Level

Level provided a strong foothold in R, SQL, Tableau, and statistics. The instructors were very professional and I enjoyed the relevant speakers. I felt more confident in my skills to move into an analytically driven job after I completed the program. 

The program does move fast and it can be hard sometimes to keep up. This is especially true for someone like me who had no previous coding background. A prospective student has to be prepared to spend time out of class to fully master the skills taught. 

Level is a very intensive 8-week course focused on  teaching you data analytics and data science.

I really enjoyed my time at Level.  I believe I definitely got my money's worth and the capstone project was extremely useful. Though, ties with Northeastern and their resources proved to be a huge bonus as well.

I'll start with the capstone because that is the most important part of this class. You are paired up with a real company with a real problem that you have to solve. This is immensley motivating as I am very interested in  education and was paired up with Raising A Reader in MA. Working with real data and real employers is the best way to test the skills you learn.

The curriculum was very sound. Everything that you learn will be applicable and is exactly what employers are putting in job descriptions of their open Data positions.  I was especially taken in by the section on R. Once I started using R, it was  hard to turn away.  You should definitely have an idea of the  very basics of basics of programming.  It will help you learn much more while you are there.

My instructor was Dale Joachim, and I could not have asked for a more enthusiastic, professional person to lead the class.  I believe his curiousity made the lectures much more intruiging and helpful.

The best part about Level is the networking opportunities, which isn’t surprising coming from Northeastern.  Anyone can learn the skills taught in this bootcamp online or by taking classes, but the connections through the in-person bootcamp are invaluable.  My cohort was great.  My classmates were constantly sending one another job postings they found based on our individual backgrounds.

Level is a really great program for anybody who wishes to enter the growing field of data analytics.  The course consisted of 8 weeks (9 am - 5 pm) of lectures and labs as well as numerous guest speakers.  Students really get to learn the technial tools (R, SQL, Tableau, excel) as well as the statistical theories.  This personally was my first experience with a coding language.  The course ends with a Capstone project where students are paired with a company and given a real data set and are asked to solve a complex business problem.

I would recommend this course to anyone looking to advance their career in Analytics! 

Level is a new data analytics bootcamp offered by Northeastern University in four different locations in the U.S.  We attended class full-time for 8 weeks, culminating in a capstone project that we did for an actual company (each student did a project for a different company...there were a wide variety of projects).  We focused on statistics, Excel, R, SQL, Tableau, regression and machine learning.

Overall, I had a good experience (great people in my class), but because the program is new there were some clear growing pains.  One of the main issues was that the program seemed to be trying to cover the full spectrum of data analytics to data science, but with the wide range of skills of the students in the course, among other things, it wasn't really possible in 8 weeks.  I know that Level took our feedback and will likely adjust the curriculum, possibly offering different levels (no pun intended) of bootcamp so that an advanced student could focus on data science, whereas someone with fewer math skills or just new to the field might focus more on SQL, etc. 

None of the students in my class had jobs by graduation, but a few of us had interviews.  It's still too early to say whether or not a bootcamp like this is the key to a job.  Level is expanding it's business contacts in our area, so that should help.  The course definitely helped solidify some of the things I'd been trying to learn from MOOCs and gave me a couple of projects to show potential employers.  It should be a five-star course after a some adjustments.

Level is not worth the money you pay for it.  

The program does not fully live up to what it advertises itself as.

If you're self motivated and bootcamp worthy, my advice to you would be to go through Galvanize
if you can afford it and have the Python/Math knowledge or take the John Hopkins Data Science
specialization course on coursera.

Their web page leveledu.com advertises the program as having "Each day built around a real world
problem so you are gaining knowledge and skills. Build your portfolio and connect with top
employers to advance your career."  If it was experiential and based on portfolio building/real
world problems, they wouldn't have spent so much time lecturing.
About 40-50% of the time was allocated to instructor lecturing going over powerpoint 
slides that they obviously hadn't made, or obviously hadn't taken the time to review before class started. 
These slides always had errors in the R and MySQL code that was being used for learning exercises
and were not created with the goal of building up portfolios in mind.  Instructors were not well versed in using
R, SQL, and Tableau - which were the main tools being used for the course material.  

Any of the students who left the program and had a portfolio created, was because they created
it themselves from their own ideas outside of class.
 
They more or less faked a pre-screening to get into the program.  They had a 10 question
pre-screening test for basic statistics knowledge and sent out a handbook 3 weeks before hand
asking prospective students to cover Swirl Stats, Excel Exposure, and review over basic stats.
A very small portion of the students actually went over those materials before class.  
There was a frequent lack of accountability for students to actually do the work, which 
caused the self-motivated students to learn less.

The pace of the course was never at a 'bootcamp' level.  There were a handful of students
bringing the class down because they didn't have basic stats knowledge, didn't know their
way around working directories, or were unwilling to try things out / learn on their own.
The instructor lecturing frequently did not help with the pace of the course either.  There
was too much lecture, and not enough projects.  

The one redeeming factor of the course was the capstone project.  The capstone project was
a useful, worthwhile learning experience.  It was hard, messy, and the most practical thing that was
worked on in the course. 
But, the project descriptions that you make your decisions based off of were not correctly written out.  Also, there are
not enough projects in each city for each student to be working on a project based out of the
city they were taking the course in.  Charlotte, Silicon Valley, and Seattle all had shortages
of projects and Boston had a surplus.  They advertised the capstone projects as if students
were going to get a project from the city they were in.

We initially had the most incompetent instructor. He was constantly late to class and annoyed by any question students would ask. During Labs he would be on his phone and do absolutely nothing to further our learning. It comical how bad he was and we noticed this pretty much the first or second day of classes. I am shocked they ebe hired this guy to begin with, which goes to show how much the admin cares. The program eventually fired him half way through, but did not do anything (anything!) to compensate for our time loss. They just continued as if nothing happened. We had two subs eventually; they were more competent, but the course overall was shit show afterwards. It just lacked any organization. Job assitance is a joke. I can do a much better job myself connecting with people at the company. The whole program is a joke. 

Starting with the cons:

The people all come from very different backgrounds. That makes for very interesting interactions, but it also makes it hard to teach. There were points where I felt like the class was stalling because some people didn't have the built-up knowledge to grasp what came naturally for some of the rest of us. That said, that's probably a con for all boot camps more so than this particular one, since Level gets its name from its attempt to solve this problem by dividing people into separate levels.

The pros:

I came out of Level with confidence. I knew what I needed to be able to do, and I knew how to do them. Coming from a self-taught background, that was huge. Having a group of committed people to share the journey with, while it might warp your own timeline, is very encouraging. I ended up getting a job through a peer who attended the boot camp with me, so that turned out well, too.

Level has been taking more and more steps to connect students and alumni with job recruiters and hiring managers, which was very much appreciated. They do care, and I thank everyone involved for all they've been doing.