Rutgers Bootcamps

I had been learning to code on my own, then I got into Rutgers Coding Bootcamp.

This is when I realized the Rutgers Coding Bootcamp was organized and the program for me. They basically take you from zero coding knowledge to job ready. Job ready means job ready. I got my first job offer and just couldn't believe it. Rutgers Coding Bootcamp has a great career service department where they work with you and show you how to start searching for jobs while taking classes. This is proof of the confidence in their program and dedication to impact students lives.

After graduation, the great career services team included multi-functional levels of support for job seekers. From providing guidance on the polishing job ready materials to equipping you to become employer competitive. My Career Coach, Timamu Wilson started partnering with me while I was still in class, sharing tools/resources/career advice and motivation. We had scheduled 1:1 meetings to polish my resume, and portfolio, and practiced interview questions, to ensure I was job ready. 

And after graduating, she totally worked tirelessly to refer me to companies to ensure I got a job. One of those companies is now my first employer as a software developer. All in all, Rutgers Coding Bootcamp has a great career service team under Coach Timamu’s leadership.

Getting my first developer job through career services is proof that they do a great job, they keep their promise and I am grateful for that. My experience with Rutgers Coding Bootcamp has been a life-changing experience, and if you want to tell a story like me, just start by applying to this school.  

#KeepCoding

This is not a course if you are new to coding. They will offer you the world, just remember they are pretty much selling. Thats their job. When its time to look for a job everybody wants either a degree or a couple years of experience. Nobody wants to hire  a noob fresh from boot camp. When I signed up they said 90% hires. That was all BS, salesmen selling. I fell for it. You want a new career as a developer then get a degree, dont waste your money. If you already have experience and a coding job and just want to learn web development then go ahead. Otherwise you are going to waste your money.

as someone who spent 10 years getting my undergrad and masters degree in education, i knew that this was going to be a challenge learning all these topics in such short amount of time. The pace was perfect for teaching us flexibility and to be adaptive to whatever is thrown our way. The support staff, student success manager and even tutors all want you to do well and go above the extra mile for you. I learned so much during my time and I feel i am prepared to take on something new. Well worth it!

I will break this down based on the star ratings.

Overall Experience:

The name says Rutgers but the course is run by a company called Trilogy who creates the curriculum and then sells the course to colleges.

The class enviroment was good. Everyone in my cohort was eager to learn which made for an interactive class. I have heard of a few classes with various types of people which pulled down the quality of the class and made it difficult for those wanting to learn to do so.

Instructors:

My instructor, Alex, was great. He kept the class fun and engaging while covering the material and brought in donuts constantly! He is always available and able to assist.

The down side is that none of the instructors have real world experiance working with React, Mongo etc in a company for a long period of time. They either have been in other areas of development, C++ etc, or just recently taken the course themselves. This reduced the learning to the basics and the things they have learned themselves along the way.

A course should be using instructors with years of experiance with these systems. Rutgers wouldn't hire professors that have only just graduated so why allow it for these ones?

The teacher's aides are also in the same boat. Most of them have recently taken the course so some of them know even less. They can assist you with the basics in regards to material covered in the course but outside of that they arn't much help and you are left to fend for yourself.

Curriculum:

The

The Curriculum covers the basics of everything but delves deep into nothing. It's good as a kick start to get you up to speed with everything but that is it. After that it is up to you to learn about other things. That being said, the course starts for those with no experiance at all and the first month is going over the basics of HTML, CSS, and intro to Javascript.

Because of the goal of the course I feel learning all that material should be prerequisite work and day one should be diving into JS.

Very little time is taken to cover SQL, Mongo, and React.. As I said the basics are covered on how to make queries but not how to do anything such as stored procedures or other valuable features of the system.

Even more disapointing is that React, the heart of the course, in my opinion, is only given 1 week of learning. My instructor replaced the last week (learning Java for some reason) with an extra week of React. Given that the system is so important they certainly don't procvide much time to learn it. This is the main reason they should make learning HTML etc a pre req.

From what I have heard of other course that is what they do so that they can start digging into the heavy stuff and provide more time with the important systems. Since this one is a Javascript course why was a wasting 1 month of time learning basics?

Job Assistance:

My advice, do not choose this bootcamp because of the job assistance. When I signed up for the course it said it uses Rutgers career services, which makes it sound like it's the Rutgers College career services but it's not. It's Trilogies on. They took that blurb down from their website after I was taking the course.

This statement is a joke. I wish I could of given it 0 stars. They state you are required to complete job preperation work in order to qualify for job assistance but that's not the case at all.

The person in charge of this area does post jobs on slack and tells you to apply, they seem to have some connection with companies. Once you apply though you never hear anything back. All I was kept getting told was "no havn't heard anything" or "going to be talking to that person next week". The links that are provided, and the assistance they give are indeed or glassdoor search links that anyone can do on their own.

between myself and someone else who took the full time cohort we only know 1 person that got hired through the career services.

Tech Panels:

The course says they do tech panels, it's more or less a lie. We had 1 tech panel the whole time ans it was two people that came in for about 30 minutes while we asked them questions. This really annoyed me as I was expecting, from their own words, a tech panel every other week or so.

Over all:

Trilogy makes lots of claims but falls short on all of them. I went in expecting much more that what I got but I did learn some things. I guess If you asked me would I take it again, I would say no. There are $25, multi hour web courses that you could take and get the same material out of it. This would go for begineers and intermediate programmers alike.

Sure the course does help in the fact that you can work and learn off of others but it's not woth the 10k for this course.

Find a place that does direct job placement, I spent 3 months looking for a job and the only thing that helped me was my previous background in I.T. Others without that will have a harder, if not impossible, time.

I have been a web developer for several years. As I'm getting older, I started to realize that I wanted to make a very meaningful impact for society or company. I thought I could do more beside just creating a website so I searched and researched exhaustively on what I can really do - a significant career change. I found Rutgers Data Science Bootcamp and I was very convinced that this was the one for me. The answer I've been looking for. 

At first, I was skeptic about this program as this was the first Data Science program they were offering. Normally, I tend to go for a well-established, seasoned programs with years of experience. But I trusted my gut and I had a feeling I would be just fine. And YUP! I was right. It was beyond my expectation. Everything was high quality. High quality course materials, instructor, TAs, support service, and career service. I can feel a lot of time, effort, planning went into this program. There was a tremendous amount of support and attention for us. They made sure EACH of us was getting what we wanted and would go beyond call to make sure we do not get left behind. They addressed my disability needs extremely well. 

Ahmend was an excellent instructor and I was very lucky to have him. He demonstrated a difficult concept with real life example so that we can connect dots easily. His course lesson plan spanning over 6 months is well thought out and includes all the popular data science tools. I had Matt, Han, Jacob, and Austin as my TAs. They were very knowledgeable and extremely helpful. At the end of the program, you will not be an expert in machine learning or data visualization but you will be an excellent junior data guy and you will become an excellent expert in a very short time. 

Juanita checked in regularly on me to make sure I'm still alive and chugging along. She was very attentive to my needs. Corey and Jessica did WONDERFUL job to make sure I am a high quality job seeker and they gave me a very individualized attention and gave me great advices for my resume, LinkedIn, and GitHub. 

This is a very important thing to do for yourself. In order to make this program works for you, you need to pay attention and put in all the hours and effort with due diligence. This program is not easy and it is fast paced. Practice Practice Practice and Ask Ask Ask! 

I entered the Data Science and Visualization Bootcamp with no prior coding experience and having not done analytics work in over 10 years.  After teaching mathematics for 10 years, I was looking to change career paths and seek a new challenge.  As a former educator, I was absolutely blown away by the quality of instruction, the constant importance of student feedback, and the attention given to every student to ensure their success in mastering the course topics and career support.  Additionally, class and homework activities were incredibly well crafted and solely focused on hands-on skills that allow you to become highly proficient in the topics covered.  I truly never dreamed that at the end of 6 months I would learn as much as a did.  I became fluent in languages/technologies such as Python, Javascript, SQL, MongoDB, HTML/CSS and the various libraries that enhance them for topics such as API creation/interaction, social media mining, statistical analysis, machine learning, and data visualization.  This program was hands-down the best educational experience I ever had.  It changed my life and was so much FUN!  

I attended Rutgers undergrad for computer science for a few semesters and became discouraged by the amount of time I had to spend on work for breadth requirement courses when I wanted to devote most of my time to computer science work.  I'd find myself in the library writing papers and doing homework for courses that I had no interest in, but was forced to take.  Fast forward a few years, and I saw the opportunity to take this Coding Bootcamp and jumped on it immediately.

I took the 12 week (full-time) course rather than the 24 week (part-time) course, and honestly I loved how condensed it was.  Going into it I thought I'd have trouble paying attention through a five hour class every day, but I quickly found that most days class would end and I wished that it was longer.  If you take the 12 week course it's definitely very important to stay on top of the assignments, but as long as you start the homework a reasonable amount of time before the due date it's no problem to get it finished and even find a little extra time to add your own flair to it.

For a little context, I had some experience in Java, but it was so far in the past for me that I didn't utilize it much.  I worked three nights a week as well, so it's possible to have a job at the same time but I wouldn't overload your schedule.  Especially towards the tail end of the course.  Many students had zero prior experience in coding prior to the bootcamp, and while some struggled in the beginning to pick up core concepts, they all finished the course as fantastic coders.  I would work with any single one of them in the future.  I just finished yesterday, so I can't really speak on job placement, but they have a career services department who will help you craft your resume, teach you what questions you will encounter in interviews, and set you up with recruiting agencies.  We even had a few recruiters attend the presentation for our final projects, which was cool.

Our instructor, Franklin Dawes, was amazing.  Super helpful, always took the time to answer questions thoroughly.  He'd go over the same thing several times if necessary, but somehow still managed to keep us on track with the curriculum every day.  Alan Chu and Tom Keel were our TA's, and they were just as fantastic.  Really supportive people who attended the bootcamp in a prior session and came out very knowledgeable.  We had a few other guest TA's, Aaron, Mark, Tammer, Rob, I'm sure I'm missing some.  They were all great too, and someone in my class by the name of Adam Kwan will be a TA for the next full time course I believe.  He was an all star all semester in our class and pretty much acted as a third TA for a lot of us, so I'm sure he'll be awesome.  Finally, Juanita Soranno helped out with career services and acted as our cheerleader throughout the course.  She's super helpful, knows her stuff when it comes to coding, and is very accomodating if anything arises.

Bottom line, if you want to learn to be a web developer in 12 or 24 weeks, you can't go wrong taking this course.  It's not easy so take it seriously, but I think you'll find it less and less of a chore as you get farther into the course to keep up and more just something you want to do.

After searching for two years on what should I learn next I stumbled into the Rutgers Bootcamp, at first I was skeptical, but after doing some research I decided to join. After the first couple of lessons, I knew this was going to be challenging; see I came from a hardware background and had no idea what coding was. The program advisor told me to go and practice in code academy before the class starts and as a good slacker, I totally forgot. So when the class started I was zero in programming but Ahmed (my instructor) was such an awesome teacher that I got to understand the concepts being taught to a high level, This is not an easy course and it is not for everyone you need to have the drive to learn and push beyond your limits "IS LIKE STARTING TO LEARN A LANGUAGE FROM SCRATCH". I just want to thank all the staff for the time being put into this course and especially Ahmed for being Great.  "Another One"! I will always remember this course as a life changing experience!!!!. After graduating I can say I am a developer with the capacity to keep on learning new programming languages because I have not just learned how to code in this program "I have learned how to learn".