Data Science Career Track

Trapping People into Joining: I joined Springboard DSC with lot of hopes to make a transition from my current role. There were very less reviews of Springboard India when I joined, now I realized that Springboard team deletes all the negative reviews for trapping people into this horrible course. I was misguided by the multiple promises made by the admission team during my enrollment.Course Content: Springboard charges Rs.1, 75,000 for the course. The course content doesn’t teach fundamentals which are very important in long run. Not even a 10% of the content is of Springboard’s own content. More than 60% of the course content is from YouTube and CS lectures which are available for free in the internet. For every topic, they redirect you to either YouTube or some articles in the internet. Most of the curriculum revolves around YouTube and Datacamp courses. Even after repeated feedback on the content, they never even tried to change anything in the content. The content should be thoroughly validated by any industry expert.Office Hours: This is a complete waste of one hour session. There is no thinking into conducting these sessions. These are only to attract new students by taking sessions on random topics. They don’t care about the understanding level of students.Support team: There are only two teaching assistants assigned to help all of the Springboard DSC students in India. Whenever someone approaches them with any doubt, they just share an article link without explaining much. Nobody validates the projects/assignments which will be submitted to Springboard as part of their curriculum. There will be no feedback on the projects done.Finally the Springboard management team, they will be calling continuously until you pay the fee, once the fee is paid. They don’t care whether you are doing the course or not.If you have any plans for learning Data Science course, then don’t join Springboard course in particular. There are lots of institutes offering better content at 1/100th of the amount Springboard charges.I Wish, I could get my money back. This post is only to save lot of Data Science enthusiasts from falling into this trap.

 Cons: Course-Fee-17,5000/-#SAY NO TO SPRINGBOARD1.Joined Springboard with a aspiration of becoming of data scientist but got totally fooled when i saw the curriculm and the way they are just taking materials from other Ed-tech websites and just serving us.2.Job gurantee and mentorship is totally very unorganised and very falsely implemented and not at all good .3.There are lot of false promises and many students who are completing the course are not at all satisfied with the course and curriculum and left unemplOyed4.This Course is not going to "CONVERT YOU A DATA SCIENTIST" as the curriculm is not well updated and not at all well structured5.They demand huge amount of money for this course which they get it from other edtech websites like khan academy,Datacamp and youtube videos which we can easily get it in small pay6.There cost weekly basis****** WHEN I ASKED FOR REFUND THIS CALCULATION THEY GAVE ME****Course Fee/Block Payment: Rs. 17,5000/-Course Duration (Weeks) - 32Per Week Amount - Rs. 5,469/-Duration of Student (Weeks) - 6 months = 24 weeksTotal Amount - 5469*24 = 1,31,250/-Total Deduction (round off) - 1,30,000/-Refund amount: 45,000/-***** THIS IS TO TOTALLY FRAUD AND BASELESS PRICE******7.Even nothing was transperent on offer letter about weekly cost and all,they are just fooling around people just to fill there pocket and looting people hard earn money*****OFFICE HOURS IS ANOTHER TWIST IN THE COURSE******-> HERE THEY SAY THAT WE HAVE INDUSTRY EXPERTS WHO WILL GUIDE AND YOU WILL LEARN FROM THEM.SO THE REALITY IS ONCE A WEEK SOME INDUSTRY EXPERT COMES TAKE A ONE HOUR SESSION ON ANY RANDOM TOPIC,FOR THEM IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT STUDENT UNDERSTANDING LEVEL IS AND TILL WHERE HE HAS COMPLETED HIS TOPICFOR EXAMPLE: "YOUR ARE IN FIRST UNIT AND THEY WILL TAKE SESSION ON 8 UNIT"-> THERE COURSE IS TOTALLY GOING TO BRING FRUSTRATION ON YOU MAINLY WHEN YOU ARE WORKING FULL TIME AND DOING THIS COURSE AND PRICE IS NOT AT ALL WORTH THE MONEY
CONCLUSION: PLEASE SAVE YOUR MONEY BECAUSE MARKET IS FULL OF FRAUD PEOPLE AND THEY WILL JUST PLAY WITH YOUR DREAM BY LOOTING YOU.#SAY NO TO SPRINGBOARD 

 ·       If you accept starting with Springboard be ready for  -- No job assistance(You will have to find job yourself) -- 6 months job guarantee is a liar. -- There are lots of unemployment Spring board alumni. -- 30 min mentor time once a week is not sufficient and satisfying.  ·       it’s not worth at all, simply i can say waste of your hard-earned money and waste of time as well. So called mentors will be not available as per the schedules and they don’t spend much time with the students in explaining their doubts or explaining the concept. ·       Next coming to so called office hours, coding support sessions it’s just for the name sake they fix up the sessions without even asking/discussing our availability time, i can they do as per their need. ·       They force you to enrol for the course by paying 1.95 Lakhs and they also provide you easy EMI/Loan by third party finance company, after your enrolment they don’t even care/bother about you concerns related to course. ·       Most imp thing is, they state you like 100%per job guarantee after the successful completion of your course in 6 months but the hard fact is you can’t complete the course within the stipulated time as they mentioned since you don’t get proper support from mentors/support team after your enrolment in any manner and course is not easy at all as they state you while enrolling. ·       Whenever you try to reach support team/student adviser to discuss your concerns they don’t pick your call many times and if they receive the call they just say will come back to you in few min/EOD or will solve within EOD but you don’t get any solutions on time or they try to convince you as per their needs. ·       whenever you try to raise your concerns regarding the course, you will get only one statement/answer like you are not attending sessions properly, not following the mentor instructions or you are not spending your time. They will never ever agree their mistakes and listen you concerns as well. ·       Most pathetic part - When you say i am not satisfied with the course or if you ask for the cancellation and your money back, they simply say we don’t have refund policy at all and they will again try to convince you to the fullest with the flashy words/statements. It’s like mental harassment. ·       My suggestions please don’t waste your hard money and time as well. ·       if you are interested to learn data science and to make career transition, we have many institute in Bangalore who offer data science course, ML, AI course with very minimum fee ranges like 15–45k with excellent course structure so please don’t get fool y enrolling Springboard. ·       All the videos/materials provided by springboard are available for free in YouTube. ·       When the entire course material is free resources why they are charging 1.95 Lakhs I don’t understand ·       Mentor ship (mentor call) is something they make as a star of the program. But you will get to interact with your mentor once in a week only for half an hour. ·       I never got a chance to discuss in detail with my mentor as there was a time constraint (mentor is be not available after 30min) ·       Springboard is not helpful at all, all they are doing now, are blaming the students. ·       Whatever the things/words which i explained above, it’s my pathetic experience and wasted money as well.   ·       Now for the curriculum. This was sadly most dissappointing. The course mainly revolves around data camp courses. And then these are supplemented by youtube lectures from Harvard or other institutions that would talk about the subject with the impression that you have intermediate knowledge of the subject matter, despite it being a beginners intro video to a concept. I have had much better success with the self study resources available on the internet, such as youtube tutorials etc. There was no feel of an actual boot camp teaching you, they basically link you to external sources that aren’t theirs.  ·       The whole curriculum is just stuff taken off of the internet or LinkedIn learning. Very little original content. A lot of the content can be found by just doing a basic Google search. Overall this course did not live up to its hype.  ·       I was told that these things do not matter and that you can easily land a job after you get both your projects done. I had done very detailed projects and posted them on github and did everything the career coaches suggested I do. Unfortunately, not a single data science position had reached out to me.   ·       The program is a complete waste of money and time, one more thing, right after I completed my course, got the certification, In certification also they made blunder mistakes they added advanced ML track concepts like time series Analysis and Recommendation systems which is not an part of my NLP track. 
  ·       They dont know how to deal with students in a cordial way, I will not recommend this to anyone who is serious about learning Datascience, you can find their course on youtube for free  ·       Frankly, I wish that I could get my money back.  ·       I recommend staying away from wasting your money with them.  ·       Don’t fall for false advertising.  ·       I definitely made a wrong decision by joining Springboard. 

 I was struggling to find a way to switch my career, until I noticed one of my friend with the similar background as mine, switched career successfully after completing career track with Springboard. Very intensive curriculum for zero background person, but in-depth knowledge and insights you will gain in the end. 

Great support system from mentors to advisors.

The pros:1. curated content from the best of platforms.2. a good support system in the form of 1:1 mentor, student advisor, career coach and TAs3. Online classrooom sessions from Industry experts.4. Content focused on market requirements5. Job guarantee

It was a well organized program that gave me the necessary skills to work in the field of Data Science. Everything from the mentor help to the videos and resources were mostly easy to understand and easy to put to use in practice. One thing that could've been better was putting emphasis on material that was more important in the field of data science that prospective companies are looking for those with that specific skillset. Overall I couldn't be happier and Springboard has been able to get me truly excited for the field of data science

It is a good course that gives you freedom to work whenever you can. Don't be fooled by the freedom. Get your time set aside each week. Do your job!The curriculum gives foundation to all aspects of data science. Also, big part of changing career is finding new people to meet with. The ideas in that part are very valuable.Working with mentor helped me understand the basics and the principles. I really appreciate the help of my mentor Branko Kovach.There should be more exercises in some parts. Particularly, some mini projects, where the code should be written by student entirely or parts of it.It was a good experience. I learned a lot.

I really enjoyed the program, and the mentor helped a lot during the whole time! I had an educational background in data science but I never had practical/industrial experiences before. Springboard's boot camp prepared me to be job-ready. Highly recommended for anyone who needs to gain experience as a real data scientist.

Joining Springboard was the best decision I ever made. It has a well structured curriculum and you are guided by the mentors and the career coaches in every step of the way. You need to be at a certain threshold with coding, statistics and Data science to get the most of this boot camp. The curriculum has to be followed up with research and self learning. 

I enrolled in the Data Science Career Track prep course as well as the main course for a combined curriculum of 8 months. I thought the prep course was very helpful as I did not have any coding experience. The prep course did a nice job of introducing me to Python and getting me ready for the main course. I was able to complete the main course in six months; however, it is a lot of content and most people need a two month extension (which is included in the price). The content is very user friendly and helpful but can be extensive. I tried to stick to the 10-20 hours of coursework weekly to ensure I stayed on track. The course consists of two capstone projects, which are used in your portfolio, and this is where a lot of the technical skill is applied. I found the capstones challenging and enjoyable and felt as though they really helped me to understand the course material. The statistics section of the course could be better formatted and with more user friendly material. I did not think it was easy to grasp and would have enjoyed something more finished. I also would have enjoyed some cheat sheets or reference guides. They had provided those in the prep course, and I found them very helpful to refer to. I really enjoyed the mentor relationship and felt it was super helpful in keeping me accountable. I met with my mentor every week and was nice to have someone for questions or concerns. 

The Data Science Career Track Bootcamp offered a comprehensive curriculum, which covers a wide range of topics in Data Science. The mentor system is also very useful. Capstone projects provide a unique experience similar to building a data science project from a problem statement to a final product. The only con I would mention is the specialization is a one-time choice. It would be great if they could offer a 1-week or so review period to make that decision.

If you accept starting with Springboard be ready for -- No job assistance(You will have to find job yourself)-- 6 months job guarantee is a liar.-- There are lots of unemployment SP alumni.-- 30 min mentor time once a week is not sufficient and satisfying. 

The pros of this course are as follows:1) Well organized set of curriculum to take you from 0 knowledge to an entry level data scientist.2) Mentors are very helpful as they are experienced data science professionals.3) Great value for the cost of course.4) Challenges you throughout the course. Thoroughly enjoyed the neural network specialization.The cons are:1) I had a challenge finding detailed knowledge within organization for signal processing (FFT, DWT, …)2) Career counseling became overwhelmed with the number of students and could not meet demand for a few months. It was corrected however.3) If you don't live in the right areas of US, job guarantee is not there. Counselors do help you after you graduate though.This is neither a pro or con, but be prepared to do a lot of research outside of the curriculum if you want to do this right. I would say 35% of my work was doing research outside of the classes.

 Springboard Review 
Positives:  ·        Mentorship  By far the biggest strength of Springboard, so big that others have copied it. My mentor was just the person I had craved for a long time in my educational career: smart, good people skills, and accountable. I learned as much from him as I did in my Master’s program. The 30 minutes a week were invaluable and gave me insights I would not have found on my own.  ·        Curriculum  For the most part, the curriculum is very good. It’s a combination of online resources Springboard doesn’t create themselves, but if I had to learn data science all over again, I would rather learn from these resources than random Google searches. Save the Google searches for the projects, where most of the learning comes from anyway. The curriculum is also more up-to-date than an in-person program. The projects stretched me to my limits, and I came out a much better data scientist because of it.  ·        Course Support  There has been an increase in course support over my time at Springboard. There is an option to have an additional mentorship meeting with a different mentor just to work on non-Capstone projects. Springboard also hosts an annual conference at their headquarters that is worth attending if you are a student.  Negatives:  ·        Job Support  Springboard is by no means a silver bullet to a dream data science job, but it’s close. You have to put in the work to landing a job to get that job afterwards. I found there were times where the career advisors were booked months in advance, but they seemed to have hired new staff. I have no doubt if you complete the course in six months that you would be ready for a DS role, but it’s an intense six months.  ·        Completion Time  I took much longer than expected and was given extensions to finish. This was more a human error than a Springboard error, and if I felt mentally the way I do now compared to when I started Springboard, I could have easily finished in the allotted time. Just be careful with grandiose capstone projects.  ·        Feedback  Outside of my mentor, I found feedback tough to get when handing in coursework.   Overall: Great experience, would do again. The positives are fixable and far outweigh the negatives and I found it paid for itself in salary raises, even with the extensions. This is the direction education is going, and I look forward to watching what Springboard does next. 

Springboard's Data Science Career Track includes an extensive curated course plan made credible by expert mentors - but be prepared to be frustrated.. Springboard's Data Science Career Track is comprehensive, including: paid and free interactive courses, lectures, multiple assignments to submit and a great administrative staff. It is not only Python, but some UNIX, some Git, some SQL, some Pyspark, sort of everything you need to operate as a data scientist. This is a double edged sword because you learned how to do something, applied it for the next segment, but would go weeks without having practiced it. I spent a lot of time referring back which was frustrating.  The most frustrating aspect for me was for most of the mini-projects, the assignments would ask you to use either new concepts/code or use functions/methods/attributes that were not emphasized in the interactive lessons. I again spent a lot of time referring back, combing through my notes, only to discover, it was not covered or not sufficiently. Perhaps, this would not be an issue if you had some previous skill with Python or a lower level language. (My previous language was R.) I spent far more time than the curriculum said – either taking notes or referring back to them. The one thing that can make or break your experience is your assigned mentor. (And by the way, I would have never persisted through the frustration without a good mentor.) I spent the first 5-6 weeks with a mentor who was not a good fit. This set me back for the first half of the course. I ended up changing my data set for the first capstone project after I had been working on it for three months. Luckily, my second mentor was extremely helpful, accessible and an expert. When I changed data sets, things started to come together. I also started to use more of the resources that Springboard provides - the on-call mentor and the TAs.  I could not get much out of the community chat because even within my cohort there was a different pace. The career track means data science as a career. The career mentors were focused on getting jobs for data scientist or data analyst titles. I found out a few months into the track that I didn't really want to be an entry level data scientist. I have had 20 years of experience in public policy. I still want to craft and implement policy while having the skills to describe, predict with and visualize the data.

I had great experience with mentor and creating two capstone projects to explore Data science skills.

When I was in University, I studied computer science but I did not know how I wanted to apply it. I first heard about data science through some friends who were in the field, and I was interested in changing career paths. The thing I really wanted in a bootcamp was a thorough curriculum, which is what I got through Springboard. Not only did I feel like I learned a lot, but the selling point for me was the one-on-one mentorship I received each week and the capstone projects that I got to create through Springboard. The relationship I developed with an expert in the field along with the consistent guidance I received when I needed help understanding difficult concepts helped me succeed, and I would highly recommend Springboard to anyone looking to start their career in data science.

Highly effective Data Science Bootcamp

This course is great for the independent learner. Lessons are completed online at your own pace.You have weekly 1:1 skype calls with a mentor who is a data scientist. They provide advice and technical assistance, and this is extremely helpful throughout the course.There is also a community page where you can post and connect with other students and discuss your projects, technical questions, or career search opportunities.You have career coaching calls to plan networking, work on your resume, and provide 4 mock interviews to practice, and these really help prepare you to find a job.This course is highly recommended, especially with the money back job guarantee!