App Academy

I was struggling horribly to learn code from sites like Youtube and Udemy while having a full time job, it just wasn't working out. I NEEDED a change. I heard that App Academy is considered the top coding bootcamp in the states so I applied. After a rigorous amount of work and interviews I had finally got accepted! By this time I was ALREADY pumped up and fully immersed in the coding world from the PRE course called JUMPSTART. I have never learned so much in 4 months in my life. I have made long lasting friendships, my first video game, a full stack application and so so much progress with languages and libraries such as javascript, ruby, react, etc. I will never forget my time at App Academy. What a rewarding and worthwhile experience!

Pros:- Great TAs to help you along the way
- Daily projects to practice the concepts you learn
- Three major projects for your portfolio towards the end of the course
- They are honest when they say 'expect to work 80-90+ hours a week'.

Cons:
- They move through the material really fast and it always feels like you never completely learn everything
- There are weekly assessments - two fails result in a dismissal, which adds a lot of stress in addition to the course load


I did feel fulfilled and satisfied by the overwhelming topics that we have to read and understand because it is also probably one of the few way we could improve ourselves rapidly

In theory, app Academy doesn't provide you with anything you can't otherwise get for free to land a job as a software engineer. They do provide things that make it a lot easier. They provide job support: coaches that will meet with you to debug your projects, slack channels with people who will help you debug, connections to partnership companies, but most importantly: motivation and direction. It's possible that you are perfectly motivated all by yourself, in which case skip a coding bootcamp such as aA. If you're anything like me though, app Academy gives you all of the directions, you follow them, and eventually you have a job in software engineering. They give you deadlines during the curriculum and are always over your shoulder making sure you apply to jobs during the job search. You are with a cohort, who is both your emotional support system and competition, the perfect recipe for motivation. Feel free to skip app Acedemy if you can cultivate these qualities yourself. If not, it's worth joining.

App Academy is hard. It's stressful. There's long hours, longer days, and longer weeks. But what do you expect? Do you think that a course that can change your life, put you on a path for a real high paying, rewarding career would be easy? I didn't know if I could do it. Somehow when the course started, I just never backed down. I put in the effort and came out the other side a full fledged Software Engineer. I couldn't recommend this more to anyone who wants a fresh start. To anyone who wants to put their life on track. App Academy changed my life and with some effort, it could change yours.

App Academy is no joke when it comes to how hard the program is. I've seen reviews before I joined that mentioned how your life during the program will basically only consist of eat, breathe, and sleep coding. And honestly it pretty much did feel like that. However, if you've got the drive and will to pick up coding skills in a short amount of time, you're not going to really mind it too much. All this to say, that I feel the reward was certainly worth the challenge. Nothing felt more rewarding than finally understanding a concept, passing a test, or getting over an insurmountable blocker during a project. For the short time that you spend here, you definitely pick up a whole lot of knowledge. For me personally, I never would have gotten this far on my own within 6 months time and I have App Academy to thank for that. Everyone from the staff to the cohort-mates were amazing and supportive. If you're hesitant on joining but you know you've been wanting to get into coding for a while, I'd say just do it. I haven't regretted my decision ever since. 

I have attended 16weeks program and recently graduated. It is fast-paced study environment, you need to spend at least 70-80 hours per week to avoid failing from the courses. Even though, TAs help you really well with keeping up your environment, and gives you motivations too. I definitely recommend it for your good future career, because they even helping you out during job search. You can get good advices not even just for your documentation but also for your upcoming interview until you get a job. 

I attended the 16-week program. It was a fast-paced environment and pretty easy to fall behind if you weren't committed to around 60-80 hours a week. It starts off pretty easy, but there are measurable increases in the pace and difficulty every two-three weeks. If you're thinking about doing this Bootcamp, I'd recommend finding a group as early as possible. It's easy to feel behind if you isolate yourself, but in a group, you realize most people are at or around the same level. Additionally, my peers helped make up the knowledge gap.

Even if you're just slightly interested in getting into coding, App Academy does a great job of really introducing you to everything you need to be a full-stack developer. Not only that but their deferred payment model helps alleviate a lot of the financial burden that you would experience with other bootcamps, where you only start paying after you land your first job. There are some pros and cons here and there though:

Pros-

- Super supportive staff who really just want to see you succeed and make the bootcamp feel less pressuring

- You get to meet a ton of new people here who are relatively in the same position as you or have the same interest

- Instructors are also super lenient as long as you're forthcoming with your circumstances. While there are specific check-in times, if you've experienced an accident and don't have the time to, as long as you let them know ASAP they're really understanding about your situations.

Cons-

- There is a lot of content on the platform that needs to be updated/changed. Some of the modules we skipped over projects because they didn't want us doing them or typos in the curriculum

My only tip for anyone interested in this program is, don't half-ass the program. You're going to end up paying for it both financially and academically if you don't give the program your all. It's an intense program and rightfully so because of the amount of content you need to fit into your brain to compete with recent 4-year college graduates. But again, there is so much support from the staff that if you don't get something, never be afraid to ask for another explanation, maybe from another instructor. 

App Academy was quite the experience. It was a lot to take on, and at times didn't feel manageable. It took a lot of extra time for me to feel comfortable with everything. I put in a lot of extra hours and a lot of effort to keep up with everything. If you learn quickly and do well teaching yourself then this is the course for you. There were times later in the program where help from instructors was a little lacking, not only did it seem that they didn't have all the answers but that they didn't have the time to help either. It is a fast paced program so I think the problem lies in the fact that we are hungry and plentiful and there just isn't enough time for it all to be possible. I would definitely recommend the program, just make sure you make friends and get a group of supporters together during the bootcamp.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I enrolled in App Academy, but it ended up being one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences in my life. The instructional staff for the most part was top-notch, though near the end of the course a few instructors gave the impression they would rather be anywhere but there. By and large, though, the staff were always friendly and helpful and would usually go out of their way to find resources to further explain some of the harder concepts. The curriculum itself is intense and does not stop.  There were little if any opportunities to not give it 100% throughout the 24-week online course. The use of spaced repetition throughout the course would often give glimmers of hope as I would somehow be able to recall and apply a concept that absolutely baffled me a few weeks earlier. Coming out of the course I am quite confident in my abilities as a software developer.  If you're looking to kickstart your career and are driven to succeed I would consider this program.  The pros far outweigh the cons and if you're willing to put in the work, you walk away with the potential of earning 6 figures right out the gate. 

I can't say enough about this program. I went in confident in myself, but not confident in what I could offer a future employer. I was always nervous about what to say during an interview and what would impress the interviewers. Now I have viable skills that are in demand and that pays well. I would first say, that anyone thinking about attending this boot camp should enjoy solving problems, and shouldn't get so frustrated that you stop trying to solve them. This program takes perseverance and a strong will and the ability to work well with others, because I promise you, getting through the program with cohort mates is what makes it all possible in my opinion. Being able to talk about the topics we learned and hear them repeated back to us through study groups helped me feel really confident in the material right away. If you've thought about a coding boot camp or have a knack for solving problems and are dedicated to honing that skill, trust that App Academy will give teach you how to become a full stack engineer and break into the competitive job market.

I was here 7 months ago, in a very similar situation and you probably are. I looked up the best Online Bootcamps and the name App Academy kept coming up. I decided to look for into it, into reviews people had left, and did general research on it for weeks. After speaking with a few alumni, I decided to take the plunge! I absolutely loved it! It was a very fun and intense course! I know so much more than I did 6 months ago, I cant even describe it. If you are on the edge, I 100% recommend App Academy! If you have any burning questions feel free to look me up on LinkedIn and I will do my best to answer any questions, pay it forward and what not!

I recently graduated from App Academy’s 24 week online program, and it was fantastic! The curriculum was informative, the instructors and TAs were knowledgeable and friendly, and the culture of my cohort was great!! I now understand so much more about web applications and how the internet works, and I have gained experience working on full-stack projects. I’m currently in the process of working with the career services / post-graduation side of App Academy, and I appreciate that their instruction and provided materials continue on past the technical learning portion of the program - they don’t just throw you out after graduation! My experience with App Academy has been amazing, and I highly recommend them!

The experience was great, I'm already getting bites for multiple interviews a week after graduation.

It would be unfit for me to say that this wasn't in part due to my previous engineering experience in the Mechanical Engineer field.
The average span from graduation to a job offer is 6 months and many of my fellow graduates with no prior work experience are still struggling to get interviews.

Nevertheless, App Academy does a great job of guiding their graduates with the best job search practices, and even finds internal referrals with partnering companies a couple of times per week.

With the ISA Plan, they dony get their money until you do, that is what ultimately convinced me to choose them as my coding camp and it haws not failed me to this day.

I know there are a lot of reviews here that speak to the curriculum, work, hours needed, and tools used by App Academy to teach their curriculum. In a nutshell... The program is amazing. The work is hard. There is never enough time. You’ll meet amazing people and build an awesome network.  The TAs are what you are really paying for and are great. The intent behind their propriety tools (that are a WIP) can be clearly seen and it’s got a bright future. The online course is best for individuals that have other responsibilities and being in person has the added value of others being in the room to help motivate you to get the work done.

The only thing I will harp on is that their current communication tools used for peer and TA chats are in rough shape. The folks who started the program didn’t know how big it would get and initially invested in Slack… which if you ask any current employee at a/A is the bane of their App Academy existence. Because a/A leaves their Slack channel open to Alumni (great intent!), the amount of users has grown to a point where it wouldn’t make financial sense to pay monthly per user (didn’t think about scale from the get go). From a business perspective, I agree that it would be a poor decision to pay monthly and it’s a band aid solution for now… but from a student perspective this was one of the biggest resource failures in the course as I have no history of chats from TAs or colleagues from as little as just 3 days ago. I understand the current situation and I also implore App Academy to find a more permanent solution ASAP. Having gone through the course and used many different comm tools in my career… I can’t tell you  how many question threads were posted in Slack… and if it’s one thing slack is terrible at it’s threading conversations. 

All that being said… I’ll focus on the Parent perspective below. 

Firstly… parents take the one online course. It the only option that gives you the flexibility to be with your family if an emergency arises.  I’ll also say that if you are a single parent with 100% physical custody and don’t have support to help watch your children… this program is probably not for you. Emphasis on ‘single parent’ and the requirements needed to be the superhuman you already are. There is a high probability that you will fail out of the program or stretch yourself too thin to be able to take care of, let alone spend time with your kid(s).  

IMO you will NEED support from your partner/support network for childcare. In fact, I’d start budgeting for the best “Thank You” gift you can think of before you even start the program. The balance is critical and allows for you to complete the program and spend quality time with your kids.

If you have a partner in house to help… I’d be very clear about setting the expectation that they will become the primary caregiver, with you seeing your kids for meals and weekends. Did I mention you’re going to have to REALLY say thank you to your partner for helping out as much as he/she will? 

If you have a joint custody agreement… I advise trying to switch to a schedule where you get your kids on Friday and Saturday only. Saturday is the only day of the week where NOTHING is App Academy related. On Sundays you’ll be studying for your assessments. 

To end on a brighter note… I’m proof that it could be done. I had my kiddo on Thursday Night, Friday Morning and Night, and Saturday Morning… and it was doable. Barely… but doable. In fact, I had to project defer over Spring Break (which happens to coincidentally have been my project week) so that I would be able to show up for my family. Parenting and doing this program definitely tops the list of one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do.

There’s also a great a/A Parent group that’s really helpful for support. They meet every two weeks or so. I highly suggest joining and even more so, suggest practicing to reach out to these peers because they are the only ones who can truly understand what it means to be a parent. 

Hope all that helps! In the end, I DO recommend App Academy. My gut says that it will only get better as they learn and time goes on. Good luck!