General Assembly

Summary:

Don't listen to the demand or trend of next hot jobs. Listen to your heart. Do you really think you can do this for the rest of your life? General Assembly does not guarantee jobs. If I had to go back, I would have taken a cheaper course via different online Bootcamp.

General Assembly itself is nothing but looking to take student's money. Their false belief of job guarantee is a scam to get students interested. General Assembly does not care for individual students who are looking for a career change. 

Many of my cohort students had to go out and find their ways to get jobs. People who had design background were in a better position. That does not mean that they got jobs right out of the Bootcamp. Overall, students end up freelancing or work at small to mid start-ups.

When it comes to the course material, I was impressed. The reason why I was impressed is that instructors were knowledge in teaching UX (The quality of UX knowledge in LA is good).

What is the process like?

Phone call with Admission Producer --> GA Dash exercise --> Interview with Admission Producer --> Bootcamp pre-work --> 3 Months Bootcamp --> Project Showcase + Networking --> Job Searching

My experience

I attended GA WDI HK (May - Aug 2016) and here's what I thought:

• Inspiring and helpful instructors and classmates. GA is really good at creating energetic and friendly atmosphere
• Programming stack are pretty much up to date. Learnt html, css, javascript, ruby, MEAN stack (mongoDB, express.js, Angular.js, Node.js), ruby on rails, postgreSQL, ionic, git & github, AWS, heroku, package managers (npm, bower), agile and scrum method (project management). Please check with your local GA as it will be slightly different !
• Fast-paced and compact course. WDI actually took more than 40h per week
• The students are mostly non-developer trying to make career change.
• To actually get the most out of the program, you should have tried a bit of programming before. Lack of knowledge will give you hard time to pick up the pace. If you are already a developer, you won't get much out of it.
• Guest speaker session is not always interesting/helpful. so i skip some :D
• It is overpriced considering it's more "5-80" course and no job guarantee
• GA WDI is aligned more with startups culture.
• Depending on your local market and your projects, you will get job offer within 2 weeks or more. Finding offer/company culture that you really like is another story though.
• It does help that GA has its own career website and the instructors+outcome producer will help you on job preparation such as mock interview; personal CV, portfolio website feedback and networking event. However, you still need to do extra work by yourself
• It's actually the beginning of your journey after you finished the bootcamp. What you've learnt is just enough to kickstart your career/company.

Reccomendation on what you should do before committing yourself to the program

• Attend the one-day course preview/WDI students showcase and get to know your potential instructor(s). By the way, don't refer to the list instructors in official website WDI page cause it's not up to date. 
• learn basic html,css,javascript from https://www.codecademy.com/ https://dash.generalassemb.ly/ http://www.freecodecamp.com . If you are not used to type fast, using computer, searching with google, little idea about webdev; please do so.
• Consider GA WDI bootcamp if you are ready to dedicate the time and money + looking for structured course and get you ready in short period. If you have really high discipline/okay with spending part time learning 6 months - 1 year, free online course such as freecodecamp is actually good too

feel free to contact me on twitter 

As an introduction I must say I did not enjoy my General Assembly experience, so this post may be biased.

However I’ll do my best to stay as objective as possible, as in the end I still believe I got from the course 75% of what I was looking for.

I was moderately satisfied as a learner, but very dissatisfied as a customer. To me the value for money was not there, as when you invest 10kGBP in a course you expect excellence.

But the worst part was definitely the way GA handled those with complaints. Either you shut up or you  are told off, that was the sad truth we experienced.

The setting

• Data Science Immersive (DSI) in London, 1st iteration starting 10th October 2016. General Assembly ran other DSI before, but in the US or AsiaPac, never in Europe.
• Cost: 10,000 GBP
• 12 weeks course + 1 week dedicated to preparation to job search (so called “ouctomes”)
• 23 students at the beginning, 17 after 10 weeks (2 left after week 4, another 2 after week 8, another 2 after week 10)
• 2 teachers and 1 assistant teacher for the whole course

About myself

• Software engineer by education
• 15 years experience in the industry (but little as an actual programmer)
• Did online Coursera “data science specialization” prior to joining the course to ensure I liked the area
• Resigned from my job to attend the training

What was good

• Student required pre-work: lots of pre-read and programming exercises to do before joining the course in an attempt to bring everyone at the same level
• Curriculum: wide variety of topics covered, choice of one main programming language (Python)
• Learn with practice: daily homework (during the first 8 weeks), weekly project for the first 7 weeks followed up by capstone project, occasionally pair or small groups projects
• Outcome programme: help to refresh CV, improve online presence, sharpen negotiation skills, eventually will work hard to get you a job. GA has a target of getting 95% of their students a job in the area they studied, and they will do their best to meet it (that’s assuming students comply to all requirements, i.e. most homework/projects completed, 2 or less days absent from the course, strictly follow the job search guidelines, otherwise students may be excluded from the outcome programme)
• Nice office on the edge of the London City

What needs improvement

• They miss “science” in data science. GA is very good at teaching Web Design and User Experience Design, it is their core business. Unfortunately they handle data science similarly to these two areas, which means they think you become a data scientist mostly by coding in python and learning associated data science libraries. The whole scientific/rigorous side of data science is overlooked, statistics are barely covered
• Teachers had too little teaching experience. Data scientists are in high demand, that’s a well-known fact. When I registered for the course, I was given two instructor names, it turned out none of them actually taught us. One of the instructors was actually recruited less than two weeks before the course. With such complex topics as machine learning and little time to prepare, the result was obviously not great. To be fair one instructor worked hard to improve during the course. Still sometimes I felt with my Coursera background, I knew more than they did, and really it didn’t feel like value for money
• Admittedly, they bring people from all horizons and backgrounds in the class in order to increase revenues. The selection process is light and conducted by non-technical people, so pretty much anyone with very little coding experience can get in. Can you really become a data scientist in 3 months starting from nearly scratch, keeping in mind it will require you to learn coding, statistics, machine learning and much more? I doubt it.
• Customer support. The class was overall frustrated with the level of teaching/rigorousness of the course. This was highlighted through surveys organized by GA, but GA didn’t seem to take the feedback into account. After the group complained more, we had individual interviews with GA course producer Still not improvement. Then we wrote an open letter to GA administration signed by 95% of the class, which led to another round of individual interviews (during which the staff was not always nice with the students). Only then GA started giving signs of taking our feedbacks into account. By then 8 weeks had passed (i.e. two third of the bootcamp), and it took a lot of nerves to reach the result. To me it sounded like GA refused to admit that the course had flaws, and kept claiming this was “their way” of doing things, closing the opportunity to improve the situation. Even more than the course quality, the customer service really disappointed me and spoilt the overall experience

As a summary, it’s rather for you if:

• You are not self-disciplined to learn through an online course that will cost you 1/20 of the price
• You desperately want a data job, but not necessarily a data scientist job (that is you are ok with an internship, or a data analyst role etc as this is likely was you will get), and are ready to invest 10000GBP for that
• You have some coding experience and are ready to work very hard for 12 weeks straight: people who got most from the course had already coding experience, and little or no exposure to machine learning

It’s rather not for you if:

• You have very limited coding knowledge, or have family commitments preventing you from working a lot, including on weekends : there is a high risk you will give up as the difficulty will be too high
• You have some prior knowledge of machine learning or other data science related topics that you want to strengthen: you run the risk of being disappointed by the shallow level of what is being taught
• You expect both excellent courses and customer service for the price of 10 000 GBP

My advice to GA:

• Don’t brand the course as “Data Science Immersive”: it’s actually an introduction to data science tools, but not an actual data science course
• Require deeper prior coding knowledge from participants
• Review in depth the feedback collection and handling processes
• Be thankful to students providing constructive feedbacks and not defensive

If you are expecting a six figure salary after a three-month crash course in Data Science, stop dreaming. The course is crammed with difficult concepts by individuals who are not educators and rather former professionals who are best at telling you to "just google it." Although there are many takeaways from my experience at GA's DSI program, my most coveted takeaway is that there are no shortcuts to becoming a fantastic data scientist. The for-profit institution that GA runs will not enable you to become an overnight statistician, programmer, and data scientist. Sure, GA lays a foundation of what is expected of creating a career in DS, but don't expect their provided hiring statistics to be as honorable as they claim since many of the hires come in-house by GA themselves and not in real-world conditions. After networking with past graduates who GA did not bring in to speak to my cohort, I got a massive sense of dread and regret as they are still struggling to find work after GA. The past GA DSI graduates that were brought in to speak were already heavily involved in engineering, computer science, or data analytics. Not individuals who, as GA claims, were not required to possess any prior education or experience in the data science field and to look to pivot careers in a 12-week full-time career accelerator program. 

Come in with realistic expectations and applicable education or experience to get what you would anticipate paying $15,000 for a three-month course. My only regret is that I'm still in the program and didn't drop like some of the wiser individuals did at the beginning of the course after seeing the disorganization, deception, and undisciplined learning environment that the DSI GA staff puts together. Now, I'm left completing a program that I have diminishing hope and returns for, along with a hefty loan under my belt after predatory advertising and claims by the GA program and staff. I would not recommend anyone attend GA for any program. It would be much more cost efficient to attend community college classes to fill the gaps in your knowledge paired with online resources than pay $15k to a for-profit business that is reminiscent to the ITT Techs of yesteryear. 

Entering the data science boot camp at GA was one of the best professional and academic choices I have made. The material I was exposed is directly applicable to the demands of the industry, as I have found many leading tech companies using them. The time and money I invested in this boot camp have been worthwhile.

The boot camp is indeed heavy on the math and stats - as it should be- after all, data scientist deal with quantitative matters. It combines practical applications of machine learning algorithms. In fact, when the instructors introduce a new method, they take their time explaining the mechanics (math and stats) behind, before they start coding them. The type of datasets they used to describe the new methods range from your traditional "Titanic/iris data set" to more complex ones "NBA players performance" and others, which helps to make the learning process move from simple to complex.  The instructors were fantastic at creating a healthy - collaborative - atmosphere in the classroom where students felt free to ask as many questions as they need. They made sure we had a hands-on experience implementing the new models during the labs and made themselves available to us during this time. Beyond this, the instructors also offered their time after school hours to go over the materials with students that had a hard time grasping the new concepts. Also, the evening and in-class TA(s) were super helpful, as they were prompt to answer my questions and provided me with extra materials to complement my learning.

As far as my classmates, many of them had stronger math and programming background, which was not my case. I invested my free time (which was not much during the boot camp) to become better at programming. I decided to be more proactive and took the initiative to get to class 15 min early and master one or two new Python methods. Also, every other night, I asked the instructors and TAs to provide me with math and Python materials that I used while implementing the machine learning algorithms or cleaning the datasets.

Before the boot camp, I considered other online courses like Coursera, edX, DataQuest and others, but I didn’t find in them the depth of explanation I received at GA. Honestly, I got the returns I expected from the boot camp.

After graduating with a B.S. in a non-quant heavy major, I wanted to continue my education and applied to the GA DSI program.  For such a rigorous and math heavy curriculum, the technical assessment assignment only consisted of coding in SQL and then visualizing those results. If GA wanted to assess if an individual was ready for a quantitatively heavy and coding heavy program, the technical assessment should have been more centered on Statistics, Calculus, and Python instead of just SQL which is very simple to pick up in a short amount of time. 

I would not reccommend this program to someone who doesn't have either a very high quantitative acumen or a very solid understanding of computer science. The reality of the program is, you aren't going to become a data scientist in three short months, unless your field of study was in close proximity to data science or you were already in the work force for several years and working with data. 

For how much the program costs, I'd reccomend either courses from edX, Udacity, or Coursera. There are several online resources like DataCamp or DataQuest that can teach the fundamentals of coding. If you aren't comfortable with very high level mathematics, you will not get your money's worth from this course. The instructors did not do a good job of teaching, rather just display how but they don't explain why. The pre-work required for the course claims to put everyone on an equal level of knowledge, but that is simply not the case. If you are from an engineering background or have extensively worked with data in some capacity, you will be much more prepared and equipped to succeed. If the course were better structured, organized, and promoted as to what it actually is, I could reccommend it. But in it's current state, unless you are someone with experience or education related to data science, you will not become a data scientist in three months and instead be burdened with at least 15k in loans.

I've taken General Assembly courses online and offline. They're commitment to quality is obvious and consistent no matter the format or topic of the course. In every class, you're working with professionals in the field. This means you're learning applicable tools, understanding how things really work (not theroteically but realistically), and hearing the language as it's used in the industry. You get a real feel for what working in that space is like. Teachers make themselves available for extra help and 1:1 help. They're excited to work with students and hear about why you're taking these courses, what your goals are, and how you've been able to apply what you're learning in class day to day. The content is thoughtfully delivered in an constantly-optimized fashion (they're always collecting student feedback and updating content for the students and needs of the particular class). Everyone is so helpful and the skills taught are immediately applicable. I'm a huge fan of this institution. 

Instructors: I am so lucky to have a knowledgable instructor along with two other awesome TAs in my cohort. they are really awesome. They are really passionate about teaching and wanting students to succeed. They do know how to teach. I would suggest you to find out who the instructor is before taking this course because instructor is the key here.

Recommandation: I wouldn't suggest you just go in there and only spend your time in the classroom. Utilizing your resources, TAs, instructor and ask questions. You are there to learn, and not just to get that certificate(the paper to me is just a piece of paper). What matter the most is what goes into your brain and know that you will become very confident after this program if you put in the work. There wouldn't be any assessment tests.

ClassSize: We originally had around 20 students, but only 12 students remained. What I would say is that GA didn't do a good job in recruiting their students and so some people left the program because they didn't know what would be expecting in the later part of the course-(SQL, which is the part that i evaulated the most, they thought excel was too easy so they left). What other students drop out was because they never used excel before. I can always always can get help from teachers/TA. Think about it:12 to 3 instructos ratio. This was the best class size I have taken in my life because of the accidental drop out students(or maybe GA should just limit the class size to 12 already) and I got a lot out of the program. I believe the best ratio is 4-1 or 3-1. 

Thought:  I would say I improved a lot whether in SQL, presentation but also met a lot of awesome people who all worked in different field and it felt pretty awesome just to be a part of this group since those who still remained in the program are the ones who really want to learn and not afriad of struggles. I would say everyone in my cohort are all very nice and knowledage.

I would give the instructors and TAs 5 starts: They would always answer your questions through slack. I had one TA answered my question during his time at work. I felt so thanksful for him. They really care about your success. 

I would give the GA curriculum a 3 since not all the materials in the courses I found it to be useful.

Instructors are the key, find out who will be teaching- if they love what they do( teaching, helping, and want their students to succeed). I was lucky to be in a awesome cohort.  

After completing General Assembly’s full-time, 12-week WDI (Web Development Immersive) Bootcamp in San Francisco, I highly recommend choosing another bootcamp. There are far better bootcamps out there than GA that will get you where you want to be; hired as a Web Developer/Android Developer/UX..

What General Assembly is really good at is creating a supportive and encouraging community of students and teachers that support each other and don’t pressure you beyond what you’re physically capable of. They have free coffee all day long which is pretty cool. Their outcomes team is incredible. They have great career coaches that walk you through every step of the job hunting process. You have a workshop with the career coaches once a week and they continue workshops after the program with feedback on resumes, interview tips, cover letters, informational interviews, every piece of job advice you’d want/need. Also, we did a ton of pair programming which is great experience. We pair programmed almost every single day.

As for the bad, and why I wouldn’t recommend General Assembly, here’s what I have to say. I came to General Assembly with basically zero coding experience. I spent about 40–50 hours on Codecademy. The pace is extremely fast and I put in 12–15 hour days as well as an hour and a half commute each way. That’s expected. It’s bootcamp. What was unexpected was the student to teacher ratio which they claim is 3–4 students to 1. Not the case. Usually, the ratio was about 18 to 1-2. There’s not a lot of help available. They also promised one on one feedback and code reviews. Not true. I received feedback twice the entire time I was at GA. And it was never code reviews. Most of the feedback was behavioral, which isn’t what I was there for, I was there to learn to code.

They also said you can go to bootcamp with no experience and be successful. Also not true. Out of our group and the group before us, 2 people are hired 2 months out. In past groups, 4–5 months out, about half of them are hired. I have no idea where they get their 99% hiring rate from, but it’s not accurate. In my class, every single person had previous experience, years of experience in some cases in the field. Only me and 5 other students were coming in as true beginners and 2 of those students dropped within three weeks. The worst part about General Assembly and the primary reason I wouldn’t recommend it is wasted time in class and mistakes during the lectures. Almost every single lecture, the teachers were obviously not familiar with the material and made huge mistakes in the code that at times set us back 8 hours of work. That is totally unacceptable when we’re paying close to 14,000$ for a 12–week bootcamp. There were so many mistakes that students actually stated they didn’t even come to class/did other stuff during class because they knew they’d have to reteach themselves later.

General Assembly is a middle ground where the more experienced students aren’t challenged enough and the less experienced students don’t stand a chance. GA is spending all their money expanding and not enough money fixing what they have. If they keep up the bad experience my group and I had, GA will not be around much longer. There’s way too many bootcamps that can actually fulfill what they promise, and do it for cheaper.

Sidenote: GA is constantly asking for feedback and I did communicate all of this to them in feedback surveys. I know they try to incorporate feedback so I hope they fix their program because I’m not the only student feeling extremely disappointed in my outlay of time and money.

Not to say it wasn’t a good experience because it was and I learned so, so much. It’s been a great launchpad and I feel excited about learning much more on my own/online programs such as Udacity. But, I don’t think it’s a comprehensive jumpstart to actually begin a career as it would be at Hack Reactor/Galvanize.

If you have any questions at all about details of the course, or you want any more information about my experience, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to talk.

Contact: geckogirl312@yahoo.com

**Used my less frequent email as to remain anonymous

Like all study's there are ups (fun class great insturctor and assistant) and downs (jam packed with fast moving topics to cover and semi difficult assignments to complete while working) 

Nick ( the instructor) and Vito (assistant) were well rounded, very pro in all topics , there is never an "I don't know moment".

Fun classes and assignments, great encouragement and enthusiasm.

Fast pace for beginners that will come out at the end proud to have developed working web apps and better understanding of the lingo and being able to manipulate code, fixing bugs, start writing own scripts from scratch, and explore libraries.

People with experience in coding or a bit of JavaScript will gain knowledge in most recent trends , frameworks, and will enjoy the subject as much as n​ewbies, as The instructor had reworked the course to make it very relevant to what the industry is currently using, and what would be most relevant.

My work is confident in GA, therefore very confident to let me use the skills I have just recently learnt, at work.