Bloom Institute of Technology

**I attended Lambda from early 2019 to early 2020. I didn't experience the recent changes**

My experience with Lambda School was an extremely positive one, I had some basic coding experience before I started but that didn't matter because they teach you things from the ground up and build you with projects and support. I had TL (Team Lead) who was always there for me and several other students, that helped a lot because I could ask him any question related to the course. 

The support, the curriculum, and the instructors were great. 

I failed like 5 times. I kept thinking it was me. I was putting in many extra hours and dropped to part timer so I could study more during the day. You only got access to an aid if you were the first one to approach them. Otherwise they would be caught up helping in student. Eventually the aids were one unit ahead of me. They changed ever four weeks. I wasted two years. And now I have to prove that my income is not tech related because they are charging me $6k. I work as a mover and a second job as a bartender. They want my offer letters or job description in company letterhead. I’m a MOVER and a BARTENDER. (Note: I have a college degree and graduated with a double major in Film and Philosophy with a cumulative 3.2- I’m not a bad student).

I really enjoyed my time at Lambda School. The community is full of caring people that really want to see their students succeed in making their dreams come true. Be prepared to work hard and work overtime on many occasions. But if you have the desire and are willing to put in the effort you will make it happen. Overall, the curriculum is thorough, but can use some improvements in some area. With that said, Lambda is always looking to improve their curriculum. At the time of me writing this, I  received and accepted an job offer as a ML engineer at one of the biggest companies is in the US. So I am happy. I will always be thankful to the Lambda community for their care, effort and determination. Really life changing. 

I am a recent graduate of Lambda Schools Full Stack Web Development Course. As of two days ago, I had two job offers almost a year from the date of starting my course, and my life is forever changed. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has the determination to change their stars.

Let me explain, I was a computer science major for about 2.5 years before dropping out. I had to pay for some additional expenses and life got away from me. I was never hurting for money and despite my unfinished degree, I had been a General Manager and eventually Director of Operations at a water park making $30 per hour and after that, I had been an API support engineer making $67500 per year at a tech start-up. When COVID hit, I was laid off along with most of the company's workforce and I had to start from 0 at a new company. I was so beholden to my employers since they knew my value but I couldn't transfer that to others and getting laid off was essentially starting from scratch with a new employer. I was soon to turn 30 and was wondering what path to take and I got the advice to take this time to invest in my skills. I wondered if I should take out loans and go back to school to start over my degree but I was intrigued by the invitation from Lambda. I read plenty of reviews both positive and negative and applied at a few different boot camps but in the end, Lambda's Income Share plan was hard to pass up. I knew it would cost more than other boot camps in the end, BUT unlike college, I wasn't left holding the bag. They backed up their instruction with their own money knowing if they can't teach me the skills of the trade AND the skills to actually land a high-paying job, they were the ones bearing financial responsibility and not me. 

With this confidence, I enrolled in the course and dove into the prep work. I am not going to cover all of the aspects of teaching but here is a basic pros and cons list of what I went through:

Pros:

• They update their curriculum regularly BUT made sure to teach older concepts that were still widely used to make sure we were still able to work at the broadest amount of companies. 
• The courses were built for remote learning and don't feel like they are a bad port of a classroom lecture
• They have a rigorous Computer science course that covered almost everything I did in 2.5 years of college courses and actually does a better job at retaining them. 
• Your tests are actually mock interviews and are built from the beginning to prepare you to get a job
• You get to work on projects for real companies
• If you are struggling, you can just repeat the month. It doesn't cost you any extra. It allows you to take more time if you need it. 
• They keep in contact with you after graduation to coach you through the job search and they set realistic expectations
• They have recordings of previous lectures if you forget something or fall behind. 

Cons

• You can fall behind. 
  • It is a fast-paced course that builds on the material every day and missing even a single day can be costly since you won't understand what is going on tomorrow. Every day missed almost counts as two since you need to understand your missed day before you can comprehend anything going forward. If you get behind, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and catch up, no one is going to do it for you. 
  • This was tough, but I can't fault the school for this, I definitely had to catch up a few times and it was hours of extra work, but it's nobody's fault but mine if I can't reach out to a classmate for help. 
• Group projects can suffer from different levels of mastery and dedication. 
  • If you have a team member who decides to repeat a month during a project, all of their responsibilities have to be accounted for. This happens regularly so you have to be ready and willing to adapt or ask for help to fill in missing team members. 
  • This one is tough and Lambda does try to fill in gaps with teachers to fill in codebases, but there are projects that I wouldn't put on my portfolio when I had completed my responsibility but our backend member fell behind or our front end team never finished
• They are always improving/adapting
  • This can be hard when halfway through a unit they need to change a topic or switch the way teams are set up. 
  • This can be jarring but the alternative is taking too long to change. If given the choice I would prefer this 

I hope it is clear that I don't have blinders on. They aren't going to guarantee you a job or do all of the work for you. After graduating, I was in the job search for nearly 6 months. However, this is not a fault of Lambdas as much as it was my goal of not just taking an easy Jr position. With what they trained me, and my previous experience, I knew that I had the chops to land a Mid to Sr level position if I work on my interviewing skills. I coded 6 hours per day and through hours into Leet code as well as practiced technical interviews on dozens of jobs I didn't want or was underqualified for and have now landed a job that pays 120k as a Software Engineer. 

In short, I know the school isn't perfect. They didn't guarantee me a job and there are a few things that they are still working on improving, but I can't give them anything less than 5 out of 5 stars. It was the first time in my 3 decades of life that I felt like a school was in my corner. 

To put this in perspective, my old job offered me my position to come work for them before. I remembered feeling so beholden to them since they knew my value but now, I felt liberated since I was currently interviewing for companies that paid more and could see value in the skills I had gained from my time at Lambda. 

If you are looking at boot camps and you have the drive to succeed, ask yourself a question: Do you want to invest in them, or do you want them to invest in you? I promise, if you have the dedication and diligence, you are more than worth the investment and Lambda can change your stars. 

I would recommend Lambda School to anyone without hesitation. I began Lambda School's part-time full stack web development program in January 2020, simply as a way to follow my passion and curiosity for tech/web development without any economic risk (because of the income share agreement). After I completed the curriculum in March 2021, I accepted a fellowship with a startup, and was offered a full time position at its conclusion, which I accepted. The curriculum and student experience did indeed change significantly during the 15 months that I was a student at Lambda, but I don't see that as a negative. Lambda School is constantly trying to improve, so things change by design. 

I've been a student since May 2020 and in the beginning everything was great and what I was hoping for. The TLs were great, lectures we awesome and the students were very helpful when anyone needed help. 

Fast forward 4-5 months and things are not the same. Lambda switched up alot of things. They've done away with TLs l, which alot of students valued when it came to 1:1s for code review. The positive and constructive feedback would only better ourselves to become better developers. The forces us to become mentors and to be mentored as well. Not every student can lead nor teach. Fortunately, my mentee dropped out of lambda and I was able to get back that time to work on the assignments.  I told my mentor I will not participate in the meetings. How can I trust the mentor to provide the guidance I need when they're forced into this role in which they probably didn't want to participate in. 

The track team is an awesome idea but execution was extremely poor. This is another idea that lambda should have let their students opt in to. Most students do not attend these meetings, probably because it runs into our allotted project time or they simply don't find the value in having these meets. Nobody takes the meets seriously. We didn't need them in the beginning and we don't need them now.

Implementing canvas was, in my opinion, a decent improvement from the TK we were used to, but we just didn't get any help to figure out how to navigate through it at first. The quizzes were a great idea too.. the downside to this all is none of our assignments/sprints are graded. How do we know if we did it correctly, dry and effectively? Sure we can test but to make sure it works but like everything else, there's more than one way to solve a problem. Technically, we can clone and fork the assignments/sprints and submit submit the git repo and nobody cares to check to make sure it's been completed. Lambda doesn't care if you do the assignments, which is ironic since they are relying on us to learn and graduate and get a job in order for us to pay them back. Which leads me to believe that they will change the ISAs and we'll have to pay back regardless if we get a job or not.

There are tons of options, cheaper options out there that will give you the same skill sets that lambda is attempting to teach us.. 

codewithmosh.com
Codingphase.com
Udemy.com
Freecodecamp.com

Do your research.


Most of us are in to deep to back out and will need to finish the program. Students make lambda, without us there is no lambda. Students who feel even the slightest way against these changes need to stand up and speak and together, and only together, can we be heard and hopefull  lambda will care enough to hear.

Lambda was a 9month FullTime Fullstack Bootcamp. 
it started out great
you have a careers session every monday
you have 3weeks of lecture and 1 week of build per unit
you are assigned into a TL team where in you have a teamlead that you can go for when you need help or to help you debug 

each lecture week would be 
4days(mon-thurs) of 2hours lecture, a daily project, and an afternoon standup
1 day(fridays) have a thing called sprint wherein you have 3hours to finish a project and hit mvp. after that there are afternoon meetings

every unit there is a thing called a build week
where in you work on a project for a whole week, and work on what your specific unit is taught its like a culmination thing and have it submitted by friday end of week. 

the first months lambda was great, my study habits had structure the instructors were great, there were some hiccups here and there but overall id say it was worth the 30k ISA

they had a hirings team, where they help you get interviews with companies that lambda is partnered with. 

this was all great until lambda decided to roll out with some changes

they cut the course from 9mos to 6mos. 
they said they have a better curriculum, but they didnt. they just removed stuff from the curriculum without really giving any concrete reason why aside from `trust me ive talked with the hiring partners`. when you ask them why they do it this way they just dodge the question and say , trust me this is a proven way. 
now there are no more TL's to guide you, and you are forced to "Mentor" students from earlier class and you get a "Mentee" from 2 classes ahead of you to build your leadership skills. the concept is great but then not everyone wants to be a leader some people just want to learn how to code. but for this thing you dont really have a choice on the matter and are just forced to roll with it. 

a lot of people are complaining that this is a breach of contract from the ISA we signed and they still did not acknowledge that.
they continued to roll with the changes even if majority of students complained about it. questions are left unanswered and everyone is wondering if this is forced labor because it does seem like it

lambda was great this i dunno

This program was great until it wasn't. I had been withdrawn after only inquiring about withdrawing, I was only seeking information, but they have decided to move forward with the process. So after snapping out of a depressive state from me losing my job from Covid-19, losing a parent, and while all being pregnant,  I sent a letter of appeal, for them to still not work with me and have not have the best open communication, whereas I wouldn't hear anything for a week so it prolonged everything. I've been with the program for a year before all this has happened, I put in hours, stressed and cried over it while working a job that had ridiculous overtime where I had to pull all nighters just to try and keep up and they still denied to help after just one stressful week.

I believed in this program and all they said to me was I can reapply after 6 months...I have written back more questions and how I felt and haven't gotten a response in almost 3 weeks. I honestly feel like I would've been better off purchasing classes from online courses, at least I wouldn't have to now owe $30,000. I would not recommend. 

Opinions about Lambda vary but I'll outline the bottom line.  Is Lambda perfect?  No.  In any organization?  No.  Will Lambda get you where you need to be if you put in the time?  Yes.

For me a program like Lambda needed to do one thing: give me enough experience to get my foot in the door with jobs that were previously inaccessible. There are rough spots in the curriculum and organization but at the end of the day I have gained the skills needed to find work in my desired field.  What's more, I have developed a network of peers that will serve me well into the future.  This is all the more true because Lambda is driven to improve by using feedback and data to fine tune the process. 

If you want to gain the skills to change careers while joining and ever improving network you will be hard pressed to find someone doing it better than Lambda.

I had been working in hotel management for about 6 years when I decided to pursue my passion for technology and problem solving and become a software engineer. I looked at many options from University, State College, Online University, and bootcamps.  There are so many options to choose from but after research I knew the bootcamp route was the one for me. I researched and found the best bootcamps for me, put together pros and cons and ended up choosing the Full time Full Stack Software Engineering course at Lambda School. Let me start off by saying I have absolutely no regrets about my decision. Now that I am graduate and working in the industry, I will share a list of some of the pros and cons of my experience with Lambda. Notice some items are on the pro and con lists.

Pros:
Class/group structure - Its very similar to a lot of real world work environments. Students are split into smaller groups/teams that are led by a Product Manager(which is typically a senior student at Lambda). These small groups were vital to my success at Lambda. They become your support system, friends, family, etc. We learn together, fix bugs together, tell stories, laugh, vent, etc. Having a great group makes all the difference at Lambda.

Agile environment - Lambda is very agile and adapts quickly. From operations flow/procedure to last minute curriculum changes to based off whats needed/used in the industry and what hiring partners are looking for. This is incredibly nice cause you are not stuck learning tech thats not used anymore and your skills are more relevant during the job search. Lambda believes in finding the need for a change and making it quick, not waisting time or making excuses why not to change.

Instructors and staff - When I attended Lamba(5/18 - 12/18) the instructors and staff were amazing! They were all very involved and personally invested in each students struggles, concerns, and ultimately their success.  Lambda will not hold your hand the whole way but for someone that is dedicated they will find the level of support very helpful and way above what other bootcamps and universities offer. I even unofficial was mentored by one of my instructors who helped me grow, network, and prepare for where I am today. The school has grown so much and many of the instructors are now directors over different programs and have hired more instructors. Hopefully they maintain the culture that was there when I attended.

Income Shared Agreement - The way Lambda uses ISA to pay is beneficial in so many ways. To name a few, it gives those without the opportunity to down pay for the program or cant get a loan or whatever the case may be an equal opportunity. Talent can come from anywhere and Lambda is giving everyone the chance. Its also beneficial because it aligns the goals of the student and the school. If the student isn't successful, nobody will benefit. Lambda is just as interested in your success and job hunt as anyone else.

Job Search Support - I received so much support when I graduated and began my job search. Besides the instructor that became a mentor to me, I was assigned an amazing career coach named Gigi, I received many follow ups from instructors, staff, and even the founder of the school Austen. Through their help and networking like crazy in my area I was able to land my dream job at an amazing company. Lambda Mission Accomplished!!

Cons:
Class/group structure - This is also included as a pro from above. The reason I included this on my cons list is the very reason it was on the pros list. If you dont have a great PM group with great vibes this can make your experience really challenging. Since this becomes your little family and support group you learn to really lean on each other and without that I dont know what my outcome would have been like.

Agile environment - This is also included as a pro from above. The reason I included this on my cons list is because as great as agile methodology, if not done correctly it can cause its own set of problems. On some of the changes while I was a student it was so sudden and without any preparation that nobody including staff were completely ready for it and it created issues, confusion, and frustration. I think remaining agile is definitely best but Lambda should understand the issues it can cause and try to be more prepared for the change with the appropriate tools and resources in place.

Saturated Market - The market in a lot of places is incredibly saturated. Yes the growth of the industry is huge and more and more jobs are becoming available, however, there are also a ton of juniors looking for their first job as well which really saturates it. This is not Lambda's problem directly, however, I feel that staff, instructors, and career coaches need to do a better job at making this issue clear and expectations are set correctly. From talking too many other students, it is a common feeling that Lambda painted the industry as growing and that there is a deficit of engineers and finding a job should be easy. Upon graduation you learn that about the saturation and confusion starts to kick in. It is what it is, but would be nice to have been aware the whole time so expectations are realistic.

Overall I love Lambda. No bootcamp or university is perfect but of the options I truly feel this is the route to take. If you are thinking about the bootcamp route, do your research, make a decision, and jump in full speed. Lambda will help support you along the way and will be there even after you graduate and find your first job. Above everything else, Lambda values feedback and takes it very serious. Every single piece of feedback is listened too and will be followed up on. This feedback is what fuels the rapid growth/success of the program and the agile practice. Once you are a part of Lambda School you will always have that network and support system that you belong to and again, I could not be more excited and without regrets about my decision.

I am going to just say this may not be for everyone.

That being said if you don't put in the work you will not succeed, there is ever opportunity to get you where you need to go, and even if you are new and not sure you can do it there are people that will help you every step for every level no one who is willing to get put in the work gets left behind, Lambda does a lot to make sure the students are getting the support they need to succeed, this only works if you do.

The course is incredible value for money.

I went from working construction in the Arizona heat to making a very good Salary working in Boston, It took a grind and a lot of hard work and effort to get there, I won't say it came easy, but I got it and Lambda showed me the way to get there.

Passion for programming is really a must, that is not a Lambda thing that is a developer thing, if you don't want to be doing this than it's probably not for you, if you can find the joy in solving difficult problems with amazing developers and friends than you will do fine, for me solving hard problems with unique thinking, finding out fun ways to solve hard problems, it's really amazing.

I will say if you are not a team player this may not be the course for you, there is a lot of pairs work and working with teams, and really if you are not a team player it will be hard to find a place inside of the industry, to get the most out of your time at lambda be sure to make a lot of connections and you will grow as a developer and as a person, meeting so many people from different background and learning to approach code in different ways.

 

The instructors are Lambda are just amazing, really I don't have anything bad to say about them, some of the most inspiring and great teachers I have had, the are some of the best and they impress me with how well they do, I am really glad I got to meet and learn from each of them. 

 

Job assistance was amazing Kelsey my career coach is one of the main reasons I never gave up on my job search, and they are improving they the way the connect the students with the hiring partners all the time, so I can only see it getting better from here.

 

Curriculum had a few hiccup but overall it was very good, in my class we learned MongoDB and I know they teach the students SQL now, I don't regret learning MongoDB though it's really awesome I enjoy it, however I use SQL at work so MongoDB has not come in use beyond personal projects. 

After accepting a job offer today that has completely changed the direction of my life for the better, I have an immense feeling of gratitude toward Lambda School. My base salary has gone up almost 3.5x from my former career as a teacher in San Francisco!

I decided to join Lambda School on a whim and honestly, it was something I stumbled into by chance from a series of events that happened over a couple of weeks that led me to meet a Lambda student who referred me directly to Austen Allred, CEO of Lambda. After getting special permission to complete the coursework in under a week due to my life circumstances, I joined the CS8 cohort that began in early February 2018.

The curriculum is rigorous to say the least, and my having no previous programming experience, apart from maybe some very basic HTML & CSS, every day and week was admittedly quite overwhelming. With that being said, the instructors at Lambda are A++ and the support system is like nothing I'd ever seen before in my 11-12 years as an educator. The system, though continually evolving , is designed where no student is left behind, and each individual student gets all of the support they need (granted they put in 100% effort) to succeed.

In just a matter of a few weeks, I had gone from basically knowing nothing to building responsive websites. In just a matter of a few months, I was building full stack web applications from end to end. By the time I got to Lambda Labs (apprenticeship program), I was working on a small team to build a first-of-its-kind app to market in only 5 weeks under the direction of an experience engineer/mentor. The progress students make at Lambda in just a short amount of time is truly incredible, and I would attribute this to two things: 1. Lambda's curriculum, instructors and staff. 2. The amount of work you put into the program.

On top of all this, Lambda's career services program is truly revolutionary. I've never seen or heard anything like it. Each student is assigned to an individual career coach and also has access to all of the other career coaches and other student success staff at pretty much anytime. One of the coolest things at Lambda is that graduation isn't celebrated, job offers are. To help you get job, the sales & outcomes teams work tirelessly to bring in new partners. In short, they set you up with all of the opportunities you need to be successful; you just have to step up to the plate and hit a home run when you're up to bat.

After I finished the curriculum in late July 2018, I signed on as a Teaching Assistant (internally known as a Project Manager) for 4 months (in my case). This program, open to most students upon reaching a certain point in the course, is pivotal in growing your skills for the tech industry. Having the opportunity to work more closely with an instructional team and mentoring and teaching others, launched me to a new level. It also helped me understand how much work goes on behind the scenes to run a school at the top notch level Lambda does. The amount of work and energy put into this school to make it an industry leader is phenomenal. 

If anyone is looking to join one of the programs that Lambda offers and launch yourself into the technology industry, this is undoubtedly the best there is. The difference between Lambda & other schools is that Lambda isn't a bootcamp. It's a full fledged CS program merged with your track of choice (web for me) and designed to make you successful on day one of your job as an engineer. Even if you do have a CS degree or have worked in engineering for a while, Lambda would still be beneficial to you. In fact, I've talked to several folks with CS degrees who were in my cohort, and they said the education at Lambda was much better and much more relevant than anything they learned in their respective 4-year university programs.

I cannot thank Lambda School enough for changing my life and the lives of so many others for the better. They are a one of a kind in this industry, led by visionaries, and I truly believe they will come to lead the industry across the world with this model.

*Full disclosure: Lambda asked me to write this review about 2 weeks after I had accepted a job, in exchange for some Lambda swag.

I'm skeptical of any company that promises to replace traditional education, because it's often framed with disingenuous arguments about student debt, the uselessness of educational bureaucracy, and what education should philosophically be. For most people, education is about gainful employment, which I disagree with.

That being said, I'm also a self-appointed expert in educational fraud—where established universities mislead students about outcomes in favor of enrollment numbers, or in my case fees—with the excessive private student loan debt to prove it. Yes, the interest is variable, and Sallie Mae is now a member of my family. Did I mention that my cosigner, my mom, is on the hook for payments larger than her mortgage? (Ask yourself, why is this legal?)

Point being: if you are thinking about taking out student loans, only do so if they are federally backed. NO private loans whatsoever. I have the lovely privilege of having *all* types of student debt.

Moving on. Lambda School. I was in the Fullstack Web track. I started in April of 2018, finished in October 2018, and was on the job market just as everyone was leaving for the holidays. I managed to land a job through my own efforts in January 2019. The career assistance was meager when I graduated, but better than any other career service I've had at the two universities I've attended. As of February 2019, I can say the career assistance has exploded in support and there are unbelievable companies giving presentations every single day that are looking for talent.

This has been my experience with Lambda as an organization: continuous improvement at an unbelievable pace. They take feedback incredibly seriously, because incentives are aligned if you are using the income-share agreement. It was main reason I chose Lambda (alongside the remote nature of the program), because I was weary of financial blunders that I continue to deal with from past educational experiences.

If you have the option to attend and complete a CS degree, do that!

Then attend Lambda!

Or better yet, attend Lambda in your last year of your CS degree.

I say this because of my experience so far at my new job. I made a production level contribution of several hundred lines of code in a framework I did not know on my 7th day of work. They said it was probably a record for first contribution. Am I an algorithm or data structure expert because of Lambda School? Absolutely not. Do I know how recursion affects computer memory and how to avoid writing quadratic algorithms because of Lambda? Yes.

Let's break down some problems I encountered with Lambda:

1. PM groups -  most problems I faced at Lambda revolved around my project manager group, which is just a small group of students you interact with on a daily basis, led by a project manager (which during my time was a Lambda student who had completed most or all of the course). It seemed that people's Lambda experience was largely influenced by who your project manager was, and who else was in your group. The format for these daily "standup" meetings definitely needs standardization, so that the hundreds of hours spent in these meetings are structured for a purpose. (This may have already changed! Remember, I've already been out of the program since October 2018).

2. Code Reviews - I never really felt like my code was reviewed regularly, or if it was, the feedback was not always given, or it was non-technical. If you need help, there is always someone to help. However, sometimes when you are stuck, you don't even realize you are stuck. Lambda really requires personal responsibility and awareness, and making yourself vulnerable if you don't know what is going on.

3. Pair programming - Looking back, I wish I had been forced to pair program more. I did a fair amount of it in the latter half of the program (remember they are always changing things—usually for good reason), and now at my job I realize how fundamental this is to working professionally as a programmer.

4. HTML / CSS gaps - When I attended, this was the first thing we learned, and the teacher was excellent. However, as the program progressed into React, Javascript, and until the end, you could really tell how easy it is to forget everything you learned about web basics. I failed a technical interview partly because I did not know what the ARIA standard was off the top of my head. Lambda did not cover Accessibility, nor a lot of the finer details of many important, native Web APIs that many would consider basic web dev required knowledge. For example, how to access a webcam. (I believe Lambda has introduced something called build weeks throughout the program, which I think would go a long way to closing this gap).

5. Growth stage - The organization is incredibly intelligent, but always be aware that this is an investor-backed venture that could sour for a lot of reasons. Thankfully, the income-share agreement reduces that risk to basically 0 for yourself, and my personal ISA terms are generous.

And for the incredible benefits of Lambda:

1. Lambda for life - you have full access to the curriculum, which is always being updated, for your life or that of the company (whichever is shorter).

2. A growing network of Lambda students all over the world, ready to help at the post of a Slack message.

3. If you get in to Lambda, you will be surrounded by highly motivated people (usually), which is probably a principle that their admissions process screens for.

4. If something goes wrong while attending Lambda, they will go out of their way to help (including financially).

5. A sincerely kind and positive atmosphere, which I hope never changes.

Overall, Lambda continues to surprise me, and I'm thankful to have chosen it and been accepted. It's also not bad that I found some dollars along the way. If you know you like staring at computers for hours on end, and continually being frustrated / elated, then programming is probably for you. Like I said, CS degree first (for lots of silly and not so silly reasons), and Lambda 1.5st because sometimes ain't nobody got time for that CS degree.

 

I had spent the last 3 years trying to get into the world of software engineering. I'd taken several MOOCs, received two certificates in introductory programming courses, one online and one through a 4 year university's certificate program. I'd even started classes in a post-bac program (I already had a bachelors in Biology) through a different 4 year university's online program, in order to receive another bachelors in Computer Science. The whole time I was job hopping from positions in landscaping, arborist work and house painting. I'd applied for over a hundred jobs in entry level positions and internships, and still didn't feel like I could call myself ready for the workplace. Lambda school changed all that.

From day 1, your broken up into small teams with a poject manager, who is genreally a Lambda student further along in the program. You have daily standup meetings and weekly sprint challenges, which are evaluated and graded. You are encouraged to peer program and both help those who don't have as much experience, or to get help from those who do. This structure is very similar to what you'll experience in the real world of programming, which is just one of the ways that Lambda school prepares you for your new career.

The full stack web development program (which is the program I went through) trains you in modern frameworks like React, Redux, Node, Express, knex, Postgres and even version control like Git and Github. Lambda is ultra responsive to the wants and needs of both the market and their hiring partners (one of whom I recently got a job with). My cohort in particular saw a shift in curriculum from one back end stack to another, all to ensure that we had the most in demand skills when we graduated. Lambda moves in days where other boot camps move in weeks and higher education moves in years. With an education from Lambda school, you can be sure that your skills will be valued. 

The computer science curriculum is really what sets Lambda school apart. I'm confident that my ability to speak about Big-O notation, runtime complexity and various algorithms/data structures is what got me my job. This portion is tough, and they throw not only 2 new languages at you (Python and C) but new frameworks like Django as well. You learn about operations on the CPU and even create a terminal emulator. The idea is getting you used to learning new things, quickly. I found that while a lot of us struggled during this portion, it really helped me to set aside my ego and realize that in this field, the learning never stops, and the most important thing is to stay curious. Again, this portion is what sets Lambda apart, and ensures that you have the tools to learn any tech stack. 

I do feel like I should mention that, like any boot camp, those with prior experience do tend to rise to the top relatively quickly. The important thing is to try and learn from those people, and not see them as competition. If you have the time, brush up on your Javascript, maybe even your C, sign up for codewars or something like it, and put in your prep work. It'll really pay off when you start classes and let you focus on the higher concepts instead of getting bogged down with minor syntax bugs. 

The capstone project was an amazing experience and the closest thing you'll get to real world development experience while still in a relatively low pressure, educational environment. That being said, get ready to work like crazy and learn a ton. We all came away with pretty impressive pieces for our portfolios and I know of at least 5 people who got jobs based solely on the merit of their capstone projects. 

The career team is awesome and if you haven't looked into Lambda Next, check it out. It's basically a continuation of Lambda school UNTIL YOU GET A JOB. None of this "We've fulfilled our responsibility, it's on you now" mentality which has driven higher education for so many years. These people take a lot of time to work with you, even when your out of the program, to try and find something that's the right fit for you. 

If you can, try and save your money, move back in with your parents, whatever it takes to go back to school full time for the 6-8 months. If you can't swing that, maybe go for the part time, year long program which takes place nights and weekends. It's definitely worth it. I more than tripled my previous income and am entering into an exciting field where I'm truly valued as an employee.