Burlington Code Academy

Having no college degree made it tricky for me to find fulfilling employment with a comfortable paycheck. Once I was hired by a tech company in Burlington for a frontline support position, I began to familiarize myself with the basics of HTML and CSS. Over time, the curiosity turned into a drive to learn as much as I could in order to excel in my role.

Once I began to grasp the basic concepts, I found myself messing about in the Chrome Developer Tools to tweak and manipulate websites--which was not only fun, but allowed me to be a more efficient employee in my tech support position.

I made the decision to jump into the world of programming and enroll at Burlington Code Academy shortly thereafter.

As other reviewers have mentioned, this course is exactly what it describes itself to be: a boot-camp. The 9-5, Monday - Friday schedule is a crash course and mentally demanding--especially so for folks unfamiliar with beginner-level computer operation and understanding. Coming in with some experience, I still found the course very challenging at times. But that's not to say it wasn't rewarding. I discovered a passion for programming and since graduating (2 months ago at the time of this review) I still write code everyday.  

The instructor team is top-notch and are willing to go the extra mile and a half for students. The team wants you to succeed and you can feel that.

In the summer of 2019 I attended BCA's Web Development Bootcamp. Prior to the class we were given some online work to be completed and a list of all the software we would be using throughout the course with detailed guides on how to install then. Because of this pre-course work I felt more prepared to absorb information being taught to us in the first few weeks of class and it was very helpful. 

The lead instructor and teaching assistants are very knowledgable. They take their time answering all questions and absolutely go above and beyond to help everyone succeed in this class. I dont believe many other schools have instructors who will help you on their days off, stay late after classes and do all the countless other things they do to make themselves available for people who need extra help.

I think BCA is an amazing place to learn web development because of all the support they offer, inside and outside of the classroom.

First a little about my background. I had grown stagnant in my career as a scientist and didn't find fullfilment or challenge in the day-to-day work. I had been a scientist for over ten years with a masters degree in the field. I had a mortgage and a family to help support so leaving my job behind was not something I could do on a whim. I took my time to figure out what I wanted to do and to look at the careers that were available to me. Going back for another four year degree wasn't an option and, frankly, wasn't going to help me start a new career. I needed to find something that took less time and had better outcomes.

The Burlington Code Academy's (BCA) full-time course seemed to offer both. I did my research on the former graduates outcomes and spoke with Alex Horner at length about my expectations for the course - namely I wanted to commit fully to course and have a full-time job within a few months of completing the course. BCA had a career-focused curriculum. Local businesses had influenced the technologies being taught and work with a career counseler was integrated into the course. Feeling much more secure in the idea, I applied and was accepted three months before the program started. 

After being accepted, I reached out to Alex for direction and was given pre-course exercises to complete. I spent time each night working through (and past) the exercises on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This certainly helped when the course started. While BCA will teach you everything you need to know, I would strongly suggest taking your time to become familiar with HTML, CSS, and Javascript to ease the transition. 

The course itself was 9am-5pm Monday through Friday and only required that we had a computer capable of running the necessary software (although I have no doubt that if this was a hurdle they would have helped me find a solution). The course started with Javascript and it set an aggressive pace. At no point did I feel overly confident or bored - which was a nice change but also quite a shock. The weeks started with three days of learning concepts through lectures and mini-labs followed by an introduction to a larger project with class time to work on it. The project based learning was fantastic! It forced me to play with and really understand the concepts. The projects also helped us to build our portfolios with meaningful work. Fair warning, the projects routinely took an additional 8 hours over the course of the weekend and sometimes longer if I was struggling with a concept. We were encouraged to discuss our issues with the other students and the instructor and teaching assistants made themselves available after class and on the weekends if we needed additional help. 

I don't think a single student made it through the course without struggling with at least one project. After a long time coasting through my job this was jarring. I was invigorated by the learning but also stressed from feeling out of my element. Fortunately, my family gave me amazing support during the course so I had the time to focus on learning. I was fortunate that I didn't need to work a part-time job during the course and could spend more time on the class. Our final weeks of the course were working on projects proposed by local businesses. These capstone projects gave us exposure to local businesses and to what real projects look like. We handled client meetings, timelines, and the project scope. The course ended with a demo night where we showed off our work to the community and hiring partners. I had an informational interview lined up before the night was through.

The weeks after the course I spent time finishing my portfolio and tweaking my resume. The BCA let us know about jobs as they were being posted (or even before) and gave us contacts for businesses that we were interested in. I ended up interviewing two weeks after the course ended and had a full-time position two weeks after that!

My suggestions if you're interested in taking the course:

1. Plan ahead. Save money, recruit family and friends to help you during the course, do whatever you can to not have to split your focus. 

2. You will get out what you put in. If you're motivated and want to work harder, you'll be able to and it will pay off. 

3. Be ready to be stressed but remember that it's part of learning something new. 

4. Avoid missing any class. I missed one day and struggled for a week and half to catch up. I can't imagine what missing mutliple days would have felt like. 

5. Treat this course like it's your job. Take it seriously and it will pay off. 

In the end I got exactly what I wanted out of this course. I was constantly challenged, pushed, and my effort was rewarded with a new full-time career. I left a career with masters degree making $55k and in three months (of very hard work) found a remote job making $72k for an entry level position. The course paid for itself and I've never been happier. If you reach out to BCA feel free to ask them to put you into contact with me and we can chat more. 

Good luck!

The Burlington Code Academy was a great experiencce for me.  After years of worikng in restaurants, and living the ski-bum lifestyle I was ready to find a job that would actually engagae me intellectually, and wouldn't crush my soul.  Unfortunatlly my double major in religious studies, and fine art didn't exactly leave me with alot of employment opportunities without first going back to school for a graduate degree.  While wandering around the internet in search of an alternative I stumbled across BCA. I was a little wary of draining my savings, and giving up working for three months to learn a skill set that I had no prior knowledge of with no gauruntee of a job on the otherside.  Despite my reservations I took a chance, applied, and got accepted. The course was great.  At some points I felt like my brain was going to explode because I was learning so many new things, but htat's exactly what I was looking for.  This course is very intense; you're going to be in class 40hrs/week with probably another 10-20hrs of work and reading outside of class, but at the end you come out with all the skills you need to build a full stack web app using a variety of technologies.  Josh Burke (the lead instructor) is great.  He has a deep knowledge of programming, experience working in the field both as a freelancer, and in a corporate setting, and he has tons of extra resources he's more than will ing to share on a variety of topics. Don't feel like you need a background in computer science, or programming to apply for this course.  All you need is a desire to learn, and a critical mind.  A love of logic puzzles doesn't hurt either, as I've found the closest parallel to programming is not mathematics (as I thought before starting this course) but logic puzzles.