Berkeley Boot Camps

My overall experience would be a 5-star if this review was based on the superb instructor and strong curriculum. It was certainly a great class and would love to do another if time permitted the intensity. 

Before starting this bootcamp, I had recently left my prior position as an Accountant with some programming experience and was looking for a general programming school. Application into the school itself was a tad too simple and rushed. Though if not rushed, I would've missed the amazing instructor and the friends I made afterwards. 

My instructor Jerome Chenette, who is a professional within the web development field was extremely caring and well versed. He's simply the best and most passionate teacher I've ever seen. He takes time to ensure students are all caught up after each section, and takes time after each class to help students catch up (especially if he sees the effort you put into practicing and learning). I can not imagine where I'd be without his guidance and push towards excellence.

The course itself is dauntingly fast and thorough, with some portions that I wish were covered. Although TAs can seem frightening at first, once you interact and raise your hand the TAs are amazingly helpful and patient. TAs are often the friendliest and top of their prior cohorts. You'll receive new information crammed into ~4 hours inclass every day. With the expectation that you stay after hours to either work with others or do homework. The recommended amount of time to learning inclass (20hrs) and outside (40hrs) of class is 60 total per week. You will definitely get back what you put in through those grueling nights. (Yes, I counted my hours to an average of 60.)

Although job assistance was minimal during the bootcamp, post assistance was fairly good. They gave a lot of pointers to improving resume and dedicate several 1 on 1 hours through online chat. Personally I would've loved if the bootcamp was a longer to accommodate job assistance, or lengthening the end of the cohort for students to discuss their search rather than online-only. However, I will admit with their assistance and a bit of luck, I managed to recieved a contractor role in my current company. 

I'm certain others will wonder whether it's worth the $13k and 3-month investment. Most definitely, even if you're not aiming to become a web developer, it gives you a foundation to begin studying on your own. Either to learn new languages or dive deeper into web, you'll be amazed at how translatable new information becomes. The 60hours a week are not a joke, as it will reinforce your knowledge with every struggle. Avoid taking the easy way out, such as completely copying from someone else. In the end, it's up to you to ask for help and your new found skill. Odds are you'll find some new friends like me.

If a data analytics / data science boot camp is for you, then the UC Berkeley (Trilogy) program is a great choice.  As a part-time, six-month program, it gives you some options – if you are making a career change, then you can put in a lot more extra time each week to build great demo projects and work on your job search, or if you need to earn some money you can work part-time and still keep up, although you will probably need more time to practice and get your project portfolio together after finishing. 

It is a bit unnerving for prospective students that Trilogy chooses not to publish outcomes, but from talking to other students as well as grads from other boot camps, the outcomes (at least for our cohort) seem at least as good as what other programs provide – a good number of people achieved their goal (new job, promotion, new skills) within a month of graduating, and most of the rest look like they will get there if they follow through in the coming months. 

The curriculum is rigorous, but the course material is a bit disorganized at times.  It pays to make sure your computer stays trouble-free, and you should be aggressive about installing software and getting it working ahead of time (you’ll be doing that all through the program).  The instructor was a superb teacher, and the support system is extensive, with multiple options for getting help.  The career services were outstanding – every time we went over and refined / revised my job search materials, I’d see an uptick in interest within a couple of weeks, and I ended up getting multiple offers a few weeks after finishing.  Getting the projects and online profiles in really good shape to show to employers really did make a difference.

The one downside is that with a slower pace, especially during group projects, you can get away with being passive and not learning.  The career services calendar also tends to fill up quickly and the meetings go by fast, so if you don’t do your part to actively seek out support and prepare, you won’t get the benefits.  Like all boot camps, this one isn’t a magical metamorphosis where you enter as your ordinary self and leave as a full-fledged Data Scientist, able to easily outcompete any five-year industry veteran for a super high-paying job.  Instead, it will provide a reliable path for you to make yourself more employable, more confident, and substantially more valuable, so that it pays for itself many times over. 

I don't want to start from beginning as other students already described that process pretty well. 

I took Full Stack Web Development course for 6 months. I was paying 1600$ a month and 2500$ upfront payment. 

Classes were three times a week. First 2 months went pretty well. They explained js, html and css. After we started jumping from one module to another yet nobody could understand them. There are group projects which supposed to help you to get along with people and learn working in a team.
But how are you going to work when only 10-15% class were catching up with instructor. After 4 months our instructor started drinking on fridays and missing saturday classes. He missed 4 classes and TA 's were not that professional to be able to explain the topics. 
I personally was doing uber and paying 1600 a month. Working 68 hours a week and going to classes. You couldn't imagine my face everytime I would make it class on Saturday morning after long uber driving night and see how Instructor isn't in class again.  When it happened 4th time - I lost all motivation and quit going to classes. I thought I will be remote at least to save time for myself. But remote classes were very low quality and most of the times translation was going off as it was unpaid subscription. 
School also supposed to have a Student Success Manager and within 2 months 3 different people came to class and represented themself as SSM and left. Honestly I never seen any of them again. So we didn't have SSM for the time we studied there. 

Also they promised to help with job search ---- Zero Help! 

After the course I talked to one of the directors in school and explained him everything. I explained him how much I worked to pay for school and what we were getting in the class. I didn't pay for 1 months  of school and they still haven't give me my Certification because of that. Even if I gained all necessary points to finish school. 

UC Berkeley ext (San Francisco) - literally broke my life in San Francisco. I feel scammed by this school. 

The UC Berkeley Coding Bootcamp is fairly rigorous, but very fair, and very rewarding. The full-time Full-Stack program is 12 weeks in length and spends a majority of the first half of the program strictly on front-end technologies, and the second half is primarily the back-end technologies. And among the 12 weeks, there are 3 major projects that allow the students to apply literally everything they've learned up to that point.

Learning and applying all of the technologies to qualify yourself as proficient in full-stack development in just 12 weeks is no short order task and it feels that way while working through the bootcamp. But the instructors and the lesson plans are consistently tailored to promote learning by building one on top of the other and hardly if ever taking steps back.

As a student who was bored easily in my academic programs in high school and university, I found this rigorous pace to be refreshing. It wasn't a matter of difficulty, but just a matter of putting in the work to follow all of the steps needed to understanding a certain  technology or concept. My instructor, Jerome is very knowledgable and always willing to support our learning whether it be by answering our questions or trying to clarify things as much as we may need before we move on to the next activity or topic.

Job assistance and career services is present throughout the bootcamp and is available to students for about a month after they complete the program. There is student support always available thorughout the bootcamp and they even set a sort of sub-curriculum for career services by establishing career milestones for students that allow them to have their professional materials reviewed and critiqued. This is a great support system as students aren't completely left to their own devices to figure out how to step into the professional realm of programming and engineering.

Lets start at the beginning. The screening was a joke. I took a quiz online and got accepted without an in person interview/screening. It consisted of a few riddles, simple math questions. Compared to screenings from other bootcamp which require you to have some basic coding fundamentals already, it made this bootcamp feel like a cash grab, but because of UC Berkeley's backing and the cost is cheaper, I decided to take the risk.

The main stack that was taught is MERN. Mongodb, express, react, and nodejs. Its a pretty good stack to learn for beginners and was taught pretty well. 

The curriculum could be improved by spending a little more time with data structures and algorithms, how javascript really works, since they focus on javascript and some more programming fundamentals.

The instructor was a nice guy but didn't really put much work into his teaching Most of the time the instructor's way of teaching was just show you a block of code and say "this does this, and that happens, now you try it" which doesnt really help. This is one of the reason's many bootcamp graduates fail to go outside of the stack they were taught. They know how things work in that stack, but they dont reallly know why it works which would translate into using other stacks if they did understand.  

Job assistance is pretty much online interview resources, so don't expect them to help you find a job after. I did eventually get a job but most of my learning that got me the job was through failed interviews and building myself up off those failures. 

Bootcamps have over saturated the web development market so don't expect to get a job with just this bootcamp.

The real gatekeeper from getting a job will be things that weren't taught at the bootcamp, aka more in depth about how api calls really work, datastructures, and algorithms, how javascript really works. how server request are made, testing(taught once at the end of the bootcamp), etc. 

TLDR: Sign up if you want to pay 12k to learn some coding for personal projects or business ventures. If you expect to get a job after this course, this course will only get you 0-10% the other 90% will be up to you to put in the work. This bootcamp is for beginners. If you can do some basic html and javascript, go to some bigger name bootcamps eg hack reactor, app academy and surround yourself with other competent coders with tougher curriculum that will make you job ready. 

I wanted to grow my career and build on my current IT skills - Cybersecurity was a natural next step.

Two things drew me to UC-Berkeley's Cybersecurity Boot Camp: The top-notch Cybersecurity curriculum and Berkeley's reputation as a world-class university. I had dreamt about going to UC-Berkeley, but never thought it possible – the Boot Camp made it possible.

The classes are fast paced with a lot of excellent information about cybersecurity. The instructors are knowledgeable and seamlessly walk through the breadth of information while addressing students' questions. The assignments are challenging - but help me practice and understand the skills and concepts that we are learning.

The career mentors are responsive and have great advice and tips on all aspects of my job search. 

If you're thinking about going to this boot camp and want to be successful: stay focused and do the work. If you don't understand the topic, reach out to the instructors for help. The bootcamp curriculum is extensive, but look at other books or information to get more in depth on the subjects being taught in class.