Turing School of Software & Design

I would highly recommend Turing to someone who is serious about changing their life. It's not easy. In fact, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It's not that the curriculum and material are so challenging, it's more the pace of the learning and the fact that it's basically non-stop for 7 months. I started to feel the burnout about halfway through, but then I had to just keep moving forward to keep up. I had to make a ton of sacrifices like saying goodbye to exercising and my social life, and keeping up with anything non-Turing related was out of the question.

Fortunately for me, it was well worth the effort. Not only did I form amazing friendships with my cohort, but I landed a job within a few weeks after graduating. My new job is strict about work/life balance, has amazing benefits, more PTO and paid holidays than I knew was possible, and a starting salary that is above the market rate for a junior developer. It's the kind of job I knew existed but didn't have access to before Turing. And if that wasn't enough, my coworkers rave about the fundamentals that Turing teaches its developers. The school has an excellent reputation out in the tech world.

As for my time at Turing, the support I received from the staff and my fellow students was stellar. They offer free counseling, focus heavily on the community and student body, and do a pretty excellent job at making students feel at home. Students have 24/7 access to the building and facilities and there is a laptop included in the tuition so that everyone is geared for success. Like the title says, it really is a wonderful program.

I had a pretty bad experience with Turing, and now I'm in a ton of debt (40K) and my current . job has nothing to do with software or programming or tech in general. I'll try and be brief. You'll see plenty of positive reviews here, but what you don't see is what happened to people like me, and I'm not the only one. You SHOULD NOT go to Turing if you're looking to make a career change just for the money because you heard software development is lucrative and it takes a quarter of the time to become a developer as opposed to getting a computer science degree. Unless you already have experience in web development or software programming in general, I would not go to Turing, unless you a study for ONE YEAR ahead of time if you have no experience, trust me. They call it a boot camp for a reason. You will be getting information through 10 firehoses at once working 80 hour weeks. You will not have time for a full-time job or even a part-time job, FYI.

Below I will list advantages and disadvantages of going to Turing and the brutal job hunt aftwards. Turing was the hardest thing I've ever done, and in the end it did not work out for me. They cram way too much information into each module. If the program was longer and more time to absorb everything, it would be worth it. Be prepared to learn 3 - 4 years worth of learning into 6 months with pretty much no downtime. 

Another thing which I really don't like and wish they would change is, their admissions process is very misleading, and it's obviously to et a lot of regular people in to make money off of them. When I attended, their only requirement was to solve LSAT logic problems. There were no actual coding challenges, or things related to being proficient or have an aptitude for ACTUAL coding. It does not prepare you for what you will face when you are in the program, whatsoever. That is my biggest gripe.  

Most, not all, of the instructors are not very good. I failed back end mod 1 halfway through at the mid-mod exam, just 3 weeks in. I happened to know a guy who did the front end program who offered to mentor me so figured I would try it again. $2,500 dollars spent on half a module gone, what did I have to lose? Short answer: A LOT.  Barely passed Mod 1 front end, didn't pass mod 2 after giving it my all. Decided enough was enough and didn't want to keep wasting money on a loan I took out. Now I was $12,500 in debt plus an additional sum for cost of living. 

Not to mention, the MacBook's you get that are "brand new" are refurbished. Mine crapped out halfway through Mod 1 and I had to get it repaired out of pocket at a local repair shop which was beyond stressful not having a working computer during the program. Then, later in the year my screen crapped out and has a lot of distorition and distorted colors and is very hard to use, very annoying. Then I get an email from Apple saying my line of MacBooks had a recall! WTF?  Thanks Jeff. AT LEAST give us a working computer if we pay your very lucrative salary?!?! But I digress.

Turing does not guarantee you a job. They have job assistance. It's completely up to you. I would get as much real-world experience as you can, don't rely just on your Turing projects except for your capstone project. I have been looking for work for OVER A YEAR. Countless interviews, no luck. If you don't have at least 2 or 3 years of REAL WORLD experience with software and programming, other than your school projects, best of luck, you're gonna need it. Just know you are trying to get a job in a very competetive industry and with no real experience other than a bootcamp, you have a real uphill battle to face against computer science majors and plenty of developers job hopping all the time, who I think really control the job market. Unless you want to take a job in a terrible part of the country.

On the positive side, Turing is the best bootcamp and education you can get for software engineering. Some people are naturally good at the logic and programming in general. i was not and it ended up being a HUGE mistake. My current job is in sales, nothing to do with programming and just starting to pay off this bs debt. I regret ever going down the Turing path, total waste of time. Again, IF YOU ARE JUST LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT OF YOUR CURRENT CAREER PATH, AND AREN'T REALLY INTERESTED IN CODING OR PROGRAMMING, DO NOT GO TO TURING. There "Try Coding" weekend is NOTHING like what you will actually be doing. It's like learning how to say "Hello" and "Goodbye" in a foreign language, not actually learning everything about that foreign language. 

Think twice about going based on the reviews here. Do some research. Try coding for yourself, build a real project. Talk to developers. Talk to alumni, and talk to them about how brutally hard the program is, because it is. I would not lie about that. Hope this was helpful to someone.