| | Zach Burke | I came to this program with 1 year of experience in C++, albeit a year of experience that took place a decade ago. With that in mind, although I couldn't qualify as a pure beginner, I came into Ubiqum with no experience of front-end or back-end languages and only a faded concept of object oriented programming. That was three and a half months ago.
Today, Ubiqum has given me the foundations of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Java, along with a few modern frameworks. It's blisteringly fast paced and pretty much everything I could have hoped for. If you're confident that this is the kind of career path you want to take and willing to stare down the screen when problems arise (and they will) then the course is well worth the money. If not, however, it's a simple fact that the structure and lesson-free nature of the program will probably be demotivating. Members of my cohort certainly feel this way and all I can say is that what you're really paying for is a constructive learning environment, not a university degree.
In short, it's perfect for the kind of person who has started and enjoyed a lot of online tutorials, but never finished them, or carried on in the long term.
Here's a brief pro and con list, for good measure:
Pros:
-The tutors are honestly the best aspect of the course, and the ability to ask precise, detailed questions when encountering problems makes all the difference.
-Having a community of like-minded people, all in similar positions in their lives (mid-career changes, etc) makes the whole process feel much less daunting than learning alone at home.
-Putting in the hours, just like you would at a real workplace, also has the advantage of giving you confidence that you could actually integrate into a real office.
-Jost, the career advisor for the Berlin program, goes out of his way to find you opportunities and projects that suit your long-term goals. If you want to walk out of here with real world experience, he'll make it happen.
Cons:
-Although the tutors are the best part of the course, they're also still human, and there should be more than two per course. I mean this not only as a student, who would occasionally find that there was no one available to help for hours on end (this is particularly true on induction days for new cohorts), but for the tutors as well, who end up sharing three people's amount of work between two.
-Again, if you aren't someone who actively learns in their spare time, or is capable of picking up entirely new skills very quickly, it's possible that the course will be frustrating, if not outright overwhelming. You get to work from day one and it never slows down. For me, this was great, but if you fall behind once, it can feel difficult to ever catch up.
-Some of the course materials are out of date and effectively useless, which means that tutors need to adapt or create new projects. Their's is a heroic effort, but it suggests that those at the top aren't half as reactive as their employees. Everyone would benefit from faster, more decisive leadership. |
