C M

Review of Epicodus

Pretty good value for the money.

Pretty good value for the money.

I would say that my overall experience there was pretty great. Pair programming can be a struggle, and sometimes it felt like I was banging my head against a wall, but overall I learned a lot from the instruction given.

I think the key to success was making sure you take the homework seriously. I found a huge difference between simply reading it, and really digging in and trying to understand things on an almost intuitive level if I could achieve it. It seems like this would be a no-brainer, but I felt like I saw several classmates do the bare minimum and it really reflected on their performance in class, and sometimes making pair programming frustrating because having not done the work, it would be teaching them all of the concepts again. Though that was really good too because then it further solidified the concepts in my head.

The cirriculum was dated, and sometimes help wasn't available very quickly from instructors, but the lack of help was rare, all things considered. I did feel like the staff was stretched thin, but that was my perceptions, perhaps on the other side of the table it's a different story.

The dated cirriculum was a bit frustration, but I can imagine with little staff to update the cirriculum, it wasn't easy to stay on the cutting edge. The other thing though... having gone through it, I realized that the cutting edge isn't necessarily the best place to be because it's often not vetted properly, so I became less frustrated with the dated cirriculum as I realized that, yes it's dated... but also it just works without unanticipated bugs. Most of the bugs we'd run into from our stacks would have solutions if we dug for them. Had it been the newest stuff, we'd be debugging javascript based issues without pre-existing solutions, which could drastically slow things down potentially.

Overall I'd say it was a great experience, and nothing beats the value of the internship that they placed me in. Having even 5 weeks of real world work experiences was worth the value of the program without a doubt.