General Assembly

General Assembly was an overall great experience. I came into the course with previous experience programming, particularly with Java, and that was definitely a great help. I feel that the course gave me an excellent, solid foundation with Android fundamentals. I was also able to put together a decent portfolio of projects that I'll be able to continue to develop as I learn new skills.

As far as career assistance goes, General Assembly put me in a good place to help myself get a job. I have a personal portfolio website hosted by github, a complete Linkedin page, and an up to date resume. I also maintain access to the carreer assistance program for as long as I need, so long as I am actively applying for jobs and regularly attending networking events.

I am currently actively looking for jobs, and there are certainly a lot of options in the New York City area. The only issue is that most postings ask for 2+ years of professional development experience, with at least a year of Android development. This is a tough requirement for any recent graduate of a program that teaches a new skill, but can be particularly tough for someone who is switching careers from a non-technical background.

TL;DR: I recommend the program. Previous programming experience is not required, but helps. Career assistance helps you help yourself.

Course iteself was actually well run and provided good information about the grwoing field.  My issues with it are more related to how it is looked upon or treated by the school itself.  It seems too stand aone within the curriculum and unfortunately the course and the students seem to be treaetd as the cliched red headed step children of General Assembly. 

After finishing the course it felt like I was just providing tuition to the school and thats all they cared about.

Just my thoughts. Thanks anyway.

I really enjoyed this class. It is definitely intense and a lot of info to pack into one week but if you need to learn these skills quick I would highly recomend it. The teacher, Suzanne, is great and goes into depth on many of the topics. I feel more confiendent to position myself as a Product Manager as I progress in my career. We did a lot of activities to really put into practice what we were learning. This is intnese though, make sure you are aware of that before committing, you have to dedicate you week to this to get as much as you can out of it. 

Overall a great experience and I learned a great deal about Digital Marketing strategy and digital markeitng plan execution.

After completing the course, I have more insight and understanding into Digital Marketing (strategy, language/vocabulary).  As I read articles/blogs about Digital Marketing trends or practices (native advertising, retargeting, etc), I am able to follow along with the article and have an understanding of the concepts.

The course is a bit long, but there's alot to learn.  During class, the information and content felt a bit disjointed and not connected, but the last 3-4 classes brought all the information together and the various components started to make more sense.

I have many years of traditional marketing experience and this course has helped me to better understand digital marketing and has expanded my knowledge base as a business person and a marketer.

I'm graduating today from the Web Development Immersive program and I could not be more pleased with how the entire experience went. The instructors were amazing, the staff was great and the curriculum was challenging.

I feel that I now have an incredible background to help propel me into web development. Not only did we learn languages and frameworks that are relevant to the market, we learned how to learn. I went from thinking "there's no way I can solve this" to "I can work through and figure this out." I would highly recommend this course (especially in Denver) to anyone who has an interest in web development. 

I cannot describe how disappointed I am. I partly blame my own judgement. The curriculum looked very attractive with all the topics I hoped to learn. But if you think about it - they promise you to become a data scientist in two months with two 3-hour lectures a week? Common! I totally understand that the course would cost more if you extended it, but this is exactly why I will not recommend it to anyone who asks me for advice. In the end it feels like I wasted my money. I'd prefer to pay more and learn properly, than pay less and pretend learning.

They could probably save the situation if they put more support in place. But support was not there. For money you pay you expect someone there to help you when you are stuck with your code or understanding and interpreting models. But no, you are basically alone! In the end I found all answers I needed interacting in stackoverflow.com and learnt how different models really worked watching youtube videos by some prominent universities.

The structure of the course and the pace are also totally wrong. We were asked to start working on a final project on week 3 before we covered all the topics. No feedback whatsoever! So instead of practising useful skills, playing with modelling etc., students ended up fighting bad data sets and working on tasks which were unrealistic.

So if you ask me - don’t waste your money. You will get the same knowledge elsewhere for free. Or if you have more money and time, do it properly.

Overall thoroughly enjoyed the courses. The lecturer was engaging and Amanda was very supportive, especially as I started quite behind. I also enjoyed the guest speakers, which added a bit of real life flavour for the industry and what being a 'data scientest' actually meant.

One area that could definitly improve though was the slides. When reviewing them post lecture or trying to draw on them for the final project weeks later, they had very little information that was possible to follow. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but would have been good to have more structure to them.

I took the Part-Time 10 week Product Management Course at General Assembly beginning August of 2016. The two instructors were incredible, Sherika and Jocelyn both have a deep background in Product Management (Jocelyn with tech companies and start-ups, Sherika with large private companies). Both brought so much experience to this class. The portion of the class I most enjoyed was that I gained so many different skillsets in a short period of time from user-experience design to writing and pitching my product proposal to developing roadmaps. For anyone with an entreprenurial bent or who wants to know enough to lead teams with very different goals and personalities, this is the course for you.

Disclosure: I am a GA employee but I am writing honestly. 

I took Front End Web Development (FEWD) at the NY campus in 2016. Overall I had an excellent experience. 

Pros:

-my instructor, Chandler, was awesome. So knowledgeable, very engaging up in front of the class (tough to do-- 3 hours x twice a week x 10 weeks), always available to help with projects outside of class, and also a fun guy outside of class.  Our TAs were also incredibly helpful. 

-my classmates were so cool. There were a lot of designers in my class who were looking to get more technical and I loved making friends with them. Also some ppl in adtech, and some ppl with more traditional IT jobs looking to expand their skills. We went out for drinks as a class a few times and I've kept in touch with some ppl professionally. 

-the space. The campus is awesome and very well located. 

Cons:

-Chandler did a great job organizing all the content so I knew where to find everything, but I think he built the website where he organized everything himself, so I don't think other teachers' classes materials are as well organized. 

-I wish there had been a little more time built into class for the students to get to know each other. I think if the connections had happened earlier we could have helped each other more easily instead of just relying on Chandler. 

-The onboarding experience was pretty non-existent, though idk if i got something different bc I work at GA?

I came to the UXD Immersive course on the back of trying to find a role in UX Design following the part time course I have completed at GA.

If you are serious and committed to learning and have a real passion for UX you will learn a lot; about yourself just as much as about UX Design (That goes hand in hand.. doesnt it??) 

I have nothing but positive feedback to give everyone at General Assembly Melbourne; the instructors and GA Staff have equally been helpful, professional, supportive and instilled a great  depth and wealth of knowledge and experience which hopefully will now allow me to take my first steps professionally with ease.

My experience on the London WDI course at GA was very mixed and hard to say if I would recommend it to anyone or not, and I will try my best to explain why. I shall first start off with the Pro's of doing the course, then get onto the Con's. I finished the course a few months ago so have had time to process my experience and to then see how it prepared me for the outside job hunting world. 

So, Pro's:

The overall feel and atmosphere of the campus was really enjoyable. It has a nice little homework area where you can hang out and work after lessons and it does not feel sterile. So after a long day of coding you can move to a more relaxing state if you need. All of the staff were approachable and it had a real sense of community. I had never been in a place where I had gotten along with everyone there, and for this reason i loved GA. It thrives a relaxed learning population. Also, the social side of the GA is pretty big and there are lots of drinks involved.

The other main Pro is that the tutors at GA put effort into teaching you. They stay every night to help till around 10pm, then come in on the weekends to help during projects too and it never once felt like they didn't want to be there. 

The other students were all lovely, which is great as GA promotes pair coding, which is great.

I also would have to say that I did learn a lot of coding information and terms.. and I say "information and terms" as I picked up a lot of terminology, also basic structuring of websites and a basic knowledge of what certain words mean... although....

.... Con's:

I did NOT learn, in depth javascript, or other languages, which I thought was a very important thing to pick up in a three month coding course. But instead of going in depth in javascript, we skimmed that, then skimmed jQuery, then skimmed AngularJS etc etc till we had covered many different technologies, but never focused a lot on one to pick it up properly. This in tern made me aware of all these things and gave me some small understanding, but left me not understanding fully how to even write Javascript, or anything else, from scratch.

We were told to copy code a lot of the time, and when I would ask what parts of the code did, i just got told to copy it and I did not need to understand what it did. 

There was not a lot of code checking and feedback of progress. Was rare that I had the tutor look through my code properly and give me feedback or in depth help. The tutor would sometimes take my laptop and do the coding for me on parts, therefor leaving me without the knowledge but with working code, this happened a lot, and it felt like I was just being given four projets to take to interviews, but was very concerned that if i got asked about the code, I could not answer the questions, as a lot of it was not my work. (also a lot of other students work from group project weeks).

So given the above you would think that I would not recommend, but, i think that GA messed up this one time.

Basically our class was the biggest one, and there were too many students per tutor. Way too many to get proper help, which is proabably why i got told to copy a lot. They do not have classes this big after us i don't think. Also, we had a tutor that was new to teaching and did not do a good job. We would not pick up entire lessons through this reason. That tutor is no longer there. The course was trying a new structure that did not work. Our homework was not a natural flow from the work in the day, and we felt like nothing flowed and a lot of the time was confused about the structure of learning, but they have now realised what they did wrong and the newer classes seem to be working well again. 

So, if we were just an unlucky class, and now they have less students, more time to help one on one and the structure is sorted, I would strongly recommend GA. But, this may be an up and down process, so cannot say for sure.

I'll leave by saying, outcomes really do try hard to find you a job after and if you do the work they will do everything they can to help you. There is a lot of support after leaving and I was one of the lucky ones that landed a job very quickly after leaving.

So GA does get you work after!! As always, if you put the hard work in, no matter what, you will get there. :)

I took Data Analytics last summer at General Assembly. I've always been interested in working with data and it's always come naturally, but I haven't had a lot of opportunities to develop those skills in the jobs I've had up until this point. I took this course so it could give me hands on -real world experience working with data, and it definetly delivered. Our instructor worked at YikYak and the TA was from a data team at Turner, so it was really interesting hearing from both how they used those tools in their daily work. I felt supported on topics that were challenging to me, and I was always able to dig deeper into areas that felt a bit easier. Now I'm a go-to person at work if anyone ever has a question about excel, and I feel confident that I can use this experience to my advantage on my next job hunt as well.