| | Anonymous | I attended General Assembly's UXDI program remotely and overall it was a great program. However, a lot of opportunities will be missed through remote versus in person. Of course COVID is unavoidable and GA wanted to ensure everyone's safety, but the same offerings were promised as in person. Not necessarily! A lot of the networking opportunities weren't possible or incorporated as well as getting panelists from experts in the field. I met a lot of amazing people and learned so much and grew immensely since the start. It's a lot of hard work but I don't regret coming to GA. If you need to have that hands on experience, especially because it's UX design, consider waiting for restrictions to be lifted for in person classes. Or go to a different school for much cheaper! |
| | Anonymous | They clearly don't know how to work during the pandemic (I very much hope that they didn't operate like this before Covid...).
I went to an open evening in November 2019. They absolutely sold it to me then- dedicated tutors who were 'veterans' in the industry, a curriculum which reflects trends in the tech industry as well as money back if you don't land a job. ALL OF WHICH ARE LIES.
Teachers seem to get annoyed when students asked too many questions or were challenging. But would often say 'please ask me questions so you can make the most out of your money'. During one full week project, the teachers wouldn't even come on zoom calls to help us debug our code and told us off again for not asking for help.
The last module - Python, Django and PostgreSQL should be omitted from the programme as it only reflects how well students can copy and paste code to fulfil a project with a backend in a different language. They clearly only do this to bulk out their technologies and languages taught during the course. The teacher barely even knew Python and was googling most the answers. Some students were even correcting them. Otherwise, surely they should get a data science instructor to each us fundamentals in Python. General Assembly's excuse to that is by week 10 there's no shame in googling for the answer as that's also industry standard. And I completely agree, but at £9,000 you would expect the tutor to be knowledgable in that language.
Another massive joke is that we had to deploy two of our big projects by ourselves with absolute MINIMAL help. After the course finished Herkou was no longer supporting the backend to one of our projects. We've not heard from the instructor how to redeploy. This proves that once you've finished there's no support. How can they charge £9000 and not help with the most inciting thing - deployed projects.
I was fed lies when I reached out to a higher up to voice my dissatisfaction, and the person always turned the conversation around to ask how they could help support me. Their answer was because I was apparently one of the top students, they thought I was doing ok, but to make me feel better and gain more support I would have 1-1 with the lead instructor to help me improve. This meeting never happened.
They make you jump through so many hoops to become 'job seeker ready' by then a lot of people drop out so aren't accounted in their outcomes statistics. You're pretty much on your own when it comes to the job search, and nowhere in the contract does it clearly state after x amount of days you can ask for your money back. |
| | Samantha Tucker | My front end web development course with Esin, and Hou Chia was great. It was very interactive and easy to follow the lessons, the homework and study ratio was great. I enjoyed learning new things with new people and over zoom and slack. I didn’t have any negative experiences in this class, it was all positive. That is the main reason I am returning to General Assembly to take another course. The Admissions team is very attentive and responds to all your questions very quickly as well. |
