General Assembly

GA was one of the best decisions and experiences in my life, mainly due to the amazing leaders here and the community of people that I have met, that will be long lasting relationships. It has certainly enriched my life. 

I graduated from the General Assembly UXDI program at the NY campus, in December 2017. I am now 2 weeks into my first full-time UX Designer position and couldn't be happier.

I had such wonderful and dedicated mentors. I am extremely impressed with the guidance, support, encouragement, communication and opportunities that my GA instructors and career coaches have continuously provided me. I can't thank them enough for helping me transition and advance in my career so seamlessly!

That being said, the course itself is intensive. A lot of work compacted into an accelerated program. It's not for everyone but it was perfect for my situation. I come from a visual design background with 10+ years in marketing so I was looking to solidify my UX design knowledge in practice, to transition in my career. I took a 6 month online course with another school prior but that only wet my appetite. The in class GA UXDI course offered much more guidance and collaborative effort, which made a huge difference for me. The course covers a broad range of topics but there isn't enough time to really put everything to practice before you move onto more material. The projects help solidify concepts. You get as much as you put into it so be sure to ask questions and dig deeper into any topic that you're not strong in.

In terms of professional development, I can't speak for everyone but I receieved great support from them. I was also proactive in communicating with them post course, which I'm sure has an impact on the outcome. My current job was actually reccomended to me by one of the GA career coaches. They were just as proactive in helping me along and now I am in a company and position that I was looking for, as a great starting point to my new career.

The course was heavily overpriced for anyone not being covered by work.

The curriculum and instructors did not provide a thoroughly instructive approach for any form of "product manager."

The course attempts to instruct would-be and aspiring entrepreneurs on the basics of business and product management, while also claiming to and attempting to cover the nuances of actual product management within an established company -- failing to sufficiently train in either.

My experience may have been tainted by the instructor Aditi Joshi. She ultimately showed with little respect for students, feigning interest and recognition of the importance of questions, answering in ways that illustrated her own "impressive" experience and awareness of trends instead of addressing the nuance and struggle with concepts behind a student's question. It's possible that a more attentive and talented instructor would have been able to substantially address product management in both the entrepreneurial and established business contexts, but seems like the course is just most likely over-ambitious and should be split up into 2 different courses.

This course ticked every box for me - excellent instructors with a balance of strong knowledge, great teaching methods and a sense of humour; challenging and engaging course material; combo of class work and autonomous projects; real sense of community. The pace is fast and I had a little bit of exposure to (non-web-dev) coding before starting, so I found that the speed and level of engagement expected was perfect for me. That being said I was doing hours and hours of coding outside of school hours, but the hours flew because it was so damn fun.

Before enrolling, one big factor for me was whether to go part-time or full-time (immersive), as it's a big financial commitment to go full-time. I can 100% recommend going full-time immersive if you're in a career change position - the job assistance (Outcomes) program makes it REALLY worthwhile.

Although I graduated with a marketing degree in May, I felt that my formal education leaned more on theory than practice. I came to General Assembly to get the most up-to-date digital marketing tactics. This course re-ignited my love of learning, most of which I had lost in the rigor of my university program. The instructors were top notch; they explained difficult concepts clearly and got me excited to put what I learned into practice. My entire GA experience, from onboarding, to the class sessions, to the alumni benefits package, to staying in the loop with the community has changed how I view education. I now consider myself a life-long learner and have General Assembly to thank for that. I had such a positive student experience that I continue to stay involved with the GA community, by attending a few events and workshops each month. I have nothing but great things to say about GA!

The couse was well structured, the lectures were packed with up-to-date industry knowledge. And almost more importantly, the projects provided immediate application and a rip-the-band-aid type experience to get our cohort into the UX mindset.

As the course went on, there were less chances for feedback, so I personally saught it as much as possible.

If you want to pivot and make that big change in your life, it's going to be a lot about you having the right mindset to do so. In Tyler Hartrich's class, he emphasizes having this mindset over and over which I now realize was absolutely crucial to me getting everything I could out of the class to make this transition.

This transformative experience can be daunting and very challenging, and I don't think it would have been possible without General Assembly's UXDI program and Tyler Hartrich's teaching method.

I took this course to update my HTML skills and learn CSS. Before selecting General Assembly, I checked out online reviews, took their free course and checked out two other online schools. I thought General Assembly would give me the skills I was looking for so I could create engaging webpages.

I was wrong about General Assembly. After completing the 10-week course, I was still confused about CSS and I did not have the skills to make my website match my design. Here's what disappointed me:

• Curriculum was old. It was written in 2014 and hadn't been updated. Tech moves quickly and I want a curriculum that is current.
• Weekly lectures were never live - they were taped. So I could watch them, but I couldn't interact with the instructor and ask questions.
• Limited to one mentor session per week, so I couldn't work ahead and finish the course in less time.
• Mentor sessions were rushed.
• Not enough hands-on coding practice.
• No lifetime access to the material learned. Most online schools give you unlimited access to your lessons.

My original plan was to take the JavaScript class from General Assembly, but for the above reasons, I instead searched for another school to learn that skill. I chose Skillcrush and for the same cost of one 10-week General Assembly JavaScript class, I got unlimited access to all their front and back end web developer courses along with a complete suite of web designer courses and wordpress coding courses. After four months at Skillcrush, I am now confident in my HTML, CSS, web design and JavaScript abilites and am actually creating engaging pages that match my designs. 

I recommend you avoid General Assembly and check out Skillcrush instead. I wish I had gone to Skillcrush first.

I was a student in General Assembly's 12-week Web Development Immersive program in San Francisco in the fall of 2017. Altogether, I learned SO MUCH throughout the program and now feel like I can be a lifelong independent development learner. The program is fast paced, very dynamic, and well suited for motivated learners.

You really get out of the program what you put into it and to succeed you need to take ownership of your learning. There is a lot of assistance available (office hours, TAs, classmates, etc.), but you need to be proactive in seeking out additional support when you need it. 

The curriculum is updated regularly based on feedback from graduates and employers, which is great to see, but that means not everything is completely ironed out before teaching. 

I was very impressed with the instructors (especially Justin!). The teachers really matter in a course that is actively taught 40 hours a week and General Assembly seems to do a great job selecting and supporting the staff. 

This rigorous program was the best decision I've ever made, hands down. I've learned so much in such a short amount of time, which would have never been possible just learning everything by myself. It's a commitment and you must devote every aspect of your life to, learning how to program and not just that, but how does everything work and why it works. Being at General Assembly I not only gained valuable skills like learning how to build an express backend, building full stack ruby applications, even the ins-and-outs of git just to name a few, but I gained an incredible community of like-minded individuals who I'm happy to call my friends as well. The toughest experience of my life, but I would not hesitate to do this all over again.

One thing I would recommend is that you sharpen your JS skills to a very refined point. This program moves FAST! So, make friends that will help you along the way of this tough as nails journey. One thing I do have to say that probably isn't too positive is that some of the instructors simply didn't really care, you'll have to weed those out and yea it will be apparent. I had two in my cohort, one didn't really care and the other was already on level 900000 when trying to explain certain things, basically wasn't too beginner friendly. The curriculum needs a little bit of work too, but don't be afraid to speak up and let the instructors know what is needed in aiding you with the learning process. For example, I fought for screencasts of certain lectures as well as others from my cohort and oh boy! did that help.

Oh and yea, I hardly had any programming experience beforehand, maybe only a few months of HTML, CSS, and JS...yup, the basics(all from free code camp). Also, no CS degree!! Currently, just graduated.

I recently completed the Web Development Immersive course at General Assembly in Boston. It was an amazing experience and I recommend it highly. It's a grueling course - 12 weeks, M-F, 9-5 with 1-2 hours of homework per night. Puctuality and attendance are critical, in order to graduate you can only have 5 tardies and only 3 missed days. I don't recommend missing any days if it can be helped because you'll miss so much in one day. During the course you complete four full-stack web applications, 3 individual and one group project. The curricilum is excellent. They ensure that you learn the basics of how JavaScript works (e.g. closures, async, prototypical inheritance, truthy/falsey, hoisting, promises, etc.). Their style of instruction really helps to cement the concepts in your brain. For each topic there is typically a lecture, demo (they show you how to code it), code-along (they code along with you), and lab (you code it yourself or in a small group). The instructors are engaging and helpful (without doing the work for you). They definitely teach you to stand on your own. My only constructive feedback is that I wish they taught a more popular web framework than Ember. I get why Ember: it "goes with" Ruby, it's opinionated, and easy to teach, and I realize that they can't teach everything. But I would have liked to have learned React or Angular which are more popular than Ember.

The makeup of the class participants is really diverse. Lots of women, non-white, and all around not totally straight, white 20-something males. Also people from all sorts of backgrounds from teaching to real estate, to just about anything.

The career support is terrific. You meet with them once a week as a group where they help you with your personal brand, LinkedIn, resume, networking, portfolio, and more. They give you personal feedback, and are available for 1x1s weekly as well. They continue their support post-graduation as well.

The instructional space is really nice. The office is conveniently located steps from South Station. It's a brand new space, with large classrooms, individual meeting rooms, "phone booths", a large lobby and students lounge with coffee, water, refrigerator, etc. The front-lines support staff is super-helpful and supply laptop chargers, phone chargers, etc. They also keep the space in tip-top condition.

I can't say enough good things about it, and would recommend it to anyone interested in a coding bootcamp.

I attended a 6 day Product Management Course in London and was hugely impressed by the quality of the instruction, resources and activities. Our class of 20 students came from a hugely diverse background, aged 25 to 55, 7 different nationalities, 50/50 male and female. This meant that I got to work with so many different people who brought ideas to the class that I had never considered. Quality instruction was blended with individual and group work in class and supported by homework activities. I worked on a personal project during the week that mirrored the course content, culminating in a presentation of my project on the final (6thth) day. A tiring, but highly informative course. I began implanting the ideas at work on the very next day.