Fullstack Academy

  Fullstack Academy has changed my life. I resisted going to a bootcamp for years, as I had a CS degree that I'd never used, and never thought I'd want to use. But times change, and when I got dumped out of a good startup job when the company went under due to the pandemic, I started looking for something more rewarding. I wanted to use my degree, but I needed a refresher. I looked at a few bootcamps and decided FSA seemed the most rigorous while still being short.

 The program is well designed, with lots of javascript and programming basics up front, then a focus on learning the web tech stack, and then back to CS principles towards the end while you work on your capstone project. The core curriculum is solid, though it could stand to be updated with some new technologies and updated versions (especially React and Typescript). There is a lot of pair programming, which I have mixed feelings about. The breadth of prior knowledge and experience in bootcamp participants mean sometimes you'll work with someone on your level, but more often you'll be working with someone drastically ahead or behind you in understanding. These can still be rewarding experiences, as you'll either have someone to learn from or have the opportunity to explain something to someone, which is a great way to deepen your understanding.

  The instructors are mostly awesome, people who genuinely want to be there and teach, rather than just a stopover between software development gigs. Teaching is hard, though, and there are a few who may be great developers but are still working on their teaching chops.  The good ones are amazing though, and all are putting in their best effort.

  The most rewarding part of my FSA experience was being offered a position as a "Fellow" (teaching assistant) after the program. The fellowship was a great opportunity to deepen my understanding of the material, share it with others, and work on my personal portfolio and applying to jobs while collecting a (very modest) paycheck. Working with students struggling with the program, trying hard to change their lives for the better, was very powerful. Lots of highs, and lots of lows.

  Having the fellowship on my resume, plus my CS degree, made it relatively easy to differentiate myself from other bootcamp grads and find a job making more than I'd even hoped for a first job. (Two weeks into starting the job, I still can't believe I got the offer). But the core program at Fullstack is challenging and relatively rigorous, the instructors are passionate and have real teaching skills, and the students are motivated and professional. The job assistance program, which I assumed would be an afterthought, was actually really helpful. The career services counsellors are experienced and insightful, and they really want to help you get a job. It was a pleasure working with them.

  Fullstack has changed my life for the better in ways that I never would have considered when I made the decision to apply.

16 week full-time immersive bootcamp teaching the PERN stack (Postgres, Express, React, Node), computer science principles, and systems design. The first 4 weeks (Foundations) are self-guided online modules teaching the basics of JavaScript and object oriented programming. The next 6 weeks (Junior Phase) are held in a classroom format, with lectures, pair programming, and take-home assignments. The final 6 weeks (Senior Phase) focus on team projects and interview/job search preparation. Students are encouraged to learn/utilize different technologies in their projects than those that were taught during Junior Phase. Students will come out of the program with 2 large team projects and one individual project. 

I started my coding bootcamp with Fullstack Academy in April, 2021.
I graduated from it late July of the same year, however, due to my personal situation I went back to my old job right away.
Even though I was working full-time and job hunting it only took 4 months for me to land a job! And I am a mother of a pre-schooler as well! My journey was very challenging with limited time I had fo myself, however, I was able to survive and achieve my goal, my dream because of Fullstack Academy. Fullstack Academy has a great curriculum, great instructors and great career coaches. By the time I graduated I was almost job ready, I reviewed everything I had learned from the bootcamp first 2 weeks after graduating. Then I was really job ready! After that I spent lots of time studying algorithms and searching and applying for jobs and even learned new tech stacks!
In addition, throughout my entire job searching journey my career coach was very supportive, we met often to chat and check-in and I always received a great guidance every time we met. 
My experience at Fullstack Academy was truly a blessing, attending Fullstack Academy was one of the greatest life changing decision I have made in my life!

Although the curriculum itself was great for job hunting with a very up-to-date tech stack, the Fullstack Academy administrators were bad at communication with the Grace Hopper cohort, we had a new instructor who was not great at the job, and although my cohort gave regular feedback, nothing was done about the issues we faced. As the women and non-binary school, we were continuously made to feel second tier to the all-gender group. Although not the worst choice of bootcamp by far, as I did manage to get a job fairly quickly after graduation, there are probably better bootcamps out there. 

They use a very different approach to "teach" you the basics (quotes because it's not taught - by the time you get into the pre-work course they will assume you know everything). 

Instead of simply asking "Make a function that repeats a string num times" they present the problem as a Jasmine testing spec. Imagine trying to decipher this test and trying to determine what they're asking, THEN coming up with a solution. 

Yeah, it makes no sense. What a steep learning curve! It really felt like they were trying to weed us out. And the fact they don't provide internship placements? Nah. I left and just got a placement at a top-10 company through a different all-women boot camp that was free. 

I am about to graduate from a cybersecurity course started in May 2021, Fullstack academy SDU. My overall rating for this course is satisfactory.

The course wasn’t easy and fast pace, to the point I got overwhelmed at the beginning, especially with no experience and background in computers. But Fullstack provides as many tools and help along the way to make this journey possible for me. Six months from that day, now I am looking back and happy for the amount of experience and knowledge I gained in such a short time.

I have so many people to thank for, my wonderful teacher who was kind and knowledgeable. My Student Aide ( Tanisha ) who were nonstop helping and carrying and pushing and making times even out of office hours due to my very complicated work schedule. Our teacher and director are taking time and patient with me while I was facing many struggles and expressing not having proper English can cause more challenges. for me too. They gave me the necessary attention, time so I will be able to find my way in this course.

Do I go back and make a choice to pick this course again? Absolutely. I learned a lot and I am hoping this will help me to find my next new career field with confidence. 

I started with Fullstack's bootcamp in a month program in February, with no prior experience, and got into their immersive software engineering program in March, finishing in late July and signed my offer as a Fullstack Developer recently in October 2021. 

It was honestly quite difficult and in order to get the most out of the program, you do need to put in many nights and weekends but I'd say, with certainty, the more work you put in, the more you get out. There is some hand holding, but if you really want to work in software engineering as a career, a large part of that is learning how to google and how to solve problems. For those who are worried about struggling, the program leads and instructors are very flexible and will work with you and potentially allow you to do a redo. 

The best part is the wonderful people at Fullstack--the instructors (shout outs to Orlando, Noelle, and Gary) all have real world experience and are also amazing teachers, the program lead I had (Serena) was super sweet and encouraging, and the career success team (shout out to Jolie!!!) was super helpful in answering all the questions and filling in the gaps. I found my job through a career success email blast!

I think the structure of the program works well and you leave the program with 2-3 projects on your portfolio that employers DO care and ask about. Like another reviewer here, my only complaint would be that there could potentially be an earlier focus on doing REACTOs (learning data structures and algorithms, which are super essential to a lot of companies' interviewing processes). Overall, I had a great experience and would recommend Fullstack.

Prior to attending the Cyber Bootcamp I had no formal education in anything related to Computers.  I attended the Fullstack Cyber Bootcamp from August through the end of April.  I did it part-time, three classes per week.  The entire class participated remotely.  We broke up into groups in each class and near the end of the course, broke up into groups to complete a capstone project.  During the last half of the course I began studying for the Sec+ exam, and passed it on the day before the course ended.  Then I studied for the CySA+ during the four weeks after I graduated, and took that exam and passed it.  Then I began looking for jobs through June and July, and in the first week of August, I received an email that a company was interested in interviewing me, and three weeks and two interviews later, I had a job!  I've been working three weeks now and I enjoy it very much!

Overall, I think that Fullstack Academy is a very good coding bootcamp, and I am glad that I attended. Fullstack is considered one of the best bootcamps, and I am glad that they have a fairly strict application process, so they only let in people who have at least a decent amount of coding knowledge.

I did a large amount of self-studying before attending Fullstack, probably more so than most other students. I am glad that I did, because then I was able to get the most out of the Fullstack instruction and experience. I thought the instructors and instruction was overall quite good, although there were a few times where I thought it could be a bit better/the instructors could explain things a bit more clearly. Again though, it's tough, because bootcamps have to cram so much material in in such a short period of time.

This goes back to my point about preparation and self-studying before attending the bootcamp - I think it's really helpful if you have a good base of knowledge, and have at least looked a bit at the topics and technologies that will be on the syllabus, so you are not completely lost when they introduce some of the topics. In some ways, I think this is a flaw of coding bootcamps in general - it's impossible to teach someone everything they need to know to get a job in tech in 4 months or so. One will have to do a lot of studying before attending, work hard while attending, and probably work a bit after graduation to sure up knowledge/skills in some areas. And ultimately, my other point is that coding bootcamps can be great, but in the end, you can (almost) teach yourself all of this stuff. There are so many resources available online at this point that are either free or very cheap. Is this expensive bootcamp worth it? - it could be, but I would say try to self-study a lot before attending, so you get the most possible out of it.

My other slight criticism of Fullstack Academy is that I felt that the size of the class was pretty large. I think my cohort started off being around 37-40 people. Throughout the course, a few people did end up dropping out (and then a few people were held back into the next cohort, since they didn't do that well in the "junior phase", so they didn't get to go to "senior phase"). However, even though the cohort was large, the instructors and teaching fellows nevertheless did a good job of providing individual instruction where needed.

In the end, I have a very positive review of Fullstack Academy. Could instruction have been a bit better in a few areas? - probably, but overall it was quite good. Was the cohort size a little big? - yes, somewhat, but not outrageously big and I still felt I was able to get enough help. Can you just teach yourself most of this stuff? yes, for the most part, but Fullstack helped me to get better in a few areas, and the senior phase stuff (working on a team, career services) I thought were very valuable to me. Ultimately, I am a success story, because after graduating (and then after about 3 more months of doing a bit more self-studying and applying to jobs) I got a high-paying software engineer job at a major company.

I attended FSA remotely in Spring of 2021 in the 2104 Cohort. Overall all the staff were amazing. My instructor Orlando, did a fantastic job explaining the concepts, and the teaching fellows did a great job answering any questions and making sure you are grasping the material. Serena, the program lead, did everything in her power to make sure you were as comfortable as possible. And Nicole, one of the career success advisors, were super helpful during the job hunt, always willing to answer questions or help me with interviews. My only real complaint about the program, was the very little time spent on data structures and algorithms, I found those concepts particularly difficult. Thanks to FSA I just signed for my very first Software Developer position!

My experience at the Grace Hopper Program changed my life in a myriad of ways. Their curriculum is extremely thorough and as they say, "they will not let you fail." I think though, that besides teaching me their specific stack, GHP really taught me how to think like a programmer. Since graduating I've been able to teach myself so many new languages and technologies because of this experience. I chose the program because I'm a nonbinary student and wanted to go somewhere where my identity would be respected, and I absolutely felt that throughout my experience. My cohortmates, fellows, and instructors were so supportive and still are even now after I've graduated. The pair programming enabled me to learn to speak technically and work with others in this new environment, and the workshops are still useful for me to go through even now that I'm an employed software engineer. I cannot recommend the Grace Hopper Program enough for any woman or nonbinary person looking to get into the technical field.

I've decided to switch my career and was coding on my own for quite some time until I realized I've only learnt some HTML in 3 months and the speed and motivation for my learning is not leading me anywhere. My friend recommended looking into coding bootcamps and I started researching. Fullstack Academy had great reviews and job landing rates so I looked no further and applied. They provided great recommendations on how to prepare for their application process, I knew zero JavaScript at that time and yet I made it! It's been a year and I just landed my first software engineering job, no way I would've done it on my own! If you need a little more guidance like me, very determined to make that switch and ready to put your life a little bit on hold for the time of the course look no further and just do it! 

Not only did I get the knowledge but also great connections, tips on how to enter the industry and how to be successful in your coding. It is going to be tough 4 months, like a highly intellectual full-time job but with take-home assignments, and the weekends are going to be busy as well with homework and projects. But if you truly enjoy coding you will be so excited to do it along like-minded peers willing to help and share their knowledge. Your classmates and instructors will become your industry connections forever along with all other graduated students. Even people I haven't met were willing to help when I reached out to them via LinkedIn knowing we both came from the same school. 

Don't be fooled that you will get a job super easily after you graduated, you'd still have to put a lot of effort into it, continue learning and applying A LOT, but everyone who stays on it eventually lands the job. During my interview process I've learnt that Fullstack Academy is highly rated among employers and that's your entrance ticket for landing an interview. After that it is your skills, your mindset, your knowledge and how well you prepare. It may take you anywhere from one week to a year to get that job, but you will and that's the point. The industry is very competitive and you'd have to compete with people who have Computer Science degrees and maybe even some experience. So I just want to be honest with you that it will take a lot of work and determination and believing in yourself. I think that the most important thing you'll get from Fullstack Academy is confidence that YOU CAN DO THIS and super important tips on applying and shining during your interview. 

A separate topic is people -- people at Fullstack Academy are just AMAZING, they have a no-ass strict policy for all staff and students. So when pair-programming you can be sure there is a kind, respectful person on the other side who is willing to help, it makes the whole process so much easier. They create a safe space for you to speak up and ask questions, that was super important to me. There are also some extra-curriculum activities, games etc. to let you all get to know each other and just have fun! 

Overall, highly recommend!

This one was one of the best experiences I've had in my adult life. Sounds dramatic, but working with full stack helped me to reawaken the potential from inside of myself that I have not felt since college. Enrolling in FSA was the first step of my career change into software engineering. The admissions process was tougher than I expected. New students must have a firm grasp of javascript basics, and must pass a coding assessment and interview process to be placed in a cohort. The pace is described as "drinking from a firehose", which sounds intimidating, but is really a blessing in disguise. The staff is very supportive, and students are assigned to Fellows for more individualized help and feedback. I started to fall behind at certain points of the program, but the instructors recognized the pattern, and provided additional resources and weekend lectures to help me catch up. The fast pace really helps to instill confidence in students when it comes to learning new technology. In 12 weeks, I would say I learned at least 15 new technologies. This has built my confidence to the point where I feel that I can handle learning any new tech in just a few days. 

The post-graduate career success team has been wonderful to work with. There is constant support, and weekly meets to share resources, thoughts, concerns, and successes during the job search. 

It is a pricy program, but the personal growth, and networking opportunities are well worth it in my opinion. I even stayed on to serve as a Teaching Fellow myself. The experience has been very rewarding. 

Before attending Fullstack Academy, I was a fashion designer working full time during the pandemic and decided to quit my job to become a software engineer. It was such a crazy decision to make, but it's well worth it because I got an offer from a company that I really like after about 3-4 months of job searching. I think 3-4 months was reasonable and as expected. 

I attended the Grace Hopper Program at FA from Sep 2020 to Dec 2020. The full-time remote immersive program was super intense, I was very emotional because there were too many tools to learn in such a short amount of time. I struggled a lot during Junior Phase but I didn't give up, and all of our instructors, Jess, Finn, Ben were very helpful. We also had great fellows like Maddie, Ashlee, and Tori, so I suggest booking as many office hours as you can with the instructors and fellows if you are struggling. 

After Senior Phase and graduation, we had a "Launch Day" with potential employers. It operated as a job fair, we could attend their section to learn more about the company then reach out to the recruiter afterward. After the Launch Day, I emailed the recruiters and got an interview with Bloomberg and another digital media company, so I liked how FA organized the event. Just don't expect to have an interview with the recruiters and received a job offer right away on Launch Day, it's not going to work like that anymore, you have to put in the work to do your part instead of wait for FA/someone to give you a job. For the job searching part, if you are still unemployed 2 months after graduation, you can apply to be a mentee and have a mentor (FA alumni working full time as a software engineer) to guide you. I would like to thank my career coach, Jolie for assigning a great mentor for me. I would also like to thank Trent for hosting job search Q&A events every other week so we have a place to share our interviewing experience. 

Overall I am satisfied with the FA's immersive program and career assistance, the only thing I would suggest for improvement is to make the class size smaller and hire more career coaches. I highly recommend FA to those who are willing to work hard and have a positive attitude.

Fullstack Academy (FSA) transformed me from a beginner of almost zero coding experience to a full-time employed full-stack developer within 10 months. To clarify, the 10 months cover pre-bootcamp preparation, self-paced foundation phase, immersive junior and senior phases (the main body of FAS), and 3 months of job hunting after graduation. My program focused on web development; the curriculum covered a up-to-date set of full-stack languages and technologies, including Javascript, React, Node.js, Postgresql, and Express. On top of that, the program also strongly encouraged students to explore languages and technologies outside the curriculum through solo and team projects. In my case, my team and I also learned AWS, React Native, Xcode, among many other tools. Although there are always more new technologies to learn, the stack on FSA's curriculum turned out very useful and practical in the current market. In my case, the core technologies and tools I will use for my job are those I learned from FSA.

Besides the tech stack, I was able to build three projects, which will constitute an important part of my resumes in the job market. Moreover,  FSA operated the program using the method of Agile software development, which is widely used in the tech industry. My classmates and I practiced pair-programming throughout the immersive phases and the pairing changed every single time to make sure most students got to work together. We also built projects starting from writing a user story, to diagraming workflow and using Github Kanban, to attending daily stand-ups and weekly code reviews, and to a final presentation. All these practices prepared me well for the real working environment.

The instructors at FSA are AWESOME! My cohort (2009 => 20 means 2020 and 09 means September, I know, it took me a while to figure this out) started during the pandemic. As a previous teacher myself, I totally understand the difficulties to teach online. However, FSA instructors did a wonderful job. They structured their lectures in a clear way. They were knowledgable, attentive and patient. They constantly checked in on everyone and were very willing to pause and answer any questions. Additionally, they all have different personalities, and made the lectures engaging, interesting, and funny in their own ways. (Jessica Bracht, Natalie Lane, Bienvenido Rodriguez, Travis Stratton, and Finn Terdal, thank you so much for being patient and caring!)

I also benefited from the fellow system at FSA. Every 6-7 students at FSA were assigned with a teaching fellow who usually graduated a cohort ahead. Our fellow organized group lunch every week to get together, to discuss everyone's process and struggles, to share strategies and resources, and also simply to chat and to get to know each other. My fellow Bobby Ton was super encouraging and supportive throughout the entire process. He was there to support me when my laptop broke down in the middle of the bootcamp, and he also wrote a wonderful recommendation letter for me after my graduation. (Thank you, Bobby! You are the best!)

FAS career assistance started during our senior phase and fully kicked in after our graduation. Career advisors gave talks on every crucial steps in job hunting. They also provided one-on-one meetings to help me prepare resume, linkedIn profile, and also a pitch speech (Thank you for helping me and supporting me, Dezzi Rae Marshall). Although I found it hard to do all this while working on my senior projects, it is good to just start. After graduation, they selected and regularly send out job opportunities, job fairs, and various events related to job hunting. I found this very helpful and the two job offers I got were both from the events my career advisor recommended. Moreover, it was very convenient to book a one-on-one meeting with my career advisor to discuss literally anything about job hunting. I discussed with my career advisor to speed up my application, report my progress and figure out what's working and what's not, prepare interviews, and negotiate salary. In addition, the career advisors also reached out to FSA alumni to organized panels, pair newly graduated students with experiences alumni to provide mentorship, and they also offer meditation sessions! (Thank you so much for always being there for me throughout the job hunting process, Trent Rhodes!)

I highly recommend FSA. As I said in my title, FSA is an awesome program that is worth your time and money. If I have to say anything for improvement, I wish the class size were smaller and there were more guidances on the Async week. Perhaps these would not have been issues if it were not for the pandemic. Oh oh, one last request, please consider adding digital accessibility into the curriculum!

I graduated from Fullstack's Web Development Fellowship in July 2020 (shout out to WDF-2004!!!). I'm currently set to begin an internship this summer at a company that aligns well with my values and interests and will stretch my knowledge and experience of languages and tools I was exposed to at Fullstack.

I had the privilege to begin the bootcamp prep in person with those who would be my cohort mates in January 2020 under the instruction of Sarah Zhao (who is so amazing at what she does). Post-lockdown, the program went remote but smoothly with Orlando Caraballo and Julissa Napoletano as our instructors. They provided a nice balance in the course of or class week, were very encouraging, and kept our learning fun. Retrospectives and check-ins with Oscar Robles were absolutely necessary for us as we were all experiencing the strain of being in lockdown and also the stress and trauma of social injustices happening around us. The curriculum was intense but taught us the full NERDS (Node.js, Express, React & Redux, and Databases using SQL) stack. We got to complete some fun workshops, pair program with our peers, and build some amazing projects during the senior (last) phase of the program. Those projects helped me when interviewing because I was excited to talk about what I've been able to build because of Fullstack.

Career Success services and our Flight (post-grad) program were great and definitely instrumental in my job search success. Special thank you to Jolie Dudley, Trent Rhodes, and my remote coach Laura McClernon for being such an instrumental part in my job search and interview readiness prep. You feedback and support were invaluable.

Overall, my experience at Fullstack was AMAZING and I would highly recommend them to anyone interested in Web Development. The Web Development Fellowship (WDF), which is in partnership with the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, is quite competitive but allows you a tuition-free education with the same curriculum as a normal Fullstack student.

I'm a recent grad from the Fullstack WDF program. It was such an intense learning experience, and the staff there seem to truly care about your success. They handled all questions from my cohort gracefully and patiently, no matter how silly or repetitive the questions were. The career service team provided us with an abundant amount of information, and made themselves available if we ever needed extra office hours to discuss our individual career goals. 

ProsExtremely supportive and amazing staff. Curriculum is constantly updated, and I feel like I have a solid foundation to enter the job market.

ConsIt's extremely fast-paced (but hey, it's called a bootcamp for a reason), and sometimes we had to learn like 5 different technologies in one week, which seemed overwhelming at the time. I had to do Udemy courses and watch youtube videos to solidify the material. Their algorithm and data structure preparation is not as robust as I would have liked. I would have preferred to have more structured lessons on data structures, and going over solution patterns.

Overall, I highly recommend this bootcamp. The staff are there to support you as much as they can, but at the end of the day it's up to you to dedicate the time and effort to ensure you really understand the material.