BrainStation

After a few years of scattered college classes and Udemy and YouTube videos, I built a decent foundation in web dev basics. I also felt really limited by the lack of professional guidance or any real network to lean on. A bootcamp by contrast is an accelerated... Read More program for non-tech people with ongoing career support and extensive networking. Overall I thought it was excellent. We ran the gamut from HTML to Heroku deployment and finished with resume and interview workshops. The projects incorporate everything learned up to that point, and include one group project, a few hackathons and one industry collaboration with the other BrainStation cohorts. I found it harder than expected - even with my prior experience. The project requirements go beyond the class lectures, so you’ll always be a fish out of water. This is by design to acclimatize us to what a real dev job is like. It still barely scratches the surface of everything there is to know in web development. The field is simply too big for an eight month (or 12 week) program - you’re really learning how to go off and learn by yourself. Still, we spent too much time on some things in the beginning at the expense of later topics. This could be because everyone was starting from different skill levels and they needed to get everyone up to speed first, but the end definitely felt rushed - especially the industry project. The instructors and TAs were pretty supportive, but in the bootcamp’s second half we were only really supposed to ask their help if we’d already tried five things. (We’ll never really learn if they always slip us the answer.) Sometimes so many students needed help it ate up all the open studio time and I was out of luck. I still think they could’ve been a bit more helpful sometimes, even if just by steering us in the right direction. There’s not guarantee of a job, but then again no reputable bootcamp would. They do advertise a very high employment rate but you have to hold up your end of the bargain and put in the hours. BrainStation will pass along job leads and news about career fairs and networking events, but it’s your job to take the initiative of job searching and networking. I recommend BrainStation to someone with at least some prior tech knowledge - even I felt a bit overwhelmed at some points. Think of it as a jumping off point for your own independent learning, rather than doing everything for you. The more of your own time and initiative you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

This was such an awesome, unique experience. I learned so much and met really great people. It's so cool thinking back to the first week when we were told all the things we would do during the course and how hard and scary it sounded at the time. It's... Read More amazing to know that we accomplished everything we set out to do and now we are officially UX designers, such a huge accomplishment. Campus felt like a second home and there were so many opportunities for personal and career growth; help with our resumes, career advice, networking events, interviews with industry partners, presentation practice, chat sessions with our cohort, and much more. The course load was pretty intense at times. There were moments when we had two projects to work on at the same time within a week. It was a lot, but it definitely taught us about proper time management and the instructors always encouraged us to try our best and that "done was better than perfect".

I put it anonymously here because I'm afraid the school will come after me by emailing me or something. I did the UX/UI design bootcamp and it was not for me. It was too fast-paced, a lot A LOT of the content I could have learnt by myself, there was not... Read More a lot of focus on the UI and so the projects were not that good and the "demo day" they have is not too useful as our capstones were not REAL WORLD projects. We did not focus too much on our capstone and so was not our best project and we had to present to companies - guess what? no one got a job. We did 3 or 4 projects during the course and I feel I lost time doing them instead of focusing on the capstone. Could have been only 2 projects instead of more than that. I got SO BURNT OUT from the bootcamp (didn't sleep well because I was always studying more hours to keep it up) that after it finished I took a 4 months break. I would never recommed a full time bootcamp like this. I didn't do this one but from what I read they tackled all the problems I had with brainstation and their curriculum seems promising for a bootcamp: https://www.memorisely.com/

This was my first time taking a course at BrainStation and It was a very informative and inspiring course. I was able to gain skills in programs such as Sketch, Flinto and InVision. The most beneficial part is definitely learning all the workflows a typical... Read More company/agency will be going through. I look forward to taking more courses here in the future.

It was a very informative and inspiring course; with lots of anecdotal insight from the instructors. The most beneficial part is definitely learning all the workflows a typical company/agency will be going through. The only negative is it couldn't be... Read More held in person, and so you're missing out on the communal aspect of it.

I took the Product Management course Nov-Dec 2020. The instructors were great but the institution itself was so disappointing. The class was way too full, I felt so bad for the instructors. We spent 2 of the classes just listening to other people's projects... Read More and the other classes whizzing through the material because the presentations took up so much time. I even submitted feedback that I had a bad experience and would like to talk to someone about it, never heard from anyone. Now I'm trying to access course materials to review for my current role and I'm barred from accessing it 6 moths after paying thousands of dollars in tuition. The customer service agent has been zero help and evidently a disappointing experience went from bad to even worse somehow. Save your money and don't bother.

As a product delivery manager this course was great for me as it empathized the importance of empathetic story telling and how it intrinsically links strategy, design and development. The only down side for me was that it wasn't in person and collaboration... Read More of the work we we doing was minimal. The facilitator was awesome.

Pros: Brain Station has industry experts as their instructors. I found their teaching faculty very learned, supportive and approachable. Instructors were willing to help even beyond the curriculum and would direct you to the relevant resources Cons: Found... Read More it little over priced

I had an incredible time at BrainStation. The only thing that could have made it better would be to have been in person with my awesome (and super helpful) classmates but unfortunately Covid kept us from that. The instructors were awesome and very knowledgeable.... Read More I have never been great in school or had much of an interest for it but for basically the first time in my life I actually enjoyed it and learned a ton. BrainStation's Web Development Program definitely set me up to succeed!

A lot of examples from real life situations. A lot of interesting examples and labs. Great Teacher with a lot of experience in Data analysis. Super helpful resources and examples. Starting with learning the basics in Excel and SQL and Tableau. The final... Read More project was a great practice.