Thinkful

I've been in the UX/UI Intensive program and will soon complete it, and it has been hands down one of the worst experiences of my life. The instructors you meet with face to face are amazing, but literally every other aspect of the program is extremely... Read More toxic. The grading is inconsistent, the grading team will fail assignments for things that were not required in the assignment listing, and the actual content is stuff you could definitely find on youtube or somewhere else on the internet for free. It seems like Thinkful actively pushes students to drop out. They also straight up lied about class sizes. When I was in the middle of enrolling, the recruiter I spoke with assured me that the instructor to student ratio was about 1:20, only to sign up for the first day and find 60+ students in the cohort. Further, they assert that you'll easily find a job afterwards but their rates of successful employment are conveniently skewed from reality. For reference, the first class worth of students from this particular program still has a high unemployment rate amongst them.

I can only speak about the Data Science (DS) Flex program, meaning I didn't join a class. I worked alone at my own pace, had a part-time job while working on Thinkful, and had a 6-month time-frame to finish. I had a unique situation where near the end... Read More of my program, COVID hit and my part-time job at a pharmacy went into overdrive. I could not focus on completing Thinkful. I presented my situation to my academic advisor and she vouched for me so that I could put the program on hold and re-enroll at a later date. Generally, I believe Thinkful's DS Flex is a good program. It definitely helps to understand what Thinkful excels in and have proper expectations before signing up. - CURRICULUM Thinkful's content is not their strong suit. Although their DS Flex program updated since I first joined, and I approve of the changes and the direction it is headed, it is impossible to cover all of DS from scratch in 6 months. DS is an ever-evolving field and Thinkful's structure helped to filter out what is most fundamental to DS. The curriculum Thinkful provides should be seen as an outline to supplement with additional resources outside of Thinkful (I highly recommend O'Reilly's "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow" by Aurelien Geron). Learning with those resources alongside Thinkful's curriculum is how you can best learn the basics of DS. Thinkful's strong suit comes from their 1-on-1 mentorship and resources for success, only if you look for it. Thinkful's flex program does not hold your hand. Those who struggle with staying motivated or proactively searching for answers in an efficient manner will struggle. I have talked to someone who managed to finish the 6-month program in 4 months and found a job a month after that. I have also talked to others who have taken 9 months to finish and are still looking for a job 4 months after finishing the program. I believe their drive and consistent motivation is a huge factor in their respective results. Thinkful is not a comprehensive program, but instead a well-thought-out foundation (at least the DS side). The people you interact with (after the recruitment stage) want to help; you just have to ask for it. - RECENT NEGATIVE REVIEWS The combined effect of an influx of COVID learners and of Chegg's acquisition of Thinkful has resulted in numerous changes and a noticeable "growing-pains" phase, which accounts for many of the recent negative reviews. The changes, from what I have gathered talking with those who work in Thinkful, were made with good intentions and make sense. It's just taking time for the new system to be optimized and it is unfortunate some people did not receive the best experience. Other negative reviews come from people misreading or ignoring the Terms and Agreements, or having misinformed expectations. If something sounds too good to be true, please read Thinkful's terms, as there are many caveats they are not mentioning. For example, their tuition refund only applies if you meet their criteria, such as completing the program in the approved time, living an hour-away from an approved major city, being age 21+ when finishing the program, speaking English fluently, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue with Thinkful is their lack of transparency and over-promising results in order to entice more people. Promising anyone who hasn't coded before that they can learn DS from scratch in 6 months is unrealistic at best and predatory at worst. Coding Python is such an integral part of the DS program and expecting to gain fluency for the rest of the program in under a month is insane. If you are in this boat, do yourself a favor and learn Python from a different program for at least a few months BEFORE joining the DS program. Then you can focus on the DS aspect rather than being bombarded with annoying Python syntax issues. - CONCLUSION Thinkful's flex programs are great for those who are proactive about their learning and want an outline to follow and are not afraid of supplementing their learning with outside resources. Being able to ask questions to an experienced mentor is what makes Thinkful worth it in my opinion, but that doesn't apply to everyone. If you do better in a classroom environment, consider their immersion programs as you will be with peers, won't be learning by yourself, and will be pushed by deadlines. Do your research, read their Terms and Agreements, ask questions, and don't expect to get results passively through Thinkful. Best wishes on your journey.

Things started off well. It's scary leaving a steady-paying job, but the stipend is what ultimately helped me to pull the trigger. I figured the little bit of money would carry me through the education and once I was employed, I'd be happy enough about... Read More the income share agreement, I mean I'd already be getting more than I was making either way.

The program started off well enough. Getting used to the design tools, a few little projects to start. A graded interview, to make sure you understood industry terminology and could present well. So far, so good.

The second phase had us take an entire project, start to finish. It was here I first started running into issues. The grading team would return an assignment with feedback, I'd work on it, resubmit, and receive fresh (different) feedback from another grader. The grader feedback was often useful, but also often vague, and there's no direct dialogue with the graders. Just enter notes in your project file, resubmit, and hope you hit the moving target (You'll find out in, at minimum, a couple of days).

So Thinkful likes to treat this as if it's a feature. In real-life, people are squishy, there are multiple decision-makers, etc. I get that, but more and more this seemed less of a feature and more of a bug. The work was never graded off of a rubric, and more on when graders felt like it was "good enough". Keep in mind, if you're more than two weeks behind you will not receive your stipend.

I complained to the teachers and the TAs about this issue and they thanked me for the feedback and got the impression it was a battle they were fighting. In fact the teachers are generally good, the mentors are good, the TAs are good. Perhaps even the grading team is good, but the efforts aren't focused well. The system is broken.

Anyway, back to this first project. It's cheesy, but it's well thought out. The timing is a little off on the modules (the reading on the modules usually showed up a day or so after we were asked to do it). But otherwise, carried through and I learned a lot.

Next major project was Team Design. As a group (ours was eight). We'd choose a real-life client and build a design of their project for our porfolio. The modules were chaos and naturally chaos ensued. There wasn't a lot of sense in the order of the modules and it wasn't unusual to find contradictory information. The main thing that carried us through was the dedication of the group. Three weeks of chaos and it was done. We still got stuff out of it, but it was a rough few weeks. Again, strange things with graders happened. 7 out of 8 would pass grading. Odd since it's a team assignment and everyone turned in the same thing.

Thinkful has decided to discontinue the Team Design Sprint moving forward. They have experimented and, I guess, decided it wasn't useful enough.

Following that is Portfolio 1. A chance to work on your website, LinkedIn, Resume, etc. The career team gave some good advice, but having a week to put together professional website on Webflow (with no experience) was quite difficult.

This seems like a good time to make an aside about how they teach the industry tools...they don't. You're really left on your own to figure it out. Figma, Notion, Webflow, any of the Adobe stuff. It's a bit of "You need to use this...go figure it out." I understand you're expected to be on the ball and learn how to use these tools and future tools on your own, but then what am I paying for?

Currently, I'm in specializations. I focused on front-end web development. It was my interest before joining and I was hoping to sharpen my skills. Really it was just an introductory course, the only instruction is checking in with a teacher in the morning, and you're left to teach yourself everything by yourself. So here I am now, no teacher, checking boxes on things I already know. I try to use the extra time to study on my own, but I'm still waiting on Portfolio feedback from about a week ago.

The final module is Capstone. A solo project. Again, not much instruction.

All together it's $37,500 for my time at Thinkful. Now you may ask me, "If it's so bad why not quit now and only pay for what you've done?". Well after passing the halfway mark you're on the hook for the whole thing. That's whether your drop out or you're hired. Funny that the quality took a sharp drop around that time.

To conclude: I met a guy who said he got a job as a Javascript Developer after spending 6 hours a day every day practicing JS for months on his own. I thought it was cool, but unrealisitc for me. In fact for the same amount I could support myself comfortably and had done just that.

I say all this to vent, but I also fear that things are continuing to get worse at thinkful. The group before my was 30 some students. Mine was 50 or so. The one following me is over 100. Thinkful is looking to get it's money hooks in as many as possible and yet isn't equipped to educate them.

I'm working hard, I hope for a job. If I can scratch together anything it'll probably be freelance. I think those that do the best were the ones who would have anyway. You've been warned.

I choose Thinkful because of several reasons. One reason was that I was looking to learn to React as the framework in their curriculum and this program was one of them. And then learning about Node, Express, and Postgresql was amazing. I also liked to... Read More structure of how the curriculum is designed. It is expected that you know the fundamentals of JavaScript, HTML/CSS before you start and if you don't, they have prep for that. Once you get a hang of the fundamentals, the real learning begins then. That was the curriculum I wanted.
The second reason was the schedule. Since I still had to work and with my commitments to my family, I knew I had to sign up for a part-time program (they call it flex there). It was more self-paced than part-time. There are no live videos, and you do not belong to a set cohort (they had registration starting every Wednesday) but other than that you get to have everything the full-time students had (if you can though, I suggest the full-time program called immersion there). I liked the self-pace because I could spend as much time as I want on a new subject, learn the ins and outs, and practice as much while I can practice and glance at the topics I already know. Don't get me wrong, there are checkpoints in almost every step, and more than enough assignments are graded. So you have to pass them to move forward. Your progress is closely being monitored.
Now comes the last part (or rather the first I listed in the title), the support. I started with the 15-day trial they had and even in that trial, they assigned me a mentor on the second day and we were expected to meet once a week (this becomes twice a week once you are done with the trial and register). Honestly, I am very grateful for the mentor I had, he was somebody who had 20 years of experience in the field (their mentors are engineers that work at other companies who chooses to be a mentor, and they are located anywhere in the world). I got a mentor before even I started to pay, can you imagine. I felt that they value support more than anything else. Then you have technical help, you use a chat tool to ask your questions (within the work hours but it was like 7 am to 10 pm), and almost always somebody answers. (I said that because I had answers to all of my questions but I heard people sometimes not getting answers). Then they have office hours ("had" I should say because near my graduation they removed it) where you could just join a video call and ask your question about the pre-determined subject and the lead will help you find a solution. They also had workshops and student presentations you could join anytime and just listen and learn a few things. Their AMA sessions were my favorite. (Again, they decided to re-design that concept near my graduation so it may not be there anymore). Another support and was really my go-to one was the Slack group. All the instructors, coaches, mentors, students, and alumni are on their Slack group and you could just ask a question and there is always somebody answers it, more often than not, it was other students which was great for peer learning but alumni jumped in and helped from time to time. On slack, you could also learn about personal experiences from alumni and how their professional life is after the program. Lastly, you have one assigned Academic Success Manager and they are your last resort if you couldn't find the support you needed and my ASM was awesome, she got what I needed sometimes faster than expected. You also check in with your ASM every month or bimonthly to go over your progress and graduation schedule and if you have any concerns.
So for those reasons, I am so grateful that I chose Thinkful and I am so happy to know that I graduated. Onto the job search now

Pros - payment flexibility and stipend.
Cons - pretty much everything else. Not much assistance is available, the course is poorly laid out, and if you want to actually succeed you’ll need to learn elsewhere. The cohorts are now 50+ people due to an influx... Read More of applications, so pairs are no longer a thing. Daily Q&A sessions have been cancelled and Office Hours have been cut. Everyone in my cohort has reported using other online coding systems to supplement the Thinkful curriculum—not only is that unaffordable for a lot of people, that’s not reasonable considering the extensive time and financial commitment required of this program.

I wouldn’t recommend this program to anyone; you’re likely better off taking a variety of the free courses available to people online.

Feels like a demanding job rather than a helpful school. Presentations could be more mentor based. Feedback from graders varies. Not comfortable. Started off alright but then went downhill near the beginning of the course. We'll see how it goes by end... Read More of next year.

This program is seriously lacking in clarity and organization. There are no specific rubrics or syllabus. The mentors, academic success managers, and instructors all have access to different information and have a hard time conveying the assignments.... Read More Even after reaching out formally to request an updated calendar that is correct for assignments I haven't heard anything in over two weeks. This program is also not BBB accredited and has had multiple complaints filed against them. The link to that is below:
https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/brooklyn/profile/continuing-education/thinkful-inc-0121-172100

I finished the Thinkful Data Analyst course in January, but I did not get a job and have been denied a refund by my career coach. The course did not help me to get responses from data jobs. I applied for more than 500 data jobs, exceeding the 10 jobs... Read More per week requirement. My Thinkful career coach only shared two data jobs with me, one of which was already closed. Lastly, it was never communicated with me until now that I was not in compliance with the requirements to get a refund. its all the lies....
during course, one-on-one mentor is only once a week. On the last two months of my course, my mentor just never show-up and never reply my email at all. Please do not apply this bootcamp.

I have recently graduated from Thinkful data science program and got positive reviews from all their Mock Interviews. I have followed everything they required, but was not able to land a job. They did not refund the tuition as they promised. Do not trust... Read More and chose this program. For anyone who want more information, I can show you everything that I have done with Thinkful.

Today, I graduated from Thinkful Digital Marketing Immersion Course. It was a challenging 2 months, brushing up my skills and building up my portfolio.

Joining a bootcamp was one the best investments I ever made. The education they give you is practical... Read More to today’s world, and it is the latest marketing insights and trends you can find!