I only went for the bootcamp prep class, but I learned a tremendous amount and the teachers (shout-out to Aleks!) and the environment is top-notch. I am still trying to get in through the admissions process, but from what I've seen they take learning seriously and will follow through on their claims as long as you can do the work.
My Background: Undergraduate degree in Economics, MBA in Finance. Left my job as a Management Consultant within the Financial Services industry to attend Fullstack Academy. I had very little prior coding experience.
Founders: David and Nimit are great guys. Both extremely knowledgable about coding and the industry in general. No matter how well the program seemed to be running, they were always looking for feedback and ways to improve the program. Fullstack Academy will just continue to get better over time with them in charge.
Curriculum: Overall very well structured and always improving. First half of the course typically consisted of instructor led lessons, followed by paired programming exercises. Throughout all exercises instructors were available to provide guidance. The second half of the curriculum consisted of two team projects, a 3 day Hackathon, and hiring day. There was also time spent during the second half of the course to help prepare for interviews.
Instructors: I was very impressed by the professionalism and knowledge of the instructors. Every instructor clearly had a passion for coding/teaching (one even described working at Fullstack as his dream job . When smart people are doing something they are passionate about, they do an amazing job.
Students: The only commonality was everyones passion to code. Incredibility eclectic group of individuals who were all amazing in different ways. One day you would be working with someone who used to be an Investment Banker, and the next day you were working with someone who was a past stunt actor for the Call of Duty video game (those are factual backgrounds). You will make great friends and you will be surrounded by people who are all working together to help each other succeed.
Outcome: I accepted a full-time Software Engineering position about a month after graduating. I went on a number of interviews (some direct outcomes from hiring day some not). Overall, I received excellent feedback on my coding challenges as part of the interview process at various companies and I always felt as if I was well prepared.
Summary: Exactly as advertised. You come into a great program with awesome people (instructors and students) and you leave with an in-demand skill that allows you to do something you love.
This place has the best curriculum of all of the NYC bootcamps that I've researched.
I found the world of code bootcamps enticing and suspect with their promise of "12 weeks from amateur to pro." Given that they all pretty much make this claim alongside the assurance you'll be learning the latest in web development, some research was in order.
My three criteria in finding the best fit were:
1. The curriculum truly had to be of the moment. This meant learning the MEAN stack.
2. The pace and scope had to be geared towards someone that's more than a beginner.
3. The people running the place had to be great teachers, not just great developers.
After reading numerous reviews, reaching out to alumni, and speaking with school reps, Fullstack became the clear choice. The knowledge, connections, and opportunities I've gained from the experience well exceeded my expectations, but it's a get-what-you-give situation. If you put in the time/effort to master the material, David, Nimit, and the rest of the team are more than supportive.
In short, Fullstack was one of the best professional decisions I've ever made. I think anyone considering a code bootcamp ought to give them a serious look.
I really enjoyed my time at Fullstack Academy. It gave me the skillset and confidence to land a dream job at a growing startup! Here are my pro s and con s of my time at Fullstack.
Pros:
David and Nimit are both amazing teachers. Their teaching styles and backgrounds complement each other and provide diverse perspectives on the course material. They ve known each other for years and have experience teaching together.
The TA s are all very smart and willing to help whenever you need them.
The curriculum is well designed and logically progresses from foundations to theories to individual technologies to complete projects (which tie all prior topics together).
Every single student in my cohort reached something called escape velocity , or the ability to quickly teach yourself new technologies as needed.
Cons:
In my cohort we had one guest lecturer for a few days who was very knowledgeable but not a good teacher.
Fullstack Academy is a newer school so their brand is limited, however those who have heard of it are usually very impressed.
Advice to Management:
Be careful to maintain the integrity of the program as you grow: this ll be hard but you can do it!
Make sure that guest lecturers are knowledgeable and good teacher.
I began Fullstack right after graduating from Columbia with only an introductory CS course and some online tutorials under my belt. I had majored in Religion and was looking for a course that would accelerate my fledgling interest in programming to professional capability. It's an understatement to say that I found so much more at Fullstack.
As many of my fellow peers have said in their reviews, the community at Fullstack is truly unbeatable. The instructors are by far some of the best teachers I have ever had in any subject. That we were able to learn as much as we did in 13 weeks is a testament to their skills both as programmers and teachers. And my cohort was simply ... an amazingly talented and beautiful bunch of people. In a field like programming, where so much depends on teamwork and collaboration, who you work with is vital to the quality and depth of your learning. Fullstack did everything possible to foster this kind of exchange at every step in the curriculum, and I walked out learning more from one day of working with a fellow Fullstacker than I had in months of online courses.
The curriculum itself is one of the most comprehensive, well-thought out and rigorous that I've ever gone through. If you want to master the MEAN stack, you undoubtedly will by the end of the course. Of course, it's impossible to learn everything there is to know about Javascript and fullstack development in 3 months, but Fullstack preps you to the point that picking up additional skills afterwards becomes intuitive and easy. I personally taught myself React in a couple days after graduating, and know that my fellow fullstackers have applied for jobs working in PHP, Python, Go, etc. Fullstack gives you the best possible foundation, after which you will have the confidence and agility to keep building on your skillset.
Finally, David and Nimit are reason enough to attend Fullstack. They are incredible founders, and I would encourage anyone who is interested in startups and entrepreneurship to learn from them. I shared an idea I had for an e-commerce company with them early on in my Fullstack journey, and both David and Nimit encouraged me to the point that I went off and launched the company right after finishing Fullstack. They gave me advice, introduced me to some amazing mentors in the field, guided me both from a technical and business perspective, and generally have been my biggest supporters till date. They also allowed me to find the first two developers on my team... fellow fullstackers from my cohort :). Although David and Nimit always emphasize that Fullstack is not a start-up incubator (people are there truly for the love of code!), it's no exaggeration to say that attending pushed me to pursue a dream I never could have otherwise. I am forever grateful.
In sum, Fullstack is the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't know a single person, either in my cohort or any other, that felt differently about their time there. If you want to spend 3 months learning an empowering skillset that will either enhance or change your career, Fullstack is, from my experience, the best choice you could make.
In Short
This is the top coding bootcamp in NYC. The school itself has an amazing track record of churning out high quality engineers regardless of previous experience or background.
The Reason
The people. I am not just referring to the co-founders or instructors but the larger community that makes up Fullstack Academy. FS does a great job of selecting motivated and intelligent individuals all of whom are passionate about learning what it takes to become a full stack software engineer. As a part of the community for about 8 months I can attest to the willingness of former students, current students, instructors and co-founders to respond to and ask questions, post pertinent links to educational readings, and work at the forefront of the software engineering world. There is truly a strong community of talented and dedicated individuals willing to share, all you need to do is ask.
In Summation
Saying that it was the best career choice I have made thus far in life would be an understatement. I have made some great friends, contacts in the engineering field, and more importantly made myself a much more valuable engineer. However (if you choose to attend) your level of success is entirely dependent upon the amount of work you put in. The resources are all there you just need to make sure you take full advantage of the best learning environment I personally have ever experienced.
Going through Fullstack was one of the most empowering and liberating experiences of my life academic, professional, or otherwise. I d never heard of a learning environment like this before, and I d certainly never had the pleasure of being a part of one. My classmates, as diverse a group as any, were smart, capable, motivated, and most importantly generous you ll find no shortage of new friends eager to help you squash bugs when you (inevitably) run into them. By the time I left Fullstack, I felt like I d fast-tracked my way into an elite professional network of ridiculously skilled developers. You will learn many of the latest and most in-demand web development technologies during the course of your 13 weeks with David, Nimit, and the rest of Fullstack s warm and highly capable staff.
I graduated Fullstack confident in my abilities as a software developer. Within four weeks, I accepted a competitive front-end position at a startup here in New York, and I couldn t be happier.
Deciding whether a bootcamp is right for you is obviously an important choice for one thing, they re not cheap. But my final bit of wisdom is that you should pick your bootcamp (should you decide to attend one) based not on the technologies you ll be learning, but instead on the quality of the instructors and your fellow students. There s nowhere I would have rather enrolled than Fullstack.
It was like a scene out of Revenge of the Nerds: there I sat on my NYC apartment couch a few days before Christmas of 2015, casually flipping through the latest issue of CPU Magazine. As a self-employed IT consultant and occasional programmer in the big city, keeping myself apprised of the latest tech trends was always important...albeit rarely exciting.
Despite enjoying fiscal success since 2009, the ratio of time spent on IT work to software development had simply been way too high for my tastes. For several years I had considered pursuing a computer science master's degree, but the substantial commitment of time and money required for graduate school was daunting. To put it bluntly, I felt lost and stuck...sitting idly by with a highly-demanded skill set wondering whether it would ever find its way into the scalding-hot tech scene.
And then it happened. Out from a sea of processor benchmark scores and graphics card advertisements jumped the article that would change my life forever: "The Camper's Code: Coding Bootcamps Promise A Bright, High-Paying Future."
I spent the next several hours churning through every online reference I could find on coding bootcamps. How did they differ from one another? What languages did they focus on? What sort of success rates did their graduates have? How challenging were they? These among countless other questions were painstakingly analyzed and funneled into one master question...
Which coding bootcamp is best? Luckily for me, the answer was clear: Fullstack Academy.
Not wasting one more minute, I hopped onto Fullstack's website and applied for admission into their 24-week Flex Immersive Program. The application process was vigorous and thorough, and it was immediately apparent that I had made the right choice. Before even setting foot on campus, I had already had in-depth conversations with BOTH founders of the academy (David and Nimit), each of whom was patient enough to answer all of the scheduling-related questions one might expect from a professional with limited free time.
The first six months of 2016 were easily the best of my 15-year career, as my classmates and I found ourselves plunged into the center of the startup tech scene. While computer science fundamentals and theory are at the heart of the program, there is truly nothing hypothetical about Fullstack Academy. All lessons are immediately put to good use, with workshops and projects comprising the vast majority of time spent by each and every student.
The atmosphere on campus (and FSA online) is electric, which is clearly the result of a unique continuity of information flow among students, fellows, instructors, and alumni. From simple tweaks and tricks of the trade to the latest in cutting-edge web development trends, nothing goes under the radar at Fullstack Academy.
By the time I presented on Hiring Day in June of 2016, I had been fully transformed from an on-the-outskirts programmer to an in-the-know software engineer. Fullstack's ever helpful and knowledgeable staff walked me through all of the necessary steps for preparing myself and my resume for the ultimate goal: career transformation. Several months of hard work and job hunting later, I can proudly say that it has all paid off as I have recently accepted a job offer from Google as a full-time software engineer.
As co-founder David Yang warned me during our first conversation last year, there is no such thing as a "magic pill" when it comes to anything in life, and Fullstack is no exception. It requires hard work and determination, but the experience and end result -- at least in my case -- is nothing short of magical.
Terrible terrible experience. I have never experienced this kind on monstrosity ever, they're ego is out of the roof. They are proud,disgusting wicked and despicable. The way I was shamed and disrepected was sick. To ruin someones life who wanted to make better of himself for a life that has given him nothing but pain and struggle how dare they,Emily Asaro Corey Greenwald and Jacqueline Ore will be hearing from their regulators
During my coding bootcamp search, my main goals were to become extremely proficient in programming, learn from great mentors, and land a great job once I was done. I'll assess my experience based on these three criteria.
Coding
Thanks to Fullstack, I can now have an intelligent conversation about the pros and cons of SQL vs. NoSQL databases, explain what $watch and $digest are in AngularJS, build apps from scratch, and show you how to do three-way data binding with AngularJS and Firebase. I have a Github repo full of code that I can explain, and projects that I was able to show employers during interiews. I definitely felt like I got my money's worth here.
Mentors
David and Nimit, the co-founders, have pretty impressive backgrounds. David was a former early employee at Gilt Groupe & RecycleBank. Both worked at Yahoo! together (and have the stories to prove it). Nimit was the co-founder of Bloomspot (acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase in 2010), and a Wharton grad. I didn't just want to learn from someone who was good at teaching, I also wanted to learn from someone who has been in and understands the startup world. They did -- they made the coding real by peppering in stories about how things were done at Gilt, Bloomspot, etc.
Job Prospects
The market is extremely hot for developers. The 2 weeks after graduating, I ended up having about 6 to 8 interviews, and ended up landing a position at a great startup which I am loving.
If you are serious about becoming a professional developer, I'd highly recommend attending Fullstack.
If you're thinking about bootcamps in general, or Fullstack in particular, you're probably wondering something along the lines of "does this actually work for real people"?
Well I am a real person, and Fullstack worked for me. It worked out better than I could have possibly hoped. I wrote my first line of code about six months before I was admitted to Fullstack. Within three weeks of graduating from Fullstack's fellowship program, I was hired as a software engineer at Bloomberg, through Bloomberg's senior hire program (meaning I was competing against developers with one or more years of professional experience).
Fullstack technically teaches full-stack web development using JavaScript, but I was hired into a backend role and now work exclusively in Python. This goes to show that this program is NOT about cranking out web devs with a narrow set of technical skills. Fullstack teaches its students how to think like a software engineer, how to quickly learn and use new concepts and skills, and how to collaborate with a team on fast-moving, complex projects. That skillset will never be obsolete.
My instructors (Gabe and Omri) and teaching fellows were some of the smartest people I've met in any context. They were all very generous with their time and talent. And they maintained the right balance between letting me struggle a bit to figure something out versus helping me understand what's preventing me from moving forward.
Fullstack's career department is also amazing. Ceren and Liz did a great job preparing me for the process of finding a job. It helps that, every year, Fullstack's network of alumni working in the industry all over the country keeps growing. It also helps that the curriculum gets overhauled regularly based on changes in the job market; one year ago they were teaching the MEAN stack. Today they've essentially replaced half of their curriculum, teaching SQL/Sequelize on the backend and React/Redux on the front-end.
Fullstack is also a magnet for sharp students who are willing to take a pretty stunning leap of faith in themselves. We left our jobs, moved across the country (some of us, at least, including me), and plowed a good chunk of money into a form of education that's existed for all of five years, knowing there will be no degree or guaranteed job waiting for us when we're done. Fullstack's admissions process is very selective, but if you get through it, you're going to be learning with, and from, a pretty incredible group of fellow students.
This program isn't easy. If you think all you have to do is get in and then coast along while your inbox fills up with job offers, then this isn't going to be a good fit for you. Fullstack is an opportunity, but you have take advantage of it by giving it everything you've got.
I am very thankful that I was given the opportunity to attend Fullstack. I took that leap of faith, and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. If you too have faith in yourself, and you have the opportunity to attend Fullstack, I'd encourage you to do the same. Fullstack's the right place for someone like you.
I know you're probably tired of reading reviews that say, "attending Fullstack Academy was the greatest decision of my life." But it's true. After many years of professional acting and part-time jobs in New York, I wanted to change careers and pursue a new direction in life, and I couldn't be happier with the results.
Were my instructors - Gabriel, Omri, Ayana, and Joe - brilliant? Absolutely. Did they know their subject matter like the back of their hands? Of course. What really set them apart, however, was that they worked PHENOMENALLY hard for the success of every student. If you were excelling, they made sure that you were challenged. And more importantly, if you were struggling, they would fight tooth and nail to make sure that you had the support that you needed - staying extra hours, having one-on-one sessions during their lunch break, whatever it took. Fullstack was demanding, but it was also a deeply caring and supportive place to learn. I don't know if there are bootcamps out there that boost their numbers through attrition, but Fullstack is certainly not one of them.
The job placement team is equally on point. Coming from the world of acting, the idea of being sought after by employers was completely foreign to me, but that's the reality of this job market. Fullstack graduates are extremely qualified, and need to be strategic about negotiating among multiple competitive offers. Liz and Ceren are experts at this. Without their help, I would have had a great job at a medium-sized company; with their help, I got my dream job as a frontend engineer at Amazon.
A word of advice to older prospective students like myself. You may be frustrated where you are right now, but afraid to make the leap, to quit your job, to spend your savings on a bootcamp, to take three months to learn, to work 80 hours a week. I promise it's worth it. As human beings, we have many talents, but the most valuable one of all is the ability to reinvent ourselves. Take the plunge. You'll be glad you did.
Coming from a different career background non-related to programming, I initially had my doubts that a 13 week program would be enough time to learn enough about web development to build anything on my own, let alone find a job. However, after doing my research in talking to other Fullstack Alumni and reading up on other success stories from bootcamps, I began to have a little more faith. After completing the program myself last April '15, I found a job within 3 weeks! Overall, I had an amazing experience at Fullstack. A million thanks to the Fullstack Team!
Best educational experience I've had. Everyone in my cohort was incredibly intelligent with diverse experiences and background. I feel that I'm now friends with some of the smartest and most ambitious people. The instructors and TAs were fantastic and both put in a tremendous effort to support you.
No course, whether a 4 year degree or a coding bootcamp, can teach you everything about coding. FSA gives students the confidence to confront and learn from challenges.
Thoroughly recommended if you want to make a career out of software development.
I believe that Fullstack Academy is probably the fastest and most effective way to learn to code today. Your learning is accelerated by great teaching/teachers, but also by a great program design and structure, which includes plenty of struggling, helping and getting helped by 20 other students with same goal: to learn how to be a competent developer fast. I know that acquiring the same knowledge would have taken at least 5X longer without Fullstack, if not more.
And besides the technical stuff, I had a blast for almost the entire three months, including making connections with really smart people that will definitely serve me well throughout much of my lifetime.
The most intense 3 months of my life; I learned so much and met incredible people.
Academically challenging and positively wonderful outcome!
I just graduated Fullstack Academy's immersive cohort in NYC. It was an amazing experience and I learned a ton. They have awesome instructors who really want to make sure you understand the material and they teach the technologies that are currently hot in the industry. For example, I learned React + Redux with them and only two cohorts before me they were teaching Angular as Angular was the hot framework then. They did an amazing job with React, and in general all of their workshops are so much fun to do and they really get you to learn and absorb the material.
I don't have a job yet as I just graduated, but Fullstack is extremely legit about helping you get one. They have people working there who's sole purpose is to assist students with their job search.
I highly recommend Fullstack to anybody who is serious about coding and is ready to work really hard for about four months straight. Time will fly and you will come out with your brain stuffed with coding knowledge and ready to apply it all to a real job.
If you're sold on the idea of being a software engineer, there really isn t more of a decision to make. Fullstack javascript is, in my opinion, the best way to learn web development, and no one does it better than Fullstack. FS gave me the opportunity to work at my dream job, and at the end of my cohort, they had to (gently) force me out because I really didn t want to leave. It was home for 13 weeks. The people are amazing, and I wouldn't trade in my experience for anything.
Before FS, I was a McGill engineering dropout on the run from adulthood, convinced that pursuing one of those career things would guarantee me a long life of disappointment. Eventually, though, I had to do something, and I decided a 3 month bootcamp might be the least terrible / most doable path to a tolerable life.
In the weeks leading up to my cohort, I was worried I wouldn t be able to keep up after 2.5 years of hanging around and being out of school. I heard that FS would be a really intensive 13 weeks; the stress of university had been too much for me so I wondered how I d manage the full time gig of FS.
To my surprise, I was able to totally and completely immerse myself in the community and curriculum while staying 100% stress-free. I never worried about falling behind because the instructors are so good at what they do. I never felt overwhelmed or burnt out, even being on campus for 10-13 hours per day, because I always wanted to be there. As FS equips you with the means to learn and build more and more, you really do get the urge to keep iterating on what they teach / whatever project you re hacking together.
The point of FS is not just to learn a particular stack but to learn how to learn. FS grads are very well prepared to learn new technologies and jump into unfamiliar stacks at whatever job they might accept.
All of the glowing reviews here are so spot on. FS is the most special place, and it s reborn so many lives. If you re skeptical, that s fair. It s a major investment of time and money. But trust me (and everyone else) - the ROI is ten-fold. If you choose FS, you will not regret it.
Prior to attending FullStack, I spent over a year and a half learning web development independently through the usual suspects of free and paid online channels. However, despite all the invested time, I still felt woefully unprepared to move beyond 'hobbyist' mode and into production-grade development. I applied to FullStack with that intention -- to become a professional grade developer and synthesize all the concepts I had learned online and in my undergrad electrical engineering days (many many many moons ago).
It's a big investment of time and money, but well worth it -- in saved opportunity cost (of not having to learn concepts in isolation), high quality of instruction (the lead instructors are fantastic!), and network of other students. I came into the school with a decent amount of prior experience compared to some of the other students, and still felt that I couldn't learn enough. You learn things that there is no way you could learn on your own -- the latest technologies, deployment, working with other developers in a simulated production environment. Plus, you have a whole classroom of potential hackathon partners! You basically learn how to learn, and once you have a solid foundation of web development principles, you're on the path after graduation to continue to learn on your own and find a job, which many of my fellow students did quite quickly post-graduation.
I highly recommend FullStack (and learning to code in general!) to anyone -- it will pay off in spades in any field you are currently in or decide to enter in the future.
I have never been to any other bootcamp, and I have never had any other instructors teach me software development.
I have, however, met many different humans in my life. I can tell you without any hesitation that this organization is run by some of the best you will find anywhere. Forever curious and honestly intelligent, enthusiastic, good-willed, and optimistic. This is what makes them such good teachers and this is why I insist that I can confidently say that Fullstack Academy will be a positive investment of time, sweat, and money for anyone with an honest curiosity and inner desire to learn.
I have attended a lot of classes in my life, and I have a very strong belief that the absolute most important thing to evaluate is the teacher. A good teacher teaches you so much more than just the material, they show you an example of what it means to have a positive and fruitful relationship with the subject, and they give you space to foster that relationship yourself. That is absolutely what I got from attending Fullstack Academy.
I am 100% satisfied with my experience, I got everything I hoped for and more. I felt completely prepared to enter the workforce as a Fullstack developer, I found myself able to meaningfully contribute to the work of a succesful engineering team, and I found that I had an incredible foundation from which my learning and understanding in this field has exploded.
If you are accepted, make sure to attend with your whole heart. Stay late into the evening whenever you can. You never know when David or Nimit will be perched on a desk at 7pm, a small huddle of students eagerly listening to their every word, relating stories, memories, and pearls of wisdom on everything and anything. These are teachers whose words you will remember.
The best programming bootcamp in NYC, ever, full stop.
I m confident that everyone who attended Fullstack Academy has mostly good things to say about it. In fact, most of them would probably claim that it was the best decision of their life. It may seem like hyperbole, but personally, it was one of the best decisions of my life.
In terms of cost and time invested, Fullstack Academy was one of the most rewarding professional experiences of my life. I learned and did more in those 13 weeks than in any other 13 week period.
- The class size is kept small (around 20 students) so enough attention is given to everyone.
- David and Nimit are amazing instructors, mentors, and engineers. They re extremely passionate about teaching and helping you succeed too.
- The TAs are all super smart, knowledgable, and helpful.
- The curriculum is well-thought-out and designed. It has a focus on the JavaScript (MEAN) stack so there s less language context-switching (as opposed to other bootcamps that use say Rails). This way you can become extremely proficient with one language yet also focus on fundamentals and concepts. It was awesome to see how far everyone in the class had progressed by the end of the program.
- Projects are super fun and you re pretty much free to do whatever you want, with any language, libraries, frameworks, technologies, etc. I made a Wafels & Dinges locator, a chat-roulette battle Tetris game, and a prototype mobile app for a company (which my team and I got paid for). I also participated in and won my first hackathon with two other classmates.
You ll learn how to learn but you should be a perpetual learner -- the journey has only just begun by the time you graduate. If you put in the effort, David, Nimit and the rest of the staff will do everything they can to help you succeed. You ll make new friends and professional connections. You ll gain confidence in your abilities as a software engineer.
Oh yeah, like me and most of my classmates, you ll probably land some cool job opportunities too.
Enrolling in Fullstack Academy was one of the best things I have ever done. In college I dabbled in a couple CS and web design courses really enjoyed them, but for some reason never pursued web development further. Coding was always in the back of my mind while I carried on with my career in a different field in which I never felt quite at home. I heard about the emergence of coding bootcamps a couple years ago and knew instantly that this could be my chance to make a big change.
I researched and applied to a few of the immersive coding programs in NYC and was accepted to all of them, but Fullstack really stood apart from the pack from the beginning. The founders, David and Nimit, were both seasoned engineers and entrepreneurs and really knew their stuff. I also liked how Fullstack teaches the MEAN stack, which was unique from all the schools teaching Rails. During the interview process, I truly felt challenged, yet supported already when I got stuck on some problems during the interview, Huntly was able to provide me just enough direction to help me figure it out on my own without giving anything away. I felt like I really learned something during the interview, which really impressed me. I also felt like Fullstack did a better job than other schools of gleaning my learning potential through their unique interviewing style. Also, I was able to gather from my contact during the interviews and admissions process that the people at Fullstack really cares about their students I didn t feel like a number like I did at some of the other, bigger schools that seem to churn people in and out.
Prior to the program we completed a month of pre-work, about 100-120 hours. This was incredibly challenging for a noob like myself, working alone while finishing up my old job. Scott, our online instructor during this period, was incredibly helpful and made himself available for live sessions to help me through any difficulties. I think it was really beneficial to complete such an intense amount of pre-work, since we all arrived with a similar knowledge base and could hit the ground running. The pre-work gave us a solid foundation in JavaScript and object-oriented programming and an intro to Node.js.
The on-site program curriculum walked us through programming and the MEAN stack from the bottom up building upon concepts week by week to complete the stack. We received interactive lectures and then daily projects to apply our learnings in Node.js, building Express servers, MongoDB and database management, some SQL, a little HTML/CSS/SASS, AngularJS, REST APIs, and more. We crammed SO MUCH into our heads during those first 6 weeks that I sometimes couldn t remember ever hearing about certain concepts, but amazingly, when it came time to do projects during the second half of the program, everything started coming back to me and all the concepts came together I was amazed at how much I actually knew.
I was thoroughly impressed with the skill and passion exhibited by our instructors Zeke, Omri, Joe, and Gabe they all really knew their stuff and knew how to break complicated ideas down into a digestible form for the students. They all seemed to really love software engineering and, more importantly, teaching it.
The career support was also excellent. Shanna gave us great resume and interviewing advice, and continued to help us after we graduated and connect us with contacts wherever she could. Charlotte, the operations manager, also helped create a fun and smooth experience for everyone throughout the program with fun activities, parties, and other support as needed during the admissions process and during our time at Fullstack.
Now I m extremely happy with my new career as a software engineer, and I have Fullstack to thank for empowering me to transform myself.
As opposed to the majority of students who attended Fullstack Academy; I arrived with a CS degree and a couple of years work experience under my belt. Even so, Fullstack was a great decision for me. The greatest assets were definitely the people and the environment.
First of all, the lead instructors David and Nimit are the smartest engineers I have ever met. They were not only capable of solving any issue that I encountered but were also entirely able to communicate the issue and solution to me in ways that I could understand. While this means that I was able to complete projects with extremely experienced mentors, it also meant that students with more experience were able to gain just as much if not more from Fullstack than the students entering with less knowledge.
Second, with all of the students arriving eager to learn, there is an environment of curiosity and exploration that doesn't exist almost anywhere else. The students are gaining the technical skills necessary to understand and use some of the newest and coolest technologies while at the same time, they have yet to become jaded and dismissive of emerging technologies.
Fullstack increased my value to prospective companies and made me a better and more curious coder. My only issue, is that I cannot attend again.
Thank you David and Nimit!
Awesome experience. I only wish it could have lasted longer.
Having attended Fullstack's second cohort, 5 months later I couldn't be happier with my decision. Fullstack provided me with all the tools and experience I needed to change fields and quickly find a job that I love. The amount I was able to learn at Fullstack in such a short amount of time is incomparable to any other experience I've ever had and is infinitely more valuable than my master's degree. Going from a very limited exposure of computer science to winning a hackathon within the first few weeks is something I had never dreamed of as possible.
As long as you willing to put in the work David, Nimit and the rest of the staff at Fullstack will do everything in there power to help you succeed. Fullstack provided me with the groundwork to easily pick up any new language or framework that I encounter with relative ease and adapt to the evolving need of my job. Even now staying in contact with them I know they will continue to be a valuable resource for me should I ever need anything.
fullstackacademy.com
