| | Massi | I was one of four persons (a fifth one was a student/instructor) that signed up for the first Deep Learning – Artificial intelligence boot camp from Ivy Data Science and I would like to recommend to anyone interested to stay away from this company. I could provide a very long list of faults and anecdotes about what happened during the 8 weeks of camp, but I will limit myself to the most relevant ones:
- The curriculum is purely fictional and not vetted by anyone. I have learned that what they propose is completely unrealistic for an 8-week camp, especially if none of the students has significant experience in machine learning and software engineering.
- The theory lessons in the morning were suspended after week 1 and the instructor fired.Lessons were replaced by self study on free online resources and books.
- Paid projects with clients were never introduced.
- At the end of 8 weeks we had only covered a small fraction of the curriculum advertised. We only ever worked with convolutional neural nets.
- I confronted the management multiple times during the 8 weeks and was first promised for proper learning support, then ignored for a few weeks, and then verbally abused at the end of the course when I was asking for additional instruction time or a refund to compensate for the lack of organization, structure and professionalism.
- During week 8 all the students demanded for additional instruction and support as it was clear that we were not ready for a job or a large project and the bootcamp has been very lacking on all aspects. Management denied any wrongdoing and tried to deflect responsibilities on students and instructor. During our last meeting, trying to find an agreement, we were confronted with verbal abuse, to the point that one of had to leave the room.
The management of Ivy Data Science has no idea about what deep learning and artificial intelligence are and have no clue how to organise a bootcamp or provide an environment that is suitable for learning. I would encourage anyone to stay away from this company. If you don’t you will have to deal with incompetence and abusiveness. |
| | Camilo Amaya | I was one of the five students in the first cohort. Four of us studied for eight weeks and the fifth was a student/instructor who was only there for five weeks. We are extremely dissatisfied and have asked for refunds.
The bootcamp started two weeks behind schedule. From the beginning, they failed to provide accurate information on what the bootcamp was offering. The curriculum wasn’t correctly built and it was never vetted by a Deep Learning professional. The people who run this “bootcamp” will tell you anything to get you to sign up and will then miserably fail to follow through.
Ivy Data Science represented themselves as a Harvard/Experfy company, promised an impossibly comprehensive curriculum, claimed to have instructors, TAs, and a camp director. Turns out they had none of this in place. They only managed to hire a machine learning expert as the sole afternoon lab instructor a week before the camp finally started on January 30, 2017. A full day of studying turned into less than half a day, and the promised lectures and certification was never provided. They left it up to the students to teach ourselves, something we don’t need to pay $13k for. The facilities were inadequate (a poorly kept co-working space in Brooklyn) and accommodations never panned out.
We raised our concerns about the lack of resources and reliable instruction from the first week. Instead of listening to the students and taking accountability, “management” barraged us with verbal abuse that made us feel physically threatened.
By week eight, the mismanagement and heavy distraction from dealing with all of this had us about a month behind. They insisted we sign gag orders just to get some additional AWS services for us to finish our studies. They also cheated their instructors out of pay. Past week eight, we were given no instruction, support, or a final capstone project to work on.
JOB SUPPORT WAS NEVER PROVIDED. None of us came out of this with something tangible to show to employers.
Stay away from these people and save yourself the time, money, and stress. There are many other courses out there that are actually set-up by Deep Learning/AI professionals.
If something feels odd here and is making you doubt this, follow your instinct. |
