Le Wagon

Le Wagon was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I had graduated university in May 2018 with a business degree, but had already started teaching myself coding. I knew in order to get hired I had to get a little more formal training. My research brought me to Le Wagon, it was the most reasonably priced, highest rated, and wasn’t too long. I decided on Le Wagon, Montreal, seeing as I could speak French and had never really been to that part of Canada.

The program itself is very intense. Do not think that this will be an easy certification, it isn’t. By the end you will have suffered countless headaches, lost hope, found it again, stress-ate, stress-napped, but in the end it is so worth it. You get what you put into it, so if you really prepare, pay attention and work on challenges all day and at home, you will succeed and have easily enough skills to find work afterwards. You can just as easily check-out and sleep for most of the days, while the teachers are there to help you achieve, they aren’t your parents.

I came into the program with a little coding knowledge but not much so I struggled the first couple weeks to catch up. The teachers are your best weapon but really try to figure stuff out on your own, often times your mistake is really small or you haven’t read the instructions to the challenge thoroughly (Also stay on their good side, you’ll be abusing them during project week). I never would have thought that in a short time I would be demoing a product I had built but Le Wagon makes you feel prepared.

What makes this boot-camp worth it comparatively is the confidence that it gives you. I can say from experience that I have been offered jobs just because I am not afraid to look up an answer and teach myself, an invaluable skill this program forces on you. Also, the project and Airbnb clone are no joke, they are serious things that will set your resume apart from other applicants.

I really cannot recommend Le Wagon enough. It was a fantastic learning experience, and the curriculum is very well-balanced. I have been applying to jobs since completing Le Wagon, and lots of the roles I have looked at require experience in the topics we covered at Le Wagon, which is great. It feels like Le Wagon looked at the kinds of jobs that alumni might apply to and ensured that they covered those complementary skills. I think Le Wagon’s system of exercises and tests is incredibly productive, and really encourages students to think like developers. We learn to not be afraid of the terminal, and how to conduct intelligent Google searches so we can think creatively and solve our problems independently. We also learn how to persist in the face of difficulty and repeated failures, which make the reward of solving a problem even greater.

Learning aside, being at Le Wagon is also insanely fun. I often found myself spending 12-hour days at Le Wagon, and not resenting it in the slightest. The staff are all so friendly and welcoming, and because almost all of them are Le Wagon alumni themselves, they understand perfectly the struggles students go through. They are incredibly kind and supportive, and make sure that we learn the importance of taking breaks and also looking after ourselves mentally and physically over the course of the bootcamp. Friday nights are always fun, and it is a very bonding experience. Some of the people I met at Le Wagon will be friends for life, students and teachers alike. It is intense, and crazy, and the best investment I have made in a very long time.

                                                                                   

I’m an entrepreneur and a mother of 2 young kids. My friends consider me to be somewhat of a geek, i.e., I love all things tech, which is not very trendy among the women of my generation (although, I’m the least geek of geeks). It’s funny how being an entrepreneur and being a parent have one important thing in common that radically changes one’s life: You are out of control, and you find yourself out of your comfort zone constantly.

Le Wagon radically changed my life in 2 different ways.

The first one is that I co-launch the bootcamp in Montreal with my brother Antoine. It was a huge step in entrepreneurship, but I was so excited and honored to bring the world's highest-rated bootcamp to my city. Driven by my passion about the product and its community, we took our place in the lively Montreal tech ecosystem, built a great team, and, so far, have offered this amazing life-changing experience to over 120 students.

The second way it changed my life is that I took the full-stack program myself and fulfilled a long-standing ambition: learn to code. I spent 2 incredible months studying at a very fast pace in a stimulating and very (very) challenging environment (as my background was not technical at all). But thanks to some key ingredients this experience was one of the best of my life. Here they are:

• **CURRICULUM**: The curriculum is excellent and the pedagogy is focused on practicality -> at the end of each day we master key concepts and are ready to grab new ones the next day.

• **ONLINE PLATFORM**: The pedagogical platform is a really powerful tool -> it gives 24-hour lifetime access to all the lectures, challenge material, and more. A great asset that we could rely on during and after bootcamp.

• **GREAT PEOPLE**: The passionate teachers who were 100% dedicated to us and supported us through our learning experience, and the great people around me that made for the perfect learning environment.

• **DETERMINATION & TRUST**: And last, but not least, my determination and the absolute trust I had in my capacity to succeed (it’s hard but I can do it) and the trust in the program & the team (they are the best and they know where we’re heading too).

My only regret is not having done it earlier

Graduated from a business school and after specializing myself in asset management during a few years in the most largest banks, I decided to learn code for several reasons.

I saw that the industry of finance and the job market were radically changing and I wanted to be an actor of this paradigm shift. I also wanted to acquire concrete skills that will allow me to directly work in smaller and disruptive companies.

Le Wagon brought more than I expected: coding & design skills, start up culture, a network and last but not least it improved my way of learning.

Today I am now working as a product manager for a start up that builds a platform where companies can automate and design conversations with their customers through AI.

Before doing Le Wagon's program in Montreal, I had spent half a dozen years owning a yoga and massage studio in Boston, and had always thought "If I could just spend a year in a cave with no distractions, I know I could build better software than the stuff we've had to use." Ultimately, once I decided to take the plunge, I chose Le Wagon's program because I thought it'd be great to be able to go pretty much anywhere in the world and have an instant community around me. And, sure enough, even as I type this, I'm sitting at a sun-lit desk in Le Wagon's Berlin campus, enjoying some free co-working space and coffee while students from at least three continents work on coding challenges a few feet away, embracing their inner dreamer and releasing their inner nerd.

The program itself is brilliantly constructed. You begin the day with a lecture (which is also available on video  even after you've graduated), and then spend the rest of the day doing coding challenges to lock in and expand upon what you've just learned. You're intentionally taught just enough to get to the edge of the solution, forcing you to learn how to research and think like a developer. Over the course of the program, you'll actually start to catch yourself facing challenges differently, with more of a sense of "I don't know how to do that . . . yet. I guess I'll find out." And at this point, I can honestly say that I *do* now know how to build better software than the industry standard in my previous business, and I'm really looking forward to doing just that.

In addition to the program itself, I think the platforms for alumni are really impressive. You'll have life-time access to the course materials online, and new tutorials and helpful resources get added all the time. The almost four thousand alumni also have access to multiple message groups on Slack, making it really easy to say "I'm going to be in Shanghai next month. Does anybody want to grab a beer?" In some cities, like Berlin, there is free space set aside for alumni to use as a co-working environment -- even if the alumni did the program in other cities. And alumni often get invited to serve as teaching assistants, and eventually teachers, in multiple cities. One of my favorite classmates from Montreal is a TA there right now, and one of my favorite TAs from Montreal is right here in Berlin with me right now, teaching Ruby.

Make no mistake. The program is challenging. You will absolutely learn new curses while you learn new programming languages. But you will come out of it with a profound sense of accomplishment and, more importantly, possibility.

Just do it.

After 7 years working for companies that required more and more technical knowledge, I decided at the end of 2017 that it was time to go a step further and put my hands in the code. Based on very good recommandations, I chose to follow Le Wagon coding bootcamp from January to March 2018.

6 months later I am still very impressed and mesmerized by the high quality of the program and how much I learnt in such a short period of time.
I was very concerned when I started the bootcamp to have too much gaps to fill in, having no technical background at all but that’s where the magic happened : the program has been so smartly built that at the end of the 9 weeks I was able to design, code and ship a product built from scratch.
You can tell that every single detail has been well thought  to make sure that everyone can succeed, learn and take as much as they can of these 9 weeks: the buddy system, the exercises, the flashcards, the yoga classes... and obviously the teachers who are so dedicated, kind and passionate about what they do. They have been the greatest support during all these weeks (without mentionning the great team working hard everyday to make your 9 weeks so amazing)
I haven’t had such an exciting, intense and fulfilling experience in a long time. And I know that I joined more than a bootcamp, I am now part of a big family.

I am now in the process of being a product manager in a tech company and without the technical skills that I acquired at Le Wagon, this wouldn’t have been possible.

I'm François. I'm recently graduated from Master at Kedge Business School in E-Business. I’ve designed my track to 3 pillars, my goal is to be flexible and find performance in an age of innovation and digital: IT/Digital, Law (bi-cursus in Law) and all in all Coding with Le Wagon Montréal.

 An amazing 2 months to meet inspiring people, discover a new land of possibilities with experimented teachers and all in all, discover my potential in coding.

 

 

I have an engineering degree and worked for 2 years as an aerospace engineer before attending Le Wagon bootcamp in Paris. As my interest for tech startups was growing, I wanted to know how the tools I used on a daily basis were made. I heard of Le Wagon through friends, podcasts, and professional relationships. I started to think about it seriously and attended meetups they were hosting, watched workshops and tutorials on Youtube. Those videos convinced me of their pedagogy and made me apply.

 

My experience at Le Wagon was a real life-changing experience. I'm now able to build a whole product from scratch, and most of all I met amazing people. The teachers are really professional, the program is progressive and covers all ranges of web development, and the platform on which you submit your daily exercise makes all the difference. The 9-weeks format is ideal to stay focus from the beginning to the end and make the best of it.

 

I'm currently working as a Product Manager and use my learnings on a daily basis. It helps me to understand and to be able to talk with developers and come up with better specifications.

If I were to do it again, I would not hesitate a second!

I’m an alumni of batch 134 and I must say attending Le Wagon is the best choice I’ve made to complete my academic training. I was a senior student at a Business School and I wanted to build my own startup, that’s why I did Le Wagon. I learned the basics of web development which in my opinion is fundamental to communicate with developers. But there is so much more. They gave me a product culture. I learned to focus on the user: designing great products and eliminating user friction. Today I work with a data engineer and I think our visions are very complementary. I hope we will become a winning team!

Even before I finished my business degree, I knew I wanted to reorient myself. I had two professional experiences where after a few months I got bored and lost interest because I wasn’t learning anything new any more. My friends, who did Le Wagon, advised me to try the bootcamp. And what a good advice!

At school, I always had trouble staying focused during classes because the format was almost exclusively about listening. On the other hand, Le Wagon’s learning-by-doing pedagogy suited me perfectly! Every day started with a lesson of about an hour and a half where a teacher would present new concepts to the class. The rest of the day was then spent practicing on exercices with a « buddy » and the help of « teaching assistants », always ready to answer your questions about the exercises, talk about their experience or give advice for after the bootcamp…

When starting the bootcamp, I had no precise idea of what I wanted to do after Le Wagon. I thought I might try to find a job as a Product Owner to keep using what I had learnt during my business studies. But I developed a passion for debugging and I didn’t see myself stopping to code after the bootcamp. I am currently working as a teaching assistant at Le Wagon and will soon be starting an internship as a fullstack developer in a start-up founded by a team of Le Wagon alumni.

In short : don’t hesitate ! These 9 weeks spent learning to code were some of the most exciting and rewarding weeks of my life !

Summer 2017 While finishing my Finance degree at Imperial College London, I came across a short tutorial video posted on LinkedIn by Le Wagon. I had never heard of this “coding bootcamp” before, but these few introductory minutes were sufficient for me to realize that I wanted to be part of the 9-week adventure this coding school was offering. And this is precisely what I did. From learning back-end to front-end, from working on my own to collaborating with my team members, from brainstorming on to pitching a product, Le Wagon offered me all the tools I needed to be able to thrive in the tech industry. The format of the program is very well-thought. The first weeks are spent learning the basics, the following ones are for knowledge enhancement, and the last 3 weeks are aimed at putting everything together and presenting the output of these intensive sessions. All this was done in a very relaxed atmosphere, where teachers are not only friendly but also very competent at what they teach, always making sure that you understand the concepts. On top of that, the incredible opportunity to join a community of over 3,000 alumni, spread across more than 25 countries, was also very appealing to me. Over a year has passed since my last day, but this has not prevented me from keeping in touch with many of the people I met there, either to ask coding questions or just to grab a coffee. All in all, Le Wagon gave me everything my previous degrees did not, namely, the opportunity to learn how to code, build and develop a project from scratch in a friendly environment, making coding a lovable art and not a painful experience like it was at school. I now work in the banking industry where I am able to use many tools I learnt during the bootcamp, enabling me to automate many tasks I perform on a daily basis.

The Wagon’s patient teachers show you how to think about programming and pass on the necessary skills to code a sleek, modern, and dynamic website. After a daily lesson explaining basic programming concepts, you work with other students on exercises that slowly stretch the breath of their understanding. Every day, ideas that initially seemed fuzzy and abstract become focused and concrete. By the end of the course, things that seemed impossibly complex at the beginning become rudimentary, and you are all the more curious to keep on learning.   I highly recommend this course to anyone willing to work hard and be challenged constantly.