| | Anonymous | 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 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. |
