LEARN Academy

If you are looking for a career change, have invested some personal time exploring the field, and are ready to take action - LEARN Academy is the place for you. My time at LEARN was great and I have no regrets. I would not be where I am today without the school so I am forever greatful for this.

I would say the positives are: it is cheaper then most other schools, it was the first school in San Diego, smaller classes, one-on-one attention, internship for the last month for real life experience, and we had group projects which really prepared me for the real world.

Cons: the head teacher was difficult to work with at times and you had to be prepared to teach yourself if he didn't want to help you, I wish we spent more time on Ruby and Javascript and less time on everything else. 

I attended LEARN! Academy from July 2016 to November 2016. I looked into the various bootcamps here in San Diego and the internship that is part of the curriculum set LEARN apart from other bootcamps. I can't say enough about how awesome my experience was. It was very challenging, but at the same time it was manageable.

The people at LEARN truly care about the students and the school. LEARN isn't trying to push as many students as possible through the pipeline just to make a quick buck. They work hard with each student not only through the classroom time but also throughout the internship and through the hiring process.

The curriculum for my cohort was Ruby. It was fast-paced and challenging, but the instructors were fantastic. There is lecture time each day but the bulk of the experience is coding challenges. The instructors give you just enough guidance to help you in the right direction. They encourage you to solve problems and meet the challenges on your own, (which is more like the real-world working environment).

The daily routine at LEARN mimics a real-world work environment, so the transition to full-time developer for me was seemless.  I was placed at a great company for my internship and was hired as a full time developer at the end of the 4 weeks. 

Another note on the internships, the companies that take interns are all great. I would have been happy at any of them. The LEARN staff took great care in placing students in the right internship environment. It worked out great for me as I was hired by my internship company. 

Going the LEARN was the best decision! I highly recommend LEARN if you want to go somewhere where you will be more than just a number. You will be a part of a great community! 

I am a recent graduate of Learn Academy and here is how I honestly feel about the Bootcamp. I find very important work with good people who care and want success for others and this Bootcamp is definitely that. I am not going to sugarcoat this because this Bootcamp was not easy for me and I definitely spent many hours of studying prior and after sessions. What I love most about learn Academy was the people who are running the program from the CEO to the instructors and their partner companies. They hire awesome people to work with and they really care about people's success.  

Prior to learn I did research on what BootCamp I wanted to attend and I actually tried to attend one of the big name bootcamp but I did not like it at all because it was nothing like Learn Academy. It was huge size of classes and it was not personal at all. Learn Academy on the other hand his build for smaller size classes and people are able to connect and make connections with others who are attending the program. If you are thinking about attending this Bootcamp I would recommend you study on your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript and watch some videos on react and Ruby on Rails. I think this would make your life easier when attending the program because it’s high pace and there’s a lot going on so you want be able to keep up.  I had great experience at Learn Academy and I plan to be a part of this awesome community and staying in touch.  

If you're a hopeful web developer or engineer in San Diego, Learn is the only bootcamp I recommend. A couple primary reasons: 1. internship and career services 2. program's willingness to change.

The internship experience speaks for itself. To have the opportunity to apply classroom skills to a functioning business is so important. One of the biggest barriers to finding employment is job experience; the internship does help address that deficit. Learn's career services is also a real strength. A week of the program will be devoted to preparing you for a job search, from the obvious things like creating a new resume to the less obvious, like taking LinkedIn head shots. I do not know how else I would've pulled everything together and very much appreciated Bryan's guidance. 

I also mention the program's willingness to accept feedback as a highlight - and it absolutely is. Prior to attending Learn, I worked at a university managing a program and have real understanding of how difficult it can be to modify classroom focus or process. Learn does a really impressive job of soliciting and responding to feedback. Every cohort changes - new projects, new format, emphasis on new skills - which is incredibly difficult to do. It does help them stand out; each cohort gets better.  

As a final note, I do think it's important to stress that you will not get everything out of Learn if you do not put in the work. Most career switches take about 18 months. Learn's program, including internship, is 4 months. I do believe that in order to be most successful, you have to put in extra time outside of Learn's allotted 40 hours/week. It is an intense program and requires focus for success. Know that the job market is tough for junior developers or engineers, but if you do the work, it pays off. I encourage you to control your fate as much as possible. Take advantage of learn alum, meetups, their recommended prep work, pairing programming, access to teachers and each of their unique strengths.

Learn is great. They will work hard on your behalf. Full recommendation from me.

My time at LEARN Academy was one of the best experiences of my life honestly. I came into it expecting to be good. But it ended up being great! I knew it would be challenging, which it was. I knew it would be hard at times, and it was. And I knew it would be a lot to take in, in such a small amount of time, and it was.

LEARN Academy and their instructors teach the content in way that makes it stick in your head. It is fast paced but as long as you are willing to put in the hard work and proper effort, you will pick it up very quickly.

Additionally, LEARN has you develop applications to practice the content which really brings everything together. Working with other students in the cohort is one of the best ways to learn because you're all learning the same content, at the same time.

One of the best things about LEARN is their career services. You are taken on a startup crawl in downtown San Diego so that you really get to see what tech companies are really like. After that, they help you practice technical interviews, real interviews, and prep you for your internship at the end of the cohort.

Overall, LEARN Academy is the perfect bootcamp if you're looking to become a software developer. I came into it having went to another bootcamp a few years back and there really was no comparison. LEARN is a hundred times better than the bootcamp I went to before. I recommend LEARN Academy to anyone interested in getting into the industry!

LEARN Academy was one of the best experiences I've had in my life! I absolutely loved being there each day working with the staff and learning with my classmates. It is, of course, not for the faint of heart. Transitioning to a completely new career isn't an easy thing to do and learning how to be a web developer in 3 months is a daily grind. But it is rewarding, exhilarating and worth it. The best part about it is that the LEARN staff are there for you each step of the way, supporting and guiding you.

I cannot stress enough how supportive, encouraging and thoughtful the staff are. Each of them worked with us on things on areas that we needed to develop and they even tailored the curriculum to fit our needs and the things we were interested in. Even though I was enrolled during a time where there was a transition for the Career Services Manager, we didn't feel like we were dropped through the cracks or that we received any less attention than other cohorts previously. And we are still receiving job support and mentorship, even though I've already graduated. 

I come from a kinesiology background and needed a change. I had my fitness business online but I decided to take the technology portion of it more seriously. I did not want to go back to college to start all over so I decided, after lots of research, I wanted to go to an immersive coding bootcamp to jump into a new career. 

Before attending Learn, I saw that they have a weekend course called Jumpstart. I attended and got a really good sense of the course work and how the class would be set up. After Jumpstart, I decided it was going to be a good fit to attend Learn Academy and the bonus is that the money spent on JumpStart goes towards your tuition.

The course is hard by taking a lot of brain power while also staying optimistic/humble. At Learn I felt like I had my classmates and my teachers to help me when I got stuck. Now, after having a professional job as a developer, all the soft skills you need for pair programming and learning in a semi-stressful environment is necessary! I work remotely and I constantly need to know how to work well with others and learn new things with other developers. The team at Learn strives to set you up for success and I am very happy I decided to attend Learn Academy!

I came to LEARN to disrupt my mid-career boredom. There were a few bootcamp-style options, but I was drawn to LEARN for several reasons: the unique internship aspect of the program; a commitment to diversity I saw in their staff, alumni, and community involvement; their place at the center of an active tech community; and the fact that, because they are local, they would be in touch with the needs of San Diego employers.

I'm over 40 and approach all new situations with skepticism. I started LEARN waiting to find out that it was all a sham, that I'd been taken for a ride, or that the level of learning was nothing I couldn't find in a few YouTube videos and I am SO happy to say I was wrong. All of what drew me to LEARN in the first place proved to be true. The educators are so passionate about the success of each student, as is the management - they have a reputation to uphold in this community, and that start with putting well-prepared program grads into the workforce. Beyond the tech curriculum and the amazing educators, two extremely valuable pieces of this program are the Career Services and the Internship. Students have real interviews with real companies, no smoke and mirrors. And the professional development portion of the curriculum combined with ongoing career services advice is WAY more than I ever got from NYU.

I will preface that reading the reviews on this site is what finally sold me on this bootcamp.  I believe I also applied to LEARN through this site. 

I moved from Chicago to San Diego to good to this bootcamp. I previous worked as a marketing admin doing product management type stuff.  Mind you, I am not extremely analytical so I knew that going into it I was going to need to step up my logic and analytical game.  It was no light decision - I had researched the various bootcamps in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco to find the right one for me.  I knew I wanted to be a part of a community, I wanted to be in California, and I wanted to learn how to build a website. Mentorship was also on my mind.  Most importantly, I was looking to do all of this AND on top of that, get a job.  

I worked hard during this bootcamp.  It truly is a bootcamp if you treat it that way.  It can also be a perfectly good way to waste three months if you allow to as well.  Let me explain.  

Bootcamp was from 9-5 with instruction in the morning and challenges in the afternoon.  Pretty standard for any bootcamp that i've seen with some being more intense and some longer.  I was extremely lucky that I had a great cohort filled with people who were like-minded and came to work hard.  The onerous was on me, though. I took the concepts we learned during the day and continued to learn things I didnt understand.  I spent hours on my off time learning the concepts, sticking with the fundementals, and going through as many of the exercises as I could.  I out myself through as many "tests" as I could during the time and still management to have fun and have a social life outside of coding.  That's not to say that I didn't think about coding and development most of the time.  One could easy sit there and do the coursework and expect a "certificate" only to find that it's rather hard finding a job.  It's not easy finding a job, there are countless ways employers will knock you out of their candidate pool.  Don't do the bare minimum if it's your goal to get a full-time job.
 
During our week of job preparedness, I took all of the instruction and truly applied it to whereever I could. I'm not the most disciplined, but I was disciplined enough to take the information and continue to apply it throughout the rest of my time.  It goes by quickly and you can't possibly learn everything you'd want in three months, but if you pay attention and work hard to grasp the concepts to apply to greater world, I think you have a better chance than most people in landing that job in development.

The instructors and network of people around LEARN is absolutely amazing and I'm continuing to meet people from other cohorts which has given me an extended network of some truly talented and amazing people.  It's an honor to give back to this community whenever I can.  (To put it into perspective, I haven't been back to my undergrad college since I graduated)

Through a concrete curriculum, extremely strong network, public speaking opportunities, and intensive job prep, LEARN helped me land my first job as a developer within a week after my internship.  Even after graduation, LEARN continues to provide me with tools to get out of my head and get into the world and make an impact through extended education opportunities at meet ups and various networking events.

I went to Learn Academy in 2016. I don’t know that I was prepared for it. I had studied JavaScript for months before I began, but still felt unprepared. It’s a whirlwind – it’s difficult, it’s exhausting, it’s stressful. It’s also rewarding- it’s a place to join a new community and to meet new people, and it’s a great way to challenge yourself and your brain.

We studied HTML, Bootstrap, JQuery, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We had a professional week in which we made resumes and our own websites, and a month-long internship. It was grueling. A fair number of people in my class didn’t have jobs when the bootcamp was over and some of them recently got hired and I think that there are a couple that still don’t have jobs – nearly a year later. So be prepared to work very hard at this – bootcamp won’t magically get you a job – there is a lot of networking and applying to jobs in there as well. In hindsight my internship could have been a lot better and I wished that I pushed harder to get in a different company. My internship didn't help me get a job after I finished the program. 

In order to get the most out of your time in bootcamp I would recommend studying before you go and possibly taking an online intro to CS course, so the concepts won’t be completely foreign. I would also recommend taking courses through Code School and Code Academy.  When I decided on this bootcamp, it was the only one in San Diego. I would recommend that you research all of your options – do not rely solely on reviews – go to meet ups and meet people from the different bootcamps, and contact different bootcamps so that you can make the best decision for you.

In the end I don't think that this was probably the right bootcamp for me. I am thankful for everything I learned, I am thankful for all of the friendships I've made, I'm thankful for a new career which I would not have been able to get without Learn. But I also think that a different path to my new career would have been better for me. Be prepared to teach yourself, test yourself, and take responibility for your education. 

LEARN ACADEMY SIMPLY ROCKS! 

What mattered to me the most were the people. I found out about LEARN from attending an SD Ruby Meetup. One of the people, Rob Kaufman (co-founder of LEARN) was giving a talk that broke things down in a way that made it easy for me understand how parts of Rails functioned. That was huge because at that time, I did not have a clear idea of what Rails was. I think it also says a lot about how LEARN is so heavily involved in the San Diego Tech scene. The lead instructor of my cohort was influential with his style of instruction. It was not so much the learning of languages and how to use a framework but the building of good programming habits (both technical and with concern to general programmer happiness). Instruction had more to do with learning to think and communicate like a programmer. Without the insights of Lisa (the outreach coordinator) and Chelsea (CEO), the transition to becoming a software developer personally would have been stifling. I’ve been working as a junior software developer now for about five months and to this day, I find myself with so much gratitude for this community of great people.

I did hit some rough patches with parts of the material, and that's natural - it happens to EVERYONE. However, I always had someone to ask for help during and after my time at LEARN. Another beautiful thing about the people at LEARN is that they are also very concerned about burnout prevention. They want you to still have a life outside of the bootcamp because they truly understand that humans are humans; that our brains can only handle so much input before you collapse into a burnout—you learn better when you’re not stressed out. This was a very winning point for me because I’m aware that programmer burnout is a real thing. I experienced something similar to it when I was in architecture school. I appreciate intensity but I just don't think being at a computer for 15+ hours a day is conducive to maximized learning or good programming. And LEARN did a great job at providing a healthy environment. 

LEARN provides an internship after three months. I cannot emphasize how important this internship was both in terms of what I learned and how I used it to build my resume. My peers have gone on to work for companies that partnered with LEARN to provide internships. A month after my internship ended, I had four in-person interviews (plus three phone interviews). I received three offers. The job hunting process was no joke. It was a  constant hustle, but I was prepared for it because of all the groundwork that was laid during the Professional Development week at LEARN. Did I happen to mention that I work at a pretty cool fin-tech startup in San Diego Downtown? That’s right — Thank you, LEARN.   

They have it down when it comes to helping you build a network of people who will help you not only get your foot in the door, but also one that will help you throughout your programming career. LEARN is a co-op space for alumni. I've been back many times (and I wish more), to ask for help, to share my knowledge, to attend meet-ups, and to just be there and work among other programmers. I have seen that they have made an already amazing program even better. 

I have no doubt that LEARN will be the right choice for anyone looking to take the leap into the world of web-development.