Fullstack Academy

Coming from a non-CS background, Fullstack really helped me kickstart my career into software development. They teach you modern and popular technologies that many companies use in a very efficient and understanding way. On top of offering great education... Read More and mentoring, their job search support is amazing as well. They provide lots of resources and opportunities for one to utilize. Would definitely recommend Fullstack to those who are considering it.

Attending FullStack Academy(Grace Hopper Program) was an extremely positive experience in my life. The Immersive Program has a good quality, is fast and effective, super challenging especially the first month, but the good thing is that you will be able... Read More to learn faster than you ever thought, and if at some point you feel discouraged, remember to repeat to yourself `TRUST THE PROCESS`. I had a great time there, my cohort was excellent as well as all the instructors and staff. Thank you FullStack Academy!

To echo a lot of other sentiments, my decision to go to Fullstack Academy was one of the best of my life. Previously, I had been working in the business (sales, support, marketing) side of tech. While I had some basic coding experience, I learned an immense... Read More amount from the robust curriculum taught at Fullstack. The entire staff in Chicago - whether instructional (Collin, Ben W, Priti, and Finn) or career/operations (Ben N, Holly, Brett) have been incredibly helpful in my success.

I'm completely indebted to them for both my education and for the opportunity to serve as a Teaching Fellow. And without the hard work of the Career Success team, I would not have the amazing job I do now as I was able to land it through Fullstack's Launch Day.

Overall, the highest praise I can give.

Going to Fullstack Academy was easily one of the best decisions in my life.

When you go to a bootcamp, if you're just going for the material, you're doing it wrong. If you just want the material, it's all available for free somewhere on the internet. You... Read More should be going to a bootcamp for several reasons:

1) Learning how to learn various techs, and how to learn them quickly. Fullstack handles this wonderfully by constantly never allowing you to become complacent in your learning or start slacking. You constantly have to be pushing yourself to absorb new material and how to digest documentation.

2) You have zero idea how to actually break into the industry. Again, Fullstack provided this with great career coaching and prepping you to have a resume that is worth looking at. Fullstack as well provides an opportunity to meet several companies, towards the end of your bootcamp, allowing you to potentially to turn these meetings into on-site interviews (which definitely happened for me).

3) If you're new to this... you don't actually realize your own knowledge gaps and weaknesses. And it takes an instructor to help you with these and point you towards things you may have never come across before. You can have all the motivation in the world, but without a good teacher to take you there, it's useless. Fullstack has wonderful instructors who are extremely passionate about not only teaching, but improving their teaching (shout out to Corey Greenwald, one of the best instructors I've ever had in any sort of educational setting).

This being said, prepare to work hard. You will only get out of it what you put in. If you think you can just go during the day and not also put in the time, constantly, during your nights and weekends... and think things will go just as well, you're mistaken. Maybe you can coast. But if that's what you're intending to do... what's even the point? I really recommend Fullstack. But if you're going to do it, do it right. Give up your life for three months. It will pay off.

I started the program without any knowledge in coding. The speed of the course is high and you as a student will fell you aren't in control more often than you imagine. To follow that, I had to dedicate more than I had ever dedicated myself to any other... Read More academic experience. And after three months, you will be ready to get into the market that changes every single minute. More than JavaScript or any other framework, Fullstack taught me how to learn new things in the speed that the market requires. The school environment is also a plus. They take seriously themes like diversity and all the staff and teachers are very supportive. I couldn't be more grateful for the teacher and fellows I had during the program. Trust the process!

Fullstack Academy can be best described in two words - life changing. For several years, I worked in Technology but in functional fields, while always being interested in and curious about building technology myself. However, I always felt an intimidation... Read More towards software development and in all honesty, some skepticism towards programs that seemingly turn you into a developer in a few months. I held on to my fear and doubts for a long time while a few of my friends went through the program and successfully became developers. One day, I decided that I didn't want to regret not trying and took the leap of faith and applied for Fullstack Academy after doing the bootcamp prep course, one of the best decisions I've ever made. I graduated from Fullstack in February this year and went through their Fellowship program for three months before working fulltime as a developer which I'm currently doing since the past four months.

Just the fact that Fullstack Academy forces you to prepare with some coding experience and you need to interview and show your readiness for the program so that you're setup for success before getting in, tells you a lot about the quality of this program. That is what made the decision easy for me to apply here versus other bootcamps although it was a harder process. Once in the bootcamp, we all had to go through a 5 week remote course that gets us all on the same page as people are coming in with various backgrounds and experience levels. You think you have learned so much already, and then you get on campus and the next few months, you are all hands on deck, building different applications with incremental knowledge growth day by day.

You get to pair program with others a lot (where two people write code and solve problems together) so you're not on your own and get experience working with others and talking your thoughts out loud which is key. There is a ton of support offered from fellows (previously graduated students who serve as teaching assistants and mentors), instructor office hours, and more. There are minimal lectures and the curriculum is mostly based on writing code yourself which is why you learn a lot in a short amount of time. You're not alone, you're in a room full of people that are going through the same thing you are together. That is powerful and has a huge impact on your learning journey. You gain a crazy amount of knowledge in 3 months, more than you could ever imagine. Towards the end of the program, Fullstack also prepares you for the job hunt and supports you in preparing your resume, linked in, interviewing, etc. and keeps in touch for post-program job search support. In my cohort, almost everyone was able to land a job in three to six months.

Now that I am working as a developer and have been for the past four months, I have realized what Fullstack gave me even more. I am a Level 1 engineer at my company but am told that I am able to work on features at least one if not two levels above my level, all because Fullstack's program was that in depth to prepare me for that, both on the front end and back end. I started out fixing small bugs but quickly transitioned into building new front end features and writing services on the back end which has been so exciting. I highly highly recommend Fullstack Academy for anyone who is looking for a means to change your career and life, and go into a creative and stimulating field like software development with support and expertise from the best staff, instructors, peers, and mentors around.

After looking into many Coding Bootcamps with the motivation of getting more "hands-on" experience so I could make a radical career change, I found at Full Stack everything I was looking for and decided to join. The result: an amazing experience where... Read More I got to meet awesome and very smart people, where I got to learn a lot about the most up to date technologies for full stack web development and, where I felt like already working in the field since day 1.

After graduating from Fullstack Academy and successfully landing my first position as a Software Engineer within a month, I was proud of myself for making such a great decision. Fullstack was the best/smartest investment I have ever made. 100% recommended!

Fullstack has been one of the best decisions I made in my life. All the instructors were not only knowledgeable of all the concepts in the curriculum, but they were all very compassionate in helping every student grow their skillset in coding.

Fullstack... Read More is split into three separate phases: Foundations, Junior Phase, and Senior Phase. Foundations is 5 weeks long and is primarily self-paced. You are given online video lectures, weekly assignments, and checkpoint tests throughout the course of those five weeks. This phase is primarily self paced and helps reinforce advanced JavaScript concepts like functional programming, recursion, and closure, which will be useful to know in Junior and Senior phase.

Junior phase is 6 weeks long at the Fullstack campus. About half of each day are live lectures, and the other half are pair programming workshops. Pair programming was one of the best learning experiences I had at Fullstack. Not only do you learn more about each person in your class, but you acquire knowledge from your time working with each individual (i.e. setting up your code editor to be more efficient when coding, understanding the Github workflow, keyboard shortcuts, organizing your code in a DRY manner, etc.). Pair programming is also reflective of how programmers code in their day job and is one of the fastest ways to really learn the technology taught for that day.

Senior phase is also 6 weeks long on campus, but focused primarily in building three projects, an E-Commerce website, a personal project, and a Capstone project. Both the E-Commerce website and Capstone project are built in teams of three or four people, and really help you learn how to work agile. The personal project helps you learn new sets of technologies outside the Fullstack curriculum to build a project you're passionate in and want to highlight in your portfolio. I built a Pokemon Augmented Reality game.

At the end of my 17 week long journey at Fullstack, I was picked as one of the three Teaching Fellows to help teach the next incoming cohort of students. Being a Teaching Fellow added another level of coding experience that was invaluable. Not only did I have another 3 months of reinforcing all the concepts I learned from Fullstack, but also was given the opportunity to teach these concepts to incoming students. I also helped manage senior project teams to be more agile, and conducted daily stand up meetings. I am happy to say that after 1.5 weeks from graduating as a Teaching Fellow at Fullstack, I will be accepting a Software Dev. Engineer role at Expedia.

If you are passionate in growing your coding career and want a quality curriculum, please consider Fullstack. If you are worried about the large expense, there are free information sessions, bootcamp prep, web development workshops, and other resources to give you a taste of what you may expect at Fullstack, and see if it is a worthy investment for yourself

The instructors are extremely knowledgable and the program is very well organized. I'm amazed at how much I've learned over the 14 weeks onsite and 3 weeks online (in preparation for onsite). I'm not new to software development, but this program offered... Read More breadth and depth that I've never experienced on the job or in graduate school.
Workshops and exams were almost always challenging. Emphasis on Test Driven Design and on pair programming was very well done. Individual and group projects were great learning experiences as well. The career success team has set me up for a disciplined and focused job search.
I would recommend this program to anyone interested in going deep on the latest software development technologies.

I still cannot believe how well designed and executed this program is. The curriculum is current and continuously being updated to ensure that it meets market needs and delivers the most cutting edge skill set. This is taken very seriously, so you can... Read More trust that what you're learning has been well thought out and planned. The structure of the curriculum itself is conducive to learning a lot in a short amount of time, which is largely driven by a perfect balance between lectures and immediately applying what you learned in workshops both individually and in pairs. In addition, the second half of this program is entirely dedicated to working on multi-day and multi-week projects to reinforce everything you learned prior and build on top of that knowledge. This not only results in knowing the stack very well, but more importantly, being able to independently learn new technologies and know how and when to apply them.

The quality of the instruction blew me away, truly. Shoutout to Geoff, Omri and Dakota! Way better than any professor I ever had at university. All teachers have a deep knowledge of the stack they're teaching and know how to break down complex concepts and explain them clearly and concisely. Every lecture is well planned and delivered. Teachers are patient and 110% committed to ensuring every student succeeds. In fact, the entire staff at Fullstack is wholly committed to going above and beyond to meet each student's needs.

The last 2 weeks have a huge focus on ensuring students are ready to start searching for jobs on the right foot upon completing the program. There is an entire career services team dedicated solely to this and whether you want to or not, they will make sure you are ready to job hunt. They will help with Linkedin, resume, portfolio, interview prep, and probably anything else you ask.

As many reviews on here already mention, all of the above is contingent on you working very hard. There is only so much a bootcamp can do. Ultimately, you need to mentally prepare yourself for an intense but highly rewarding experience. Overall, highly recommend!