UNC Charlotte Boot Camps

Like other reviewers have mentioned, this is a legitimately hard course. Depending on your background, this may be one of the harder educational ventures in your life. However, in my opinion, it is absolutely worth it. If you put in the time and effort, you will definitely come out of this program with the skills necessary to succeed in the marketplace. 

That being said, you must approach this program with the proper attitude. If you do the bare minimum, your chances of breaking into development post-graduation are slim. That may sound harsh, but it's the reality of the situation, and if you know this going in you are far more likely to succeed. The good news is, you are constantly surrounded by people who truly want to push you and help you to achieve your goals. TAs, instructors, and career services are committed to helping you every step of the way. I can honestly say this is one of the few times in education where I felt everyone in the organization went above and beyond in terms of guiding me.

So, is this course right for you? If you thrive on a challenge and know coding is the career path for you, then I would wholeheartedly recommend this program. 

In the fall of 2023, I had never even opened the terminal before.   After six short months, I have gone to developing full stack web applications.   As a college dropout, I was worried I would not be able to complete the bootcamp but thanks to a friendly and informative instructor as well as a well structured curriculum, I was able to tackle and overcome the harsh challenges presented and hold my head high as a graduate.   Now for the first time in years I can see a hopeful path forward for my future and the career I might be able to take, for that I can only say I am grateful to the full stack bootcamp of UNC Charlotte.

There are a ton of positives and negatives to the Full Stack Web Development coding bootcamp at UNC Charlotte. I will address both of these from my honest perspective as a full time student in hopes that it provides future students a true insight into what to expect as well as hopefully assist UNCC and Bootcamp Spot with improving the program.
My starting point for context:Prior to starting this course I had written ZERO lines of code. I didn’t do the pre-course work either, which honestly you should do. I am naturally a little above average at learning speed, so don't go into this thinking you can just breeze through it.
Overall Course Experience:I had a great experience with this course and I would highly recommend it to certain people. I do not think this course would be great for everyone. You need to truly have a passion for learning to code, A LOT of time to dedicate to learning outside of class, and be a decently fast learner. You have 20 hours of class time a week, and it’s suggested you need to put in 40 hours outside of class. That’s not an exaggeration, I was putting in close to 90 hours a week in the second and third month of the course. 
Instructors:I only have positive things to say here. Our instructor was Anthony Cooper and I cannot speak highly enough of him. He is a very experienced coder and understands the entire full stack for web development. He was incredibly relatable and approachable, which I find to be extremely important for an educator. He was so incredibly patient with every student that struggled and we all certainly had moments where we struggled. There was never a moment that I encountered a problem in my code that Anthony could not solve. He even tried to adapt his teaching styles for each student’s learning style, which is incredibly difficult. He went above and beyond to help any student even outside of class hours, including weekends. He is truly a brilliant individual and my class was so lucky to have him, and UNCC is equally lucky to have an amazing educator such as him.
Our Teaching Assistant was Maxwell Allee and again, I can’t say enough great things about them. Max was so much more than just a TA, they were basically a second instructor. Their knowledge was incredible and I do not think I could have completed this course without their help along with the help from Anthony. They were so incredibly passionate about coding that it was infectious, just speaking about code to Max got me amped to code even more frequently. I don’t know when they actually had time to have a personal life or sleep because they were always helping a student. A difficult part about getting help with coding is that you don’t know how to phrase the question for someone else to understand the situation, Max was exceptional at understanding what someone was asking and getting you to your solution without just giving you the answer. Max facilitated learning above all else. They also had to help students through personal issues that came up throughout the course, which takes a lot of compassion. I can’t speak for each student, but the consensus was that Max was incredibly understanding and helpful in those moments. UNCC was so lucky to have them as a TA for 2 years, and they’ll be lucky when they decide to hire them back as an instructor (Max has moved on to a corporate job right after our course ended).While Anthony and Max were both incredible individually, they were even better as a pair. Both are truly full stack developers, and understand the course work inside and out, however Anthony excels at front end development and Max excels at back end development. Their expertise brought so much to the class and gave different learning perspectives which helped so much since everyone learns differently. I do not believe it is possible for there to be a better teaching pair out there. I feel bad for prospective students because you will not have this pair of incredible educators. I wish I could more eloquently describe just how incredible these two were.
Student Success Manager:The SSM role in this course is basically the in between person between the students and the university. A student advocate in my experience. Ours was actually a substitute SSM, I believe she was on loan from another university, her name was Gemini Sanford. She may be the kindest most compassionate person I have ever met. In my dealings with her I can say I felt so incredibly comfortable, safe, and heard. She went above and beyond any normal expectations of an SSM, and without her I would not have completed this course. I’ve spoken to a lot of my classmates about this program prior to writing this, it’s not my place to say their personal and private issues that came up, I will say that every one I’ve talked to has only the highest praise for Gemini. She was always the most positive and excited person on presentation days, she genuinely cares about your growth and happiness. She helped so many of us through so many different issues, she is the ideal person for a job like this. I hope one day to be as good at anything as she is at her job. 
Curriculum:I am giving this 5 stars but I do have negatives to point out in this section.

Anthony Cooper did a wonderful job presenting the curriculum and it is well designed to take you from not knowing how to code to being able to make a fully dynamic web application. 

You will learn the MERN stack, please research what that is and the pros and cons to that stack vs other stacks. You will be learning javascript, it will be your programming language. You’re not going to learn Python, C#, or Ruby… etc. You’re not learning to make mobile apps, or video games (I did end up making browser based games though). 
The course is well designed to amp up along the path. It starts out slow teaching the basics like HTML and CSS. As you get into javascript it is designed to not overwhelm you by throwing you directly into something like React, each unit is a stepping stone to something further down the line. I feel like they taught us Handlebars just to make React a bit easier to comprehend. 
The curriculum is designed for the part time 24 week course, and this is where a lot of negatives come in. The full time course is the same curriculum but just the time cut in half (I don’t think they even change any wording, they refer to things being an odd or even week for homework when that makes no sense when you have 2 homework assignments per week not 1). Where this becomes a pretty noticeable problem is with homework. In the part time it’s pretty easy to just have it due on the same day each week. In the full time it ends up changing, and you typically have homework due one day after you finish the unit it’s related to. There were many homework assignments that I spent 20+ hours on, trying to do that within a day and a half is tough. Homework should be due the day you finish the following unit. 

There are no days built in for catch up if your class falls behind. Adding a day or two to the schedule and being more fluid to adjust the schedule would help a lot. Possibly even making it a 13 week course, I know this hurts the marketing and increases overhead but one additional week would really help the students.
The assessment for entry to the course is not very selective. This can become a problem if everyone isn’t dedicated and able to put in the extra time outside of class, they can slow down the entire class or not contribute to group projects. A more selective process for the full time course than the part time course would really be a great benefit. 
Job Assistance:I will say they have a lot of assistance for your resume building. They provide great feedback and have a lot of example material to assist you. That is about where my positives end for job assistance.
Their sales staff are incredible, and I say that with a ton of sales experience. They certainly built up their career services department in our discussions. They claim to have a ton of industry contacts which will help you get a job post graduation, I have not found that to be the case. They have a job board but no referral system. They build up events like demo days where you’re supposed to have interaction with potential employers, however the last one had maybe 2 companies there. 
Most of my interactions with their career services staff have been copy and paste emails where the person doesn’t even change the signature name.
Do not take this course with the expectation that they will find you a job or even be a big help in the endeavour. 
Where I am at currently:I can make any website my mind can think up. I can create a backend server with authentication, and databases. Probably the most valuable thing to employers, I can work with React which allows a much more dynamic web experience. I can’t believe how much I learned in 12 weeks.
Synopsis:If you truly have a desire to learn coding to advance your knowledge and begin your journey, this is a great course. You need to be able to put in over 60 hours a week though! I just hope you get as lucky as I did with my instructor, TA, and SSM. If you are thinking of taking this course because it’ll get you a job right after graduation, this might not be the course for you.

I am a Computer Engineer but I stayed away from software development for more than a decade. I was looking for training programs in data analysis to get adapted to current technologies and I found this Data Analytics Boot Camp at UNC Charlotte, which seemed very complete for my current needs.

 I have really enjoyed this Boot Camp because I have been able to recall concepts and of course I have learned many other aspects that I did not know. I love the fact that everything is explained incrementally, there are many helpful resources available, I can re-watch the class videos, and there is even job search advice.

My advice for other prospective students would be at least to attend all classes, ask many questions and do your homework on time. Apart from that, try to go beyond the scope of classes and assignments, go the extra-mile because this program gives us the tools to success.

This CyberSecurity boot camp was outstanding! I went into it knowing I loved the field (without any previous work experience in it) and grew even fonder of the subject throughout the course. I was notified of this course through a school email, and was very interested. As I had just been terminated early from a temporary position due to Covid, I knew I wanted to do something in my time and this turned out to be the perfect fit.
Our instructor, Aaron, was phenomenal. He is such a smart person, and has a very wholesome way of teaching material that it is very easy to absorb. He's funny and engaging and he felt more like a classmate than a teacher. By far my favorite aspect was getting to learn from him. The material was good, although at times it was tough. But throughout the whole course he was fantastic and never wavered from his helpfulness.
I have just 2 pieces of advice for anyone interested in a boot camp course. 1: network, network, network. Even just messaging your instructor, or classmates, or being engaged in class discussion can go a long way for making positive connections that can turn out to be some of the best. 2: as any former student would say, do your homework ASAP. Don't let it sneak up on you. If you start the homework sooner, you'll have more time if something goes wrong. This also allows your TA's plenty of time to grade your work.
Overall this whole course was nothing but the best experience all the way through and I'm so happy I did it, and was lucky enough to have the instructor and classmates that I did.

I joined this program because I wanted to gain technical skills in the finance industry. This program did just that for me. I started with no coding background and learned everything through the course. My instructor and TA were great. Those two were very knowledgeable and each had backgrounds that added a ton of value to my experience. The program is tough. So much material is covered and you may not intend to use all the skills they teach. I’d recommend only taking this course if you absolutely plan to follow through, invest the proper amount of time and be comfortable with not getting “it” right away. There is one on one tutoring available and the Student Success Manager was very accessible and responsive. I am currently working with the career services provided and it already has been very useful to me in learning how to gain an edge in the job search. Overall I had a great experience and gained a ton of value from the program.

If you want to explore and submerge yourself into a field of constant change, then Data Analytics is the field for you. We used real world examples to illustrate applicable computer languages and tools. The instructors went above and beyond, not only during class, but also outside of scheduled hours to help us understand topics or assignments. Along with the instructors, the student success manager sent us numerous resources to help us learn new material and understand the current job market. My instructors have properly prepared me for the job market and my inbox from recruiters proves it ha! However, I did not want to stop learning, I decided to continue my education in Analytics by starting graduate school this fall. 

I recently graduated from this course.  It is amazing.  It moves very quickly, and you will be doing in months what a traditional student would take years to learn.  Don't expect it to be like a normal class though.  You have to put in a lot of time and have to stay on top of things for the full class.  

I can't believe how much I have learned, and I have accomplished things that are beyond what I imagined possible in just three months.

I had Jeff Hoffman as my instructor.  He was amazing.  He is very patient and explains things in very accessible ways.  I highly recommend him as an instructor.

I really liked the curriculum.  They keep it up to date with what is best for the job market.  From time to time, there were small issues because of how frequently it is being changed, but they updated it quickly.

The job assistance is good.  They helped me by reviewing and giving actionable feedback on my resume.  I am not sure if I am going to get a job through their job assistance, but they have helped me become competitive in the employment maket.

I feel confident in the skills I have learned at this bootcamp and believe I will get a job soon.

I started in Data Analytics Boot Camp, and it was the first co-hort they taught on this subject. I have never coded before, except for occasional SQL, so this experience was brand new to me. The instructors were great, the pace was very fast, we learned pretty much new topic every class. For those of you looking to get ahead in Data Science industry, this is a pretty good jumping board (I was looking for something like this, when I wanted to get some coding exposure, and prepare for grad school). 

If you are worried about coding, don't be, majority of the students have not coded before either, but your confidence level will grow. Everyone understands that the class is for beginners, so they take (fast!) baby steps through the course. The materials are available after the course is over, so you can always read through them at your own pace.

Couple of things to be aware of:

-attendance in mandatory, though you get a few excused absences

-all lectures are recorded by the instructor, so if you have to leave, or just want to review, it will be there

-there are grades, but they measure only the progress in class, not whether or not you get the certificate (unless they are all 'incomplete' or below C)

-TAs are very helpful, they will walk around the classroom, and help as this is a hands-on class, you will code real time with everyone in the class

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience, though sometimes it was very frustrating personally, because I was not learning as fast as I wanted, it gave me a start at coding career, I was able to understand basic concepts. It won't teach you to become a full stack developer in six months, so the rest is up to you!

 

I had previously written a bad review on here and had it taken down myself after being approached by Trilogy.  I decided to try and be fair and wait it out until the end (I am 3 months in) and see if things got better.  Unfortunately, nothing has changed.  I know writing this review will most certainly put me in the negative spotlight (again) but I don’t care and I will not be taking this one down.  If I can save one person from wasting their money on this course, then I would consider it well worth it.  I must also point out that lots of these reviews were written by former students hired by Trilogy to be Teachers Assistants so take what they have to say with a grain of salt.

I will start by saying that this course is not equipped to deal with students with disabilities and doesn’t seem to care about their troubles in the course.  I can say this from personal experience, I am a disabled Marine with injuries sustained while in Afghanistan (sight, hearing, neck/back injuries).  After an incident in class involving a TA and other students that caused me great indignity, I complained and yes it was ignored.  I honestly don’t feel comfortable going to class anymore.

But personal feelings aside, this is just a bad course.  There is no homework review, so you really have no way of knowing if you are doing the assignment with the cleanest possible code or if it’s just a bunch of spaghetti code that hiring managers will laugh at (if you’re lucky enough to get an interview).  You can have a functioning App with the worst written code and still get an “A+”.  It wouldn’t take much effort to release the code via GitHub after the fact, so students could compare their code and know what the best practices/methods are.  The first few homework assignments were explained via a short YouTube video of what sounds like a stoner trying to explain the assignment in between bong hits while there is music playing in the background…. Yes, he really does have his radio on playing music while explaining the assignment.  Very unprofessional and hard to take seriously.

The “Career Services” department practices discrimination daily.  Its mind boggling how I paid the same amount of money as everyone else, yet I don’t have access to the same career workshops/classes/networking events that other students do.  It really isn’t fair that some students will be better equipped than others simply because Trilogy likes to pick winners and losers.  Lots of students are pretty much paying for their own disenfranchisement.  As far as I know, this is the only boot camp that does this.  I bring this up, but they already have my money so why should they care or make an attempt to be more inclusive?

Class size can be up to 60 students…. It can be overwhelming at times, very hard to concentrate with so many side conversations and thinking out loud going on.  I am so much more productive at home, which defeats the purpose of even going to class.  I see most bootcamps try to limit the class size to 20 students because this is a heavy subject and a proper learning environment is essential.  It makes this really feel like a diploma mill and high student turnover is the only objective. 

Very few free parking spaces at the UNCC center.  Budget out another few hundred dollars to cover the costs of parking.  There is a UNCC lot right next to the building, but a parking pass is not included in the large tuition we pay. 

Veterans do not take this course.  The GI Bill doesn’t cover it and Trilogy has no plans to go through the process of getting approved by the VA so veterans can use their GI Bill to attend.  I guess they don’t want to open themselves up to scrutiny.  Quite frankly, I don’t think Trilogy wants veterans taking their course.  The way my concerns and needs have been brushed aside just reinforces my arguments above.  There are many boot camps out there that accept the GI Bill.  Please investigate those.  I wish I knew about Code Platoon.

I will give credit where it is due and say the instructors are great.  But great teachers can only do so much, this is a problem with how the bean counters at Trilogy have structured the course, career services, learning environment, and curriculum.  Its like asking Tom Brady to lead a high school team to the Super Bowl.  

In closing, if you are on the fence about a career change or just learning how to code….. go elsewhere.  There are many great courses on Udemy that cost $10, Colt Steele has a complete Web Dev bootcamp and covers pretty much the same stuff this course does.  I’m trying hard to see the value in this Trilogy boot camp since a $10 Udemy course will help you build projects for your portfolio and you can just hire a resume writing company to write your resume for you (all for a lot less than the almost $10k for this boot camp).  Or shell out a little more $$ and go to a boot camp with a Career Services Dept that is committed to helping ALL students.  There are some bootcamps which actually get you internships after you graduate, unfortunately this isn’t one of them. 

 

**Note to Trilogy, please do not contact me.  I do not wish to discuss this further.  I will finish this course and take my worthless certificate and most likely go finish my degree or use my GI Bill to go to a real coding boot camp.  

I learned a lot through this program. The curriculum and teachers really allow anyone, with the motivation, to really succeed at learning how to create full stack applications. The course is really focused on web development, and once you complete the six months, you WILL have been given the information and ability to gain the skills needed to create web sites for any company from a start up to a Fortune 500 company. 

I would have liked the class to dive a little further in to the back end, but you learn enough grasp the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS, which you can take those basics and apply and grow in any direction that you want to grow. I think that is what I really appreciated from my teachers, I can take those basics and apply to any of the thousands of other frameworks and they will make sense. 

This is a very intensive class, that will take up more time then just the hours in the classroom. But if you were to apply your self, you will have the skills to work as a developer for almost any company.