-on-one sessions as needed. I enjoyed all the instructors, found their lessons to be engaging, and that there was a good cycle of lecture, labs, homework, gameshow-like review and open group discussions. My instructors were Dave and Kiefer, hilarious guys, super-approachable, and always eager to help in and out of the classroom.

Teaching Approach: The course and teacher philosophy is to teach theory and have a real-life hands-on examples for each of the lectures. The main product from taking this course, (or any of the Metis / Galvanize courses) is a extended Capstone project. Day-to-day there's about 4-5 hours of lecture, and the remaining time is interactive labs / in-class projects. Each week there was a "take-home" project to complete that covered the previous week's content. Near week 10 / 11, the take-home projects end, and the focus is on each student developing their own capstone the lectures turn into topics of interest, and there's heavy project Q+A assistance.

Content :  This is not primarily a CS 101 course. I would recommend people to study some introduction to python classes (also offered by GA) before taking this immersive, trying to learn CS 101 at the same time as statistical methods can be taxing. Any exposure to data analysis (excel) will be immensely helpful.

The course was only 1 week on python review, and then the class dived into understanding statistical topics and methods, statistical interpretation, and general data-science problem-solving approaches. Data science is a dense subject. I loved the class, it covered more topics than i expected, but I recommend this course as a great core course for statistical analysis, but a "starter" course for advanced machine learning techniques such as neural networks, reinforcement learning, image recognition, and natural language processing. While these were covered in class, each of these topics are so deep that each could have been its own multi-week course.

Pacing: this isnt' GA specific but all bootcamps/immersives: it's a full-time commitment. It's 40 hours of classroom, then take home projects, and then the large capstone project at the second half of the class. It's a LOT of content in a short amount of time. I would also set any students expectation that learning that much for 12 weeks is a lot. Be prepared to take notes/archive/log everything you absorb so you can review the material after the course is over. 

Community: From my cohort, and my friends cohort, one of the strongest aspects of GA's immersive is the community. The class diversity was great. My class of 22 was closely knit, still keep in touch, and contributed throughout from our diverse backgrounds in econometrics, finance, bio research, or tech. Anyone can sit through an 12-week online-video course at home, but you would miss out on having 22 other people for study groups, conference groups, projects partners, happy hour buddies, and so much peer-to-peer help. It has been invaluable. I believe the GA brand as well as the screening process has been good at recruiting motivated, collaborative, and eager learners.

Conclusion: Overall I really enjoyed the course, would recommend to anyone interested in expanding their data-analysis toolset beyond the SQL / Excel /  python / math/ computer science experience. This course will explain the core concepts for statistical analysis, and set a good path forward for advanced machine learning. General Assembly has some great instructors, and a great community. This class is great at equipping students and enhancing skill sets, to pivot into data analytics, but not going to be a silver bullet to immediately get a job as a experienced data scientist. The content is too deep and complex for that

Background about myself:

- Recently graduated with a BS in Computer Science

- Part of DSI-SF-2

- Took this course to be able to pursue a career that incorporates data.

Overall Experience:

In terms of the material, I had a great experience learning and understanding the vast machine learning models and AWS products. Initially the pace of the class was a little slow; however, after week 2 it started ramping up. Both the instructors (Dave & Kiefer) are skilled in the material and are willing to put extra effort to make sure everyone understands the material. In terms of job assistance, more time could be put into the different industries and the concentrations of Data Scientist. DSI is still a new program and I'm sure the job assistance will be better as the cohorts continue.

After Graduation:

GA is known for their sense of community during and after the course. Most of my classmates would meet up to work on homework, attend conferences, and practice common interview questions. With the help and support of my career coach, instructors, and classmates, I was able to find a Data Engineer position that allows me to use the skills learned both in my degree and this program. 

First off a bit of background on me by which to use to judge my assessment:

• I came into the program with 10 years of work experience in data analytics/BI roles in financial services. I enjoyed the more technical bits of my job and had dabbled with machine learning in my free time and wanted to pursue a career where these would be my primary focus. I decided a boot camp would be the best way to upgrade these skills in a hurry.

• I was in the 2nd DSI cohort in San Francisco

• I am the instructional assistant for the 4th cohort

Instructors

The instructors for my cohort were David Yerrington and Kiefer Katovich. I found Dave and Kiefer to complement each other well with Kiefer coming from an academic background with strengths in statistics and experimental design and Dave’s experience being from industry with a heavy focus on recommender systems and engineering/big data. I felt that collectively they were very strong in all of the material covered in class and had the work experience to provide context for all of the models that were covered. Both instructors were receptive to feedback and were good about making themselves available and tailoring the class to meet the students needs (adjusting pace, adding time for additional reviews, and making themselves available after hours, etc)

Curriculum

Overall I felt the curriculum was pretty strong. You cover the full data science gamut all the way from collecting and cleaning data to building and evaluating a number of different types of models and everything inbetween. The class covers the basics of python, statistics, and linear algebra that are the underpinning of machine learning models as well. Towards the end of class you get exposure to some of the big data technologies used in industry. Both instructors took care to explain the intuition and practical application between all of the models with an emphasis on providing examples and visualizations to really drive new concepts home. For those looking for the mathematical proofs this was usually left as supplemental material in the appendix of lessons. All and all I believe that the class gave me an excellent foundation in the entire data science process by which to build on in my career.

Job Assistance

This is the one area that GA needs to place some extra focus on in regards to the data science program. To be clear I have found the career coaches to be incredibly supportive and responsive. Similar to what they’ve done in the user experience and web development spaces GA needs to grow their data science network. This will help to provide a more natural pipeline for both networking opportunities for students as well as job opportunities. I’m sure this will improve with time but I would really like to see growth in this regard.

Overall

I’ve seen some reviews saying that this class is not a silver bullet, by which you spend 3 months and you’re set for a brand new data science role, especially with no relevant experience beforehand. I believe that is 100% accurate. I would recommend this class to anyone that either A) has a solid stats/math background, B) has a computer programming background, or C) is a SQL ninja doing data analytics currently. I believe that anyone that has at least a couple years with any of these under their belt would benefit from this program and could use it to accelerate their career. If you’re coming in totally cold I would recommend spending the better part of 3-6 months building up a foundation in linear algebra, stats, and programming beforehand. It’s just not realistic to pick this up from scratch in 3 months. This class should be a bullet point on a resume, not your entire resume. 

Overall I was very happy with the program. I felt that the class gave me a very strong foundation that will serve me well as I continue to learn and grow in my career. Is there room for improvement in the program? Absolutely, as would be expected for a relatively new program. That said I feel the staff is very good about collecting feedback and iterating the program and continually refining and improving. All and all I would say if you're a person that has a quantitative and technical bent and is curious this is a great program for fast tracking your move into data science.

The last thing I'll mention is that there is a strong push to build a sense of community within GA and the cohort. I can't tell you how valuable I found this during the class and after. You would see the benefits of this manifest in a number of ways including: students forming study groups to work through labs and homework, team happy hours after class, groups going to networking events including conferences and meetups together, and even having study sessions and interview prep whiteboarding practice together. I will say that this is one of the things that sets apart a bootcamp like this from learning online from a MOOC. I know that in the years to come I will be tapping into this network that I have built out during my time at GA. 

After researching different coding bootcamps, I settled on GA due to their flexible curriculum, job support and mainly due to my experience interviewing with them. They have a relaxed, nurting culture on campus that extends to all students and makes you instantly feel like part of the GA family.

My time spent doing the Web Development Immersive was simulataneously inspiring, stressful, life-changing and crazy. The course structure is very flexible, allowing for changes in the ever-changing web development landscape and the instructors are the most inspiring, knowledgable, personable people I've come into contact with. The amount you cover in such a short space of time is truly outstanding and, as long as you put in the work, you will leave feeling you can actually code! 

After graduation and with the support of the team I was able to secure my dream job within six weeks. It felt like a big risk to leave a full-time role and take this on but I can say it was completely worth it!