Turing School of Software and Design

My experience at Turing was amazing. The curriculum, the instructors, and the other students were all top notch. It was good enough that I'm not sure how the experience could have been better for me. There are certainly some things that weren't perfect, but Turing is so responsive and adaptable that I either saw them fixed in my time there, or I'm certain they have been fixed now.

I did have some personality conflicts with one staff, but it never got in the way of learning, and that's just how life works. It wasn't even serious enough for me to think of raising a complaint. Other than that, I would count a lot of the staff there as friends.

Overall it was an excellent experience.

However, Turing is not easy, and you will not just walk into a high-paying job. Turing is for peop...

The Turing School of Software and Design is hands down the best boot camp for people changing careers into coding. The three main reasons I believe Turing is the best choice are 1) It's a non-profit! 2)They teach you to understand the logic behind the code. 3) They teach more than just code. To touch on the first point, Turing is a non-profit, which means all the money they receive from students and donations goes back into the teachers, the facilities and the curriculum. Which means they are consistently looking to improve Turing. Other boot camps are more worried about if your check clears or not, and everything else is up to you to learn on your own. At Turing, if you just aren't understanding the material or decided you made a mistake going into software development, Turing will ref...

Turing was one of the most challenging yet rewarding things I have ever done. However, if you're looking to make a career change, I think this could be a good option for you! You will need to go in knowing that you won't have a lot of spare time for 7 months, and that you will need to put in a lot of work and ask for help even when you don't want to. Not only will you gain valuable tech skills, but you will also get stronger at working with people who are different than you, how to collaborate efficiently and how to be a better team member. Not every paired-partner project goes well, and navigating those waters while being put under a lot of pressure to complete difficult projects can be tough. Both programs are difficult. If you ever hear that the frontend program is "easy" then you a...

I recently finished Turing's front end program. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and that is not an exaggeration. It's a 7 month program, for me it ended up being 9 months (I had to repeat a module) which really isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like an eternity. They call it a coding "boot camp" for a reason. Turing will test the limits of your physical, mental and emotional energy and push them to their breaking points and beyond. You will literally cry at points. You will be unbelievably stressed and frustrated. But you will learn more than you could ever imagine. I would like to share some extremely important information and things I wish I had known before taking the plunge and things to consider if you're thinking about enrolling....

Pros: incredible staff. intentional curriculum tailored to what is needed to be a successful entry level dev. Held to high standards that ensure you graduate knowing what you need to. Lots of support. Strong alum network, especially in Denver.

Cons: closest I can come to a con is that it takes up most of your time for 7 months which can be difficult.

If you decide to attend Turing and do the things you're told to by instructors and job staff you will graduate and get a great job.

Students, teachers and all employees make Turing a very special place, I not only learned to code but I learned how to be part of a community, how to work with others and how to contribute to the web development industry!

The seven month program was super hard but it was worth it

Modern life is so saturated with unwarranted uses of the phrase “life changing” that it’s status is largely reduced to paper-thin cliché with scant genuine meaning.
But, in stark contrast to this sublimely negative intro, I can unequivocally say that Turing changed my life for the better - and not merely through a career upgrade - but through the memories, community, and work ethic that I gained in the journey.

Too often the chief metric of success is post-completion salaries - which, of course, makes basic sense, the field is dominated by a perspective rooted in stats and hard numbers. But when weighted above all else, it misses the forest for the trees, leaving no room for the perspectives, confidence, and work ethic one can gain - and it is precisely in this dimension that I fee...

Pros:
- Very solid instruction. The four modules lasted six weeks each, and covered:

Mod 1: Programming in Ruby, Object Oriented design, testing, etc.
Mod 2: Sinatra, Rails and ActiveRecord basics
Mod 3: Advanced ActiveRecord, Authentication/Authorization, creating/consuming APIs, etc.
Mod 4: Node and JS frameworks. A little React.

- Job hunting and technical interview prep throughout
- Culture "stuff" throughout. Gender and bias problems in tech, how to be an advocate for marginalized groups, etc.

Cons:

- I did a ton more pre-work than was required, and felt well prepared going in, but I feel like the recommended pre-work between the mods didn't quite serve the goals. I felt behind the ball on mods 3 and 4.
- Large group instruction is hard for everyone, but I fel...

This program was tough and requires an incredible amount of time and dedication for 7 months almost non-stop. 10-12 hour work days are pretty normal.
But if you follow through, it has the power to complete change your life!

The Turing School of Software & Design changed my life. I am now making twice as much money as I ever have before at a fulfilling job. I am incredibly grateful to Jeff Casimir and the staff at Turing for their work and vision. I can vouch for the legitimacy of the program and career prospects for graduates. I am not an anomaly, either. Read the Jobs Report. The numbers are in line with what I saw. I won’t say that the program is necessarily a good fit for you, though. I saw a lot of people drop out of the program, so I encourage you to try to determine if this is the right path for you or not before dropping 20 grand on it. I’ll spend the rest of the review describing what I think a prospective student should do or consider before signing up.

Turing did not hand me anything. It’s not...

The decision to take a break from life to spend a lot of money to go back to school was hard but MORE than worth it. Turing was the hardest 7 months of my life. There is no getting around the fact that it is a HUGE commitment and sacrifice, but it is truly life altering. I went from having zero career direction to a lifelong career with the ability to provide for my family. The education I received at Turing is invaluable and I recommend it to ANYONE willing to sacrifice 7 months of their life. 7 months is NOTHING compared to the rest of your life.

I will admit, my choice to attend Turing was a little biased. I worked at LivingSocial when the Hungry Academy(the predecessor to Turing). I saw first hand how successful the graduates were at that program.

Pros: Turing taught me how to learn and how to think with an engineering approach. It was a lot more than just memorizing the syntax. Learning how to learn was critical when I took my first development job that did not use Ruby on Rails, but I was able to apply the concepts and be successful.

Mentoring. Turing has a great mentor network that is very active. As a student, I relied on mentors to solve problems when I was stuck. Now I help by using my contacts to help people get their feet in the doors at companies.

Curriculum - they do a great job at iterative learning wher...

I enrolled in Turing on the recommendation of a close-friend and completed the program in 2015. Being an adult with a previous career and history I hope this will be a more clear-eyed and less infatuated review.

Anyway, what they expect out of you at Turing can border on the unreasonable but what can you expect when they are trying to pack 4 years into 7 months? They are trying to take someone with no experience and make them hirable as a junior software dev in 7 months. You need to be very serious about becoming a dev, intelligent, and not a dick if you want to succeed at Turing.

Honestly, to their credit they pull it off brilliantly.

I feel like overall my Rails and Ruby knowledge that came out of the program was very strong, with my JavaScript knowledge being somewhat weak. ...

Attending Turing was one of the best decisions I have ever made. If you want to work in Ruby and/or Rails (and if you are just starting out, it's a wise first step) there is truly no better place to learn.

I had been working as a technology coördinator/person-who-handles-everything-that-plugs-in-and-teaches-classes-on-the-side for seven years prior to enrolling at Turing. Unfortunately none of that transferred to programming and I started with basically nothing.

The program was rigorous. All those water analogies (drinking from the fire hose, being thrown into the deep end, &c.) described my experiences, especially at first. As the program progressed though, so did my understanding and looking back week by week, my progress was real and impressed me.

The staff are committed to turning out the best alumni in the world. That goal is lofty and they take it very seriously. Add in a non-trivial social justice mission, and you can see that the staff are holding themselves to at least as h...

I attended the Turing School of Software and Design back in 2015, so while some of my specific information will be outdated, my perspective of my experience now out in the industry will hopefully be helpful for perspective students.

Be forewarned, this program is hard. It is also a more than full time commitment. Also while you don't need to have experience with coding/programming beforehand, it will definitely give you a leg up when you start. I have now been out in the industry for two years, and Turing gave me a great foundation to start with. I think Turing's advantage though is the growing network of Turing Alumni and connections through mentors. With the saturation of junior developers coming from "bootcamps", having the foot in the door through Turing's network and their emph...

Turing is designed to push you to your limits. Every day is packed with several new concepts that you are expected to absorb and begin using right away. It's difficult, the pace never slows down, and it is exactly the program I was looking for. The pros and cons are tied together: you will have to drop everything else going on in your life at the time to focus on this program, but without that, you wouldn't be able to graduate so quickly with so much exposure to so many topics. After starting my first job after Turing, I was able to contribute to development right away, without much additional training (other than processes very specific to our team). Turing prepared me very well for my career, taught me how to continue learning on my own, and even though I look back on my time there as...

I graduated from Turing some time ago, so it is likely that some portions of my review will be out of date but hopefully still helpful.

First the good. As a whole, I was pleased with my experience at Turing. I went from being very technologically experienced to being a reasonably solid Ruby on Rails dev who got a job in San Francisco and now makes a reasonable living doing it. The course is rigorous and intense, with little time for anything else. Most of the instructors were extremely helpful, genuinely want to see students succeed, and have a passion for education. You are likely to become very close with your classmates as you will all be going through this difficult (and somewhat traumatic) experience together.

Where Turing could improve: As I mentioned above, many of the shor...

I joined Turing because I knew I wanted to get into coding and I didn't feel like a 12 week program would be enough. Turing is one of the longest programs in the country, 7 months. It also is very challenging and instructors believe in you but will not pass you along if they don't think you're ready for the next level. I loved the program, it's non-profit mindset and the job opportunities they came with it. I was hired for a job 10 days after graduating and found that most of my classmates who job hunted aggressively were able to get a job quickly within the first three months. I felt very prepared in the real world with the skills I had learned at Turing.

This program requires a huge amount of commitment (both time and mental energy) but it's entirely worth it. I received a great job offer on the last day of class and I felt well prepared by Turing to complete my work assignments. The only downside isn't Turing's fault at all but being located in Denver means an incredibly competitive job market for junior devs and if you want a job you'll have to be comfortable putting yourself out there (meetups, networking, making connections any way you can really).