BrainStation

BrainStation is inspiring and cultivating a community of creators! What I was most impressed about throughout the 10 week Product Management course that I recently finished, was the fact that every Tuesday night I learned and worked together with my classmates... Read More on ideas, concepts and strategies that I could directly apply to my what I was doing at work the next day. The energy and passion from the instructors really shone through and helped to motivate the class to think deeper than just the creation of a product as an idea, but to think even further as a product that solves a very specific problem for a very specific target persona. I loved the hands on approach, had a wildly diverse group of classmates, and am now putting what I have learned in this course into application at work.

BrainStation not only provides an accelerated learning environment - they also provide an opportunity for you to meet new peers and friends by providing socials and many events for students to attend. They have morning coffee chats - lunch and learns... Read More - as well as evening and weekend workshops.

All in all, I would recommend any of their courses to anyone looking to get into Tech!

The product management course at BrainStation is a must-take for anyone looking to transition into a more product-focused role. The small class size makes it easy for students to dive deeper into the material and have meaningful discussions with each... Read More other. I really appreciate how the students all come from diverse industries as well. The instructor is super approachable and spends time answering your questions, while providing relevant anecdotes from his experience as a product manager.

The course content is also really impressive, although I wish we had more than 10 weeks to go over it all. There's a lot to absorb, so I recommend that after class, you take the time to review and really understand the concepts. The material touches upon all aspects of product management, and explains how different business functions interact with each another. As a marketer at a tech startup, it was crucial for me to understand how product marketing fits in the product management discipline.

Lastly, the final project allows students to build their own product from start to finish. Thinking critically about the features you're building and the problems you're solving for really trains

I've gotta say.... I went into this class knowing very little about coding (I could look at the CSS in the backend of my blog and make minor adjustments, but writing code was completely foreign). I'm midway through the class and already feel like I have... Read More learned WAY more than I realized I was capable of (I'm an arts major - logical thinking isn't my forte!). Definitely recommend this course for beginners (yes, it's tough) or for anyone looking to brush up on the fundamentals of coding.

I've been taking the Digital Marketing course at BrainStation for the past few months and I love it! I have a marketing degree but needed to get a refresher on some of the digital components of my degree. BrainStation was the perfect choice for me. The... Read More classes are relaxed and fun, but in-depth and relevant. The instructors are hip and are all working in the industry. I highly recommend BrainStation.

I’ve attended multiple events, the SEO workshop, I’m currently enrolled in the Digital Marketing course and I’m already thinking about what I can take next. BrainStation is a fresh approach to learning business concepts with smart and passionate professionals.... Read More I would highly suggest BrainStation to anyone looking to build their education or to refresh an old concept.

I recently completed BrainStations Web Development Immersive class and loved it. I did not come from a computer science background and consider myself to be more artistic and design oriented. I hadn’t even touched HTML or CSS before attending one of BrainStations... Read More Workshops a few weeks prior to committing to the immersive program. I definitely learnt more in 10 weeks then I had expected and now have a solid foundation as well as the resources to continue refining these new skills and create meaningful projects.

What is unique about BrainStation is its learning environment and community within and beyond the classroom. It has the ability to welcome people from all sorts of different backgrounds and empower them to learn in a self-motivated setting. The teachers and staff are supper friendly and are always ready to help. It is important to note that it is called an immersive program for a reason and the more you are able to dedicate yourself the more you will get out of the experience. Furthermore, remember that communication is key in order to maximize your learning within a short period of time, don’t stop yourself from asking for help if you need it.

If you are on the fence in regards to dedicating your time and money to this opportunity I definitely recommend taking one of their workshops related to web development to get a feel for their teaching style. In addition attending on of BrainStations free WDI information session could be helpful.

Just completed the 10-Week Web Development Immersive course at Brainstation.

Pros: The curriculum is extensive and in-depth, and it covers the whole full stack development process, from front-end HTML and CSS to back-end databases and deployment. The course... Read More focuses on Javascript, so be aware of that if you have any past experience or have a job in mind already. The curriculum is constantly updated and curated so that we learned topics that would be relevant for most development job opportunities. The teaching staff was very knowledgable and helpful, they answered a ton of questions, even ones that weren't specific to topics covered in the course and were more related to the general web development industry.
The environment there was extremely friendly and there was always help available from the instructors, teaching assistants or even other students. The mid-course and final projects were a great chance to utilize and demonstrate what we had learned, and the students that did the final project came away with an app that could be shown as a portfolio piece.

Cons: Its a full-time 10 week course, so it requires a lot of commitment both in terms of time and money, so be prepared for that. There's a lot of information to cover in those 10 weeks, so it requires a lot of attention and effort to stay on pace.

Overall: This is a great environment for learning, no matter if you're a slow or quick learner. If you're prepared to put in 100% effort during the course, you will learn a ton of new skills, and the teaching staff will help you prepare for whatever role you want to pursue afterwards, whether as a developer or product manager or anything else. Excellent experience.

The curriculum is a work in progress. Things we were supposed to learn were never covered and not replaced by anything else. We were promised files containing the solutions to many of the challenges, but many were never delivered. The deployment lessons... Read More we were promised near the end of the course still haven’t been added to the online portal.

Some of the challenges used starter code provided by other people from Konrad Group which didn’t work and actually prevented us from completing the challenges. Even the code written by our lead instructor Rares was frequently wrong because he didn’t take the time to check his work before giving it to us to work with. This is not the right way to teach! Spending hours trying to figure out where I went wrong only to eventually find out it was the source code (which we weren’t supposed to touch) that was wrong, was a colossal waste of time and incredibly discouraging. Rares just shrugs this off like the quality of the information we are given shouldn’t matter.

The lead instructor was mainly unavailable, across the street working for the parent company, taking meetings, or even teaching a different class while we did without. That’s double-dipping, and Brainstation should know better.

The TAs tried to be helpful, but it wasn’t enough. One had the attention span of a gnat, one was too busy babysitting the girls who were flirting with him (for hours on end), and the third didn’t have the training to be able to answer even the most basic questions. The teacher was rarely in the mood to answer questions. Waiting for 45mins+ for someone to be available to answer a question was the usual.

The pacing of the course is uneven. We raced through HTML, CSS and Javascript, then pretty much stopped dead while the teacher was teaching the other class. Each lesson was dictated at lighting speed so most of the students didn’t even try to keep up. We just had to teach ourselves via Google after our teacher or TA stopped talking. They have no presentation skills.

Most weeks there is a “guest speaker”. I put that in quotes because every single speaker worked for Konrad Group, so they weren’t really guests. One week they brought a female developer all the way from the Costa Rica office to talk about being a woman in tech. They couldn’t find a female developer in Toronto? Hmm. The single freelancing talk was taught by our lead instructor who told us he only worked freelance long enough to build up a portfolio and get a job. The company doesn’t know anyone who actually chooses to work freelance?

The website used to brag about the classroom being in the midst of industry professionals. It isn’t. It’s across the street in an old building they haven’t finished repairing yet. There is no heat, the floor shakes like the building is falling down, the plumbing isn’t hooked up right, and the brick walls are held up by wooden shims. But the design has won awards! LOL

There is zero job search support. We finished the course with no portfolio to speak of. Only a couple job ads were posted on the Slack channel before it became a ghost town. These were not for companies that Brainstation has any connection with, but just ads somebody saw. The interview preparation consisted of a slide deck prepared by Konrad Group for their own hiring purposes. We were promised a copy but never got it. There were mock interviews conducted by Konrad Group which consisted of, “Show me your project,” and “What is…” (simple questions of general programming knowledge which we hadn’t actually been taught). Useless.

Konrad Group/Brainstation exists in a bubble. They don’t bring in other companies to speak, they talk about themselves exclusively, and they don’t care if we get hired by anyone other than them (as TAs or interns, never as web devs).

The consensus among the grads from my cohort is that we were ripped off. An immersive course is better than nothing, and better than studying on your own, but for $8000, we did not get our money’s worth.

I've been taking BrainStations UX Design course through the Spring, and love it! Both my TA & Instructor are incredibly smart, well connected- and most importantly- great teachers. Plus it's just a beautiful space to work! The class size shrunk a bit... Read More through the course, but I didn't mind since it provided more 1:1 feedback with my work and project.