UT Austin Boot Camps

I signed up for the Graduate Learning Certificate Program through UT Austin for AI / Machine Learning and it has been a very frustrating experience. The materials have not been up-to-date, the mentor through the first 1/2 of the program was barely understandable, and now they have extended the program end date from mid-Dec to mid-Jan. In addition, they micro manage you by forcing you to attend a Saturday class weekly at 9:00 am in order to get credit for it, even though it is recorded and could easily be watched later for credit. PGP-AIML-BA-UTA is the name of the program.

I attended the Cyber Security bootcamp at UT Austin. I had a great experience overall. I worked full time, and I found that part-time was not too bad to handle. I enjoyed what we learned curriculum-wise. I would have liked to learn more hands-on, current technologies in the Forensics unit. I really enjoyed the projects we did, however, I would have liked a little bit more diversity in the topics. For instance, instead of doing another red team vs blue team project, a forensics project would have exposed me to the tools a little more.

I learned valuable information in this course that I could use in a real-world setting. We used what we learned in the class and applied it to numerous assignments versus memorizing material and being graded, which helped significantly retain what I learned.  

 The Instructor and TAs selected to lead this course couldn't have been better. Their backgrounds tied in well and provided different avenues of digital marketing. They offered lots of great resources to reinforce the course material. And if they didn't know the answer to the questions, they would research an answer. 

The overall program is very good – I have gained a tremendous amount of new information and skills; my projects were well rated – I believe it was excellent achievements.

I would like to thank – the excellent instructors and the TA community and all the program staff.  All Very helpful and trying to make life easy!

The reason I came back to write a review, I used this website to make my decision to attend this program. I feel now I am responsible to write about my experience. I hope you find this good for both the school and the future students.     

Please do not take me wrong – the course is good but I believe few things need improvements: -

The program covers a lot in a short time – in many cases just high-level exposure is presented!

The program needs to focus more on the analytical side than the web dev side.  

The program for example uses time (full one week) to teach basics of MS-excel in the beginning of the course – which is not necessary (and could be done as a homework assignment if students need it) and instead the time could be invested to make other subjects stronger.  

The program, for one week, covers R Lang– which is not enough and no time for R in this class and we did not use it to do real analytics – Python, which is good and well presented in the program, was the main programing language– So, instead this part, the R Lang part, should be eliminated and the week should be given to make other parts of the course more stronger e.g. machine learning or even the JavaS etc..   

Carto is an example of something needs to be eliminated no need for that.  

3 group projects are way too much – I think one or max 2 group projects are more than enough!

Some people benefit from group projects some DONT – instead, the time of at least one group project should be given to students to choose to make a standalone – projects or more real-life examples to strengthen the skills covered in classes.

The program focuses more on the tools and skills rather than the real analytics – for example the program does not cover enough statistics or very little! The class should focuses more on getting information from data..     

Finally, the program promised:

Access to prospective employers – but I have not seen that or very little.  

Also promised industry projects but I have not seen that as well or very little.

The career services are very conventional – just the normal stuff e.g. resume, interview techs etc...

You are on your own in finding a job

 

Please take the above as a positive feedback for future improvements! And a sound decision to attend the class

Overall Thanks for the help, and I believe it is was a good step from my side towards a data analytics career 

Did I really just pay 10K for a review class? Because that's exactly what it seems like.

  This is an honest review: SAVE YOUR MONEY! Apologies in advance for the poor formatting!    Teaching: The teacher is less a teacher and more of a ~facilitator. Facilitator in the sense that he was doing less teaching and more facilitating of slides/ giving out assignments. The guidance was sub-par, to say the least.   -Often times the teacher wouldn’t show up on time for class when us students were out with our computers open ready to learn. How can you expect us students to come ready on time to learn and the professor shows up late… I mean that's totally demotivating.    -The teacher would rush through demos and not explain the solutions in depth or at all for that matter! When asked a question he barely knew the information himself, I might add that the TA seemed to know a bunch more than the teacher himself and also seemed to put in much more effort in supporting struggling students.   For example, When a student asked a question the teacher would often stumble to find an answer and say he’s gonna get back to you at a later point with the answer but rarely have I ever seen him follow up with an answer, he just doesn’t get back to you…. that shows lack of initiative and lack of care.   Above all, I felt as though the teacher failed to show genuine care as to helping us master these skills. It seemed as though he was just rushing through demos and examples without full in-depth explanations.   Class:   There are a lot of days when the whole class was us choosing a group to work with and working on one problem the whole day, not going over it until the last 20 minutes of class or even the next day! From my calculations, we are paying a couple hundred bucks a day for class… I understand working with others is a skill to develop but I didn’t get much out of this.. especially when the correct ways to do things/ the answers are not properly gone over with in-depth explanations/ adequate time... I felt like I was paying to get assigned a coding problem and then just solve it with classmates who didn’t know much more then I did so we didn’t get very far or take away much.   I genuinely feel robbed out of my hard earned money, on top of student loans I now have 10K more of debt…and for what? A disorganized curriculum with a professor that is always in a hurry to leave class and does not care about the students? A $15 Udemy course is FAR more valuable than this whole course. HANDS DOWN.    Support: The support services are sub-par, it's quite funny how they can even be called support services! It's a marketing ploy to make the course look more attractive. There aren’t any properly trained tutors… the tutors are students that are either in the course or have completed the course.  The career services support is a total joke as well…. There is a saturation of developers and its very difficult to get a job, going to a boot camp does not make you any more attractive to employers at all.  I wish the staff and people, in general, took the thousands of dollars students spend on boot camps and education more seriously, as we don't really have the thousands of dollars because most of all of us are already buried in loans of all kinds *~especially from education.   I hope I shined some light for all of you…. Again this is my honest review and it's how I felt about the course, I’m sure others feel differently but I wanted to express my take as well.    Thanks for reading!   TL;DR Heed this advice and save your money! The University of Texas at Austin barely has anything to do with this course it's actually done by Trilogy Education, so don’t get fooled about that because you can’t even take advantage of UT Austin resources. Go to Udemy or any other online course and work through it yourself, it's a far better (and cheaper) investment and you will be thankful. I just wish I had taken this advice before I shelled out so much money, but I was lured and partly skewed by reviews here on this site, so I wanted to give my take on it so maybe I can save some people in the future from falling into the trap I fell into. 

it is extremely difficult to articulate how bad this bootcamp actually is. it is not for a lack of words or vocabulary, but it is difficult to get past the feelings of being cheated, scammed and otherwise disappointed. i originally wrote an extremely long review but i have now condensed it to a critique of the 3 promises i was given before joining:

1. instruction & guidance : the main thing i wanted/expected from this course was instruction in what is modern web development and its best practices. what i got was a clueless instructor who clearly does not know what modern web development is. the curriculum is developed (and the course is run) by a company named trilogy. it really has nothing to do with UT Austin but rather is sold on UT Austin's reputation. do not be deceived. the instructor basically read powerpoint slides to us in class and made it excruciatingly clear that he did not prepare before class one bit. what made things worse is that the instructor fumbled through every single lecture and could not answer questions intelligently or accurately. it was frustrating and infuriating to say the least. i was hoping for someone to tell me more than what i could find on youtube or blogposts. what i got instead was a joke of an instructor reading slides… not teaching. want some examples of the poor instruction and guidance? gladly…

   • 3 weeks in i asked the instructor why we use parentheses on some javascript methods and not others, such as 'length.' he said i can add them to length, as in lenght(), and it will work. i was immediately given an error as length() is not valid.

   • i didn't get any of my javascript homework graded until about half-way through the course. so much for feedback. and when it was graded, my feedback consisted of "you should comment your code." but nothing in terms of actual javascript best practices, language proficiency, or content mastery. the last of my homework assignments that was graded (which was due oct. 29 2016) was graded on nov 26, 2016. there were 5 more assignments due after that, none of which were looked at by any instructor, TA, or employee of trilogy.

   • a couple weeks before our final project was due (which was a MERN project - mongodb, expressjs, reactjs, and nodejs) all instruction was over. we had not been instructed, however, in how to actually write a full MERN app or deploy it. in class, we used Heroku for deploying and hosting our apps. so one of my team members asked a TA (the resident ReactJS expert) how to successfuly deploy our app. the TA responded with “I don’t know. I don’t deploy to Heroku. If you get an error I would see what the problem is and just fix it." starting to see the picture? feels like nobody cared once they had my money.

2. career assistance: wow. this was the exact opposite of everything i was sold on. the majority of visits we had were from recruitment companies. anyone can get with these people. just join linkedin. they'll contact you like crazy. or fill out a form at any of their websites. it was an embarrassment that they had recruiters come to class. and it was insulting because, in essence, they (the recruiters) came to sell their services. i thought that was what i was paying for… for the course to actively help in career advice and search. what i was initially told was that they had a bunch of companies as partners who would come out to meet us and give us a chance to present ourselves to them. and that couldn't be further from the truth. our career assistance 'guru' was anything but. i found out last month that my family and i have to relocate out of state, so i asked our career assistance 'guru' if she knew if any of the companies coming to our 'demo day' hire remote workers. her response was for me to search craigslist. craigslist… that was the response. i have a screenshot of the slack conversation to prove it, if you really want to see it. craigslist. i paid money for this? you shouldn't.

3. curriculum: that was the only decent thing but it could use some updating. and it would be better if they hired actual web developers to teach it. otherwise, it's as good as codeacademy.

DO NOT waste your time and money on this awful program. i feel cheated and robbed so please learn from my mistake. if you really are interested in joining a bootcamp, my suggestion would be to seek out 'graduates' and instructors and talk to/email them; ask if you could sit in on a class to evaluate the program; join http://freecodecamp.com/ and follow it to the letter. you'll get as good, if not better, instruction than this terrible bootcamp.

please understand that i put a ridiculous amount of hours and a lot of hard work into the program. and i really did learn quite a bit. but i learned DESPITE this program. not because of it. they did let us know on the first day of class that we are expected to put in a lot of time outside of the program. so i was prepared to do just that. i just didn't expect to or think i'd have to teach myself everything.

the only two things that kept this experience from being 100% suck:

1. i met a few great people with whom i hope to continue coding and collaborating.

2. one TA, Alex Girodano. if trilogy wises up, they will hire him to be an instructor and possibly make themselves look good. because right now, i will tell everyone to steer clear of trilogy and the coding bootcamp at UT Austin. a total rip-off.

My biggest hesitation on recommending this course is the lack of qualified instructors. I was surprised to learn that the course actually has no connection to UT, it is designed and run by a company called Trilogy Education Services. So any associations you may want to attach to UT and it’s educational standards are misleading. The instructors for these courses have no education training so there is a complete lack of pedagogy, and when things get difficult to explain, which they do often, instructors are unable to break down the complexity and explain things in a way the class can understand. The curriculum is pre-written and instructors read off powerpoint slides word for word. Which results in the instructors not having a complete grasp on the concepts and lessons trying to be taught. The homework assignment are not real world examples, we had to make lots of games. Which can be difficult to code, but I was told I would learn real world examples of how to code. What I have told everyone who asked if they should take this course is NO. If I were to do it over, I would spend about 6 months learning HTML/CSS and as much Javascript as I could online or from books. After you have these fundamentals, I would take a course like this, but not a full-stack course. I would take a front-end course, or a back-end course and actually get good at something. If you are serious about your education and your investment, visit a class and sit through a teaching session, be critical, and try your best to talk to students and get their honest feedback. Sadly I feel like I wasted my money on this course. I expected a course UT would indorse to be better.