Fullstack Academy

  I attended Fullstack Academy's Immersive Javascript program in the Summer of 2015. At that time I was pursuing a career change into web development. I had been attending graduate classes for Computer Science but was a little unhappy with the pace. I had just been hearing about boot camps, and liked the idea of an immersive program that was comprehensive and demanding. This led me to Fullstack and really one of the best decisions I've made.   The bootcamp itself prepares you very well. You learn Fullstack development by performing workshops and developing projects. It very much mimics actual project development. On top of the actual course material is thorough job prep as well. There were whiteboard problems and interview/resume prep. All leading up to hiring day where you get to demo your projects and meet with employers. They really cover all the bases. I'm very pleased with the results.

I spent about a year browsing software engineering bootcamps while I put together the money to be able to attend. In that year I narrowed my search to three different bootcamps. After interviewing with each I finally made the decision to commit to Fullstack Academy. The seemed to have the strongest curriculum and devoted staff. I can tell you now that I chose correctly. Fullstack Acadmeny has been probably the single most productive 13 week period of my life.

Fullstack Academy teaches you how to write fullstack javascript (client-side & server-side). In addition to this they teach computer science concepts they help mold the way you solve problems. The fact that you learn one language and use it for both the server and client is hugely important. This allows you to spend more time learning valuable concepts and patterns that you can apply to any language you learn rather than spending a lot of time learning new syntaxes.

The second half of the course is spent taking what you have learned and apply it to group and solo projects. This lets you really nail down the git workflow as well as learn how to work effectively in a collaborative environment.

In addition to all the technical instruction you receive you will also spend time learning about the job market; how to write a resume, how to do well in white board interviews, how to do well in other types of technical interviews, how traverse the interview process.

During senior phase every morning starts with an hour of whiteboard problems. Not only does this help prepare you for whiteboard interviews, but it's also very fun, and seriously strengthens your technical problem solving abilities.

I would recommend Fullstack Academy to anyone who is eager to get in to software engineering, and willing to work hard to get there.

 

I attended the September 2015 cohort of Fullstack Academy and absolutely would recommend the experience to dedicated individuals intent on learning to program. For a few months before applying, I used online resources like Coursera, Codecademy, and Coderbyte to ramp up my self-learning. I also worked on a few smaller projects for practice before applying. 

Fullstack academy is full of great instructors and great teaching fellows (students who successfully completed the course and are hired as mentors and engineers) and as a result, my questions were always answered with patient guidance and thoughtfulness. I was hired as a Teaching Fellow upon graduating, and after finishing my fellowship, I received multiple offers from amazing companies and was ready to jump into my position as a full stack software engineer.

I chose FSA because I knew I wanted a rigorous program that would expedite my journey to becoming a software engineer. I'm so grateful for Fullstack- it's not for the faint of heart, but it will definitely prepare you for a career in software engineering. Thanks Fullstack!

Alright, do you want to be a developer? It's a serious question, are you interested in putting in lots of time, effort and money learning about computers, programming methodalgies, and staying up to date amongst the rush of new developers coming into the market. If the answer is yes then just go to fullstack (money and circumstances permitting). 

It's a great program with terrific instructors and a top notch curriculum. It was by far the best educational setting I have ever been in, surrounded by a great group of people who are so passionate about learning. 

If you are on here then you are most likely comparing against other bootcamps, and let me tell you as someone who does some hiring at my company now, Fullstack students stand out. Many of the others simply do not put out as impressive students (cough cough ones with ruby backends cough). I would also look very cautiously at ones that offer 'guarenteed' jobs. Nothing is guarenteed, and programs that do that have to either being extremely selective with people they know they can place into jobs, or be offering sub par jobs or internships with no extensions. Fullstack was great for people looking for a career shift, most of my fellow students had been in a career for several years (avg age 27-32) and were looking for a shift into programming. 

So hopefully all these rave reviews convince you to go, as I'm glad I did and so is everyone I know. 

Summary

If you're deciding among different bootcamps, you can't beat Fullstack. The head instructors are all very sharp and incredibly committed to their students. The professional network is robust, and the career services team works tirelessly. The program felt at times like drinking from a firehose, but in the end, I graduated with a job offer in hand - for more details, read on! 

My Road to Fullstack

I graduated from Harvard College with a degree in history, then moved to China for five years, where I worked as a Product Manager at Lenovo. I fell in love with coding while tinkering around on side projects, and decided to attend a bootcamp because I felt it was the best way to level up in a short period of time. I chose Fullstack over Flatiron and Devbootcamp because I was impressed with the teaching skill and coding knowledge of my technical interviewer, and because co-founder Nimit convinced me that learning full-stack JavaScript meant I would spend less time on context-switching and would benefit from understanding one language more deeply. Didn't even consider places like AppAcademy becase I dislike the idea of the school taking a percentage of my first-year salary - my goal has alwasy been to optimize for greatest learning, not highest income.

Student Experience

It's hard to understate how caring and committed the teachers are. The head instructors have different styles, but there's no discernable difference in quality among those who have been around for several years and those who have just joined. I was lucky enough to learn from Dan Sohval and Ben Cohen as a student, and later worked closely with Gabe Lebec, Joe Alves, and Cassio Zen while I was a fellow. These instructors represent an embarassment of riches, and I would consider every one of them as a mentor and a friend.

The learning environment at Fullstack is truly collaborative. All of junior phase relies of students working in pairs (driver/navigator roles), and senior phase includes several group projects. The teaching staff is genuinely interested in making sure everyone masters the material, and that the students at the top of the class are spurred even beyond the core curriculum. At the same time, I pushed myself so much harder than I would have just my learning on the side. Some of my classmates had CS degrees or had even worked as web developers before - sharing classroom time with them really motivated me to put in extra work.

Teaching Fellowship

The fellowship selection process is rigorous (about half our cohort applied, with only a ~25% acceptance rate). I applied because I genuinely enjoy teaching and because I wanted to build a more robust portfolio of projects before starting my job search. Throughout the fellowship, my number one priority was helping my students, and I can say the same for the other fellows I worked with. After gaining more of an insider's view at Fullstack, I concluded that my earlier perceptions were correct: the staff prioritizes student learning above all else.

Job Search

As a fellow, I was able to start my job search a few weeks before leaving Fullstack. Ceren Nomer on the career success team is a total beast, and would answer my questions at all hours of the day. She helped me refine my technique for looking for suitable companies, had great suggestions for how to follow-up after various stages of the process, and was up-front and frank about how to negotiate for salary/benefits. I was hoping to get an offer at an early-stage start-up where I'd be the first junior hire on the engineering team, and that's exactly what I ended up with. I should also note that the tech stack at my new company is almost entirely in C#, a language in which I have yet to write a single line of code. This, more than anything, shows how Fullstack teaches its students to be great developers, not just code monkeys.

Conclusion

Hard to beat the Fullstack experience, both as a student and a fellow. If given the choice of going back in time to attend a different school, I wouldn't change a thing.

In a nutshell, best decision ever. Fullstack was everything that it is hyped up to be -- a top coding bootcamp that will teach you the skills to be a top developer. It is not watered down, the instructional quality is off the charts, the curriculum is constantly being updated to meet industry demands, I could go on... Be warned, the currriculum is tough and they only admit top candidates. It's easy to get burned out.

I also reocommend applying for and doing the Fellowship (a 3-month internship on campus as a TA for Fullstack). It was fun and I feel like I got to relearn everything and fill in gaps that I may have had as a fresh graduate. 

Also, the general staff is great too. Gaby, Cang, and everyone else who keeps FSA functioning like clockwork are all really awesome and professional. You can expect a minute by minute daily schedule to follow thanks to them. Chris Thieke - campus manager - is the shining gem of FSA and will have you cracking up whenever he is around. 

I'm not without my crticisms but they are few. Could focus more on Front End testing workshops, and it's rare but sometimes students stop showing up and don't contribute to team capstones but not much is done.. Here are there some things that I thought could be done better, but overall the curriculum and outcome exceeded my expectations. 

Final thoughts:

1. I am happy with the decision I made to attend Fullstack, and feel that the investment was well worth it. Even my husband says that I learned in three months what took him years to learn on the job. So many doors have been opened, it is unreal.
2. The Fullstack immersive instructors and curriculum exceeded my expectations.
3. I entered Fullstack knowing basic JavaScript (loops, strings, arrays) and I now know how to build web apps from scratch and not just the front end. I can create a server, make API routes, and have information persist to a database. I also know how to teach myself any other framework or language. I also know how to talk about the languages and frameworks I learned intelligently. 
4. I am prepared to enter the tech world with confidence and am confident that I can land a stellar job. My career path has been changed and I have more opportunities and options now. Companies that I never thought I had a shot at working for are reaching out to me and I'm getting 2nd and 3rd round interviews with them.
5. You don’t have to come from a computer science background to succeed at Fullstack Academy. It’s a tough program, but well worth the effort you put in.
6. Fullstack taught me how to think like a programmer.

 

I came into Fullstack Academy doubting that the program could bring someone with zero prior programming knowledge to the level needed to land a job in the tech field. I am thrilled to say that, roughly 7 months after having first set foot on the Fullstack Campus, I signed an offer for a Software Engineer position at Google. Fullstack Academy is, by all measures, the best investment I have made to date, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anybody considering it, especially those with little to no prior programming knowledge. I will note, however, that hard, consistent, and dedicated individual work is a must if you want to make the most out of the Fullstack investment. Ultimately, as with anything in life, the more work you put into the program, the greater the rewards you will reap from it.

I attended Fullstack Academy the summer immediately following my undergraduate graduation, and I am positive that it was the single best decision I could have made for my career. After attending Fullstack, I worked as a Teaching Fellow for the next cohort of students. Immediately following my fellowship, I had received a job offer and was working a full-time permanent role instantly. I am confident I would not have been able to land the position I had without Fullstack, had I tried teaching myself.

One of Fullstack's greatest strengths is the community of growth and encouragement it fosters. The admissions process does an excellent job of vetting its candidates, and it shows. In addition to an excellent community, the instructors do an amazing job of not only teaching the students materials, but teaching students how to teach themselves. Software is a constantly changing field, where an engineer will regularly need to learn new skills and abandon dated technologies. Fullstack not only teaches the cutting edge technologies, but teaches them in a way that allows students the freedom to discover. The instructors also do a great job of making sure no one feels left behind, and offer countless assistance to those who feel like they are struggling. It is certainly not an easy program, but if you are passionate about development and willing to put in the work, you will not regret attending Fullstack.

I moved to New York for Fullstack in April 2015, stayed on as a teaching fellow through the end of that year, and started contracting with a company I met through hiring day in February 2016. Shortly after, I went on full-time and have been with that company since. I’m back on coursereport because I’m now interviewing bootcamp grads and wanted some perspective of other programs.

It’s disappointing to see some reviews of other programs indicating that students were unable to get quality help or were asked to leave so quickly after initially struggling because it reflects poorly on the bootcamp style of education in general. That said, there is a substantial range in the competence of graduates. A lot of it is due to the prior experience and work ethic of the individual before attending, but from what I’ve seen thus far, most of that range is due to the quality of the bootcamp. Awesome developers come out of a number of programs (one of our best developers is a Dev Bootcamp grad), but I sincerely believe Fullstack is a cut above. Our company, where the majority of engineers are Fullstackers, would not have been able to double its revenue in the last year if Fullstack provided a mediocre education.

I’d like to add two impressions to what’s already been said to help answer why. 

1. While applying to Fullstack, my interviewer made sure I left the interview knowing more than I did before - even though I had yet to be accepted or become a student. That culture of making every engagement a learning experience, and genuinely trying to do the right thing for every applicant and student has modeled how I strive to engage applicants at my current job.
2. Fullstack does not simply teach you how to program in a javascript framework. Fullstack teaches you how to learn software development. My first project after graduating was a react native app. While react was not apart of the curriculum at the time, I was able to quickly pick it up because I understood javascript at an advanced level, and I was able to leverage my understanding of how angular provided solutions to the general requirements of an application. I knew the right questions to ask, and how to find answers to them in order to efficiently learn react. Curriculums change to match demands in the industry, and that Fullstack has successfully made the shift from Ruby to MEAN (mongoDB, express, angular, node) and now to NERDS (node, express, react, databases using SQL) demonstrates its agility. 

As someone who had no formal education nor experience in software before Fullstack, I never had to pretend to know more than I knew in order to get a job, and I never felt I was in over my head when asked to learn something new. I ended up becoming a de facto lead developer on projects ranging from mobile apps for local startups to proof of concepts utilizing machine learning for PwC and Google. If this is what you want and it’s inside of you, Fullstack will bring it out. 

I attended Fullstack's Flex Immersive (part-time) course from January to July 2015, as part of its first cohort. It's been over a year since I've graduated (and successfully transitioned to be a fulltime software engineer!) and judging from not only my own experience but other alums/students as well, I can confidently say that Fullstack continues to be a place of excellence that strives to help its students succeed, whatever their goals may be. 

First I want to mention it's really commendable that Fullstack has various options of attending, whether it's the Flex program or the remote immersive. I was really grateful Flex existed when I was looking to make a career switch (mainly for money/flexbility reasons). Running all of these cohorts in unison must be a logistical nightmare, but Fullstack pulls it off with high satisfaction. 

Curriculum: Fullstack consistently iterates and improves on its product/curriculum (as all good developers do). When I attended we learned & used the MEAN stack, now it's the NERD stack. I'd advise prospective students to not be /too/ hung up on the specific technologies though - what Fullstack really teaches is the ability to pick up any technology or language and the proper methods and tools to do so effectively. Getting better at debugging and reading documentation are some of the key things I learned at Fullstack that have far longer lasting impact than specific syntax. As for Flex vs. fulltime, the curriculum was completely equal across the board, though you will most likely need to spend more time outside of class reviewing the material and/or finishing up workshops.

People: Both instructors and staff at Fullstack are all incredibly friendly and open to help on whatever issues you may have. The hiring team is supportive and loves meeting and advising alums, even months or years after graduation/landing a job. Connections and relationships made at Fullstack are long-lasting and really strong, as proven by the latest alumni event which was bubbling with people and lots of hugging and chatter. No matter what your background, you will definitely meet your people here -- some of the most intelligent, curious, inquisitive and friendly people I know I've met at Fullstack. 

Thank you to Fullstack for providing an amazing opportunity to productively learn development and build awesome projects -- and helping make a dreamed about career switch possible.