General Assembly

I had a good experience attending General Assembly - my teachers were knowledgeable and engaging, my classmates were awesome, and the material was good for the change I was making. 

I think my overall impression since having left is not great though. There is no interest or support for students after they leave and GA misses a huge mark by not pursuing alumni engagement. 

Lots of potential and good opportunities here, especially in the DC network, but I think this GA team is more focused on its own internal drama and not enough on growing a solid curriculum and network. 

I had a great experience at General Assembly's Web Development Immersive. I came into it with virtually no programming experience, other than the pre-work we were assigned after enrolling. It's a cliche, but it is definitely a situation where you get out of it what you put into it, and I worked as hard as I could tolerate throughout the 12 weeks (and I continue to do so), because I knew how much catching up I would have to do to be able to market myself and my skills.

The instructors were excellent, very knowledgeable and available, with varying experience levels between them. The course itself was very project-focused, so that we would have applications to demo for potential employers at the end of it, but there was also ample time given to covering concepts we might expect to be asked about in interviews, and what to expect upon entering the workforce. 

The only major complaint I have is the focus on Ruby on Rails for so much of the course, despite its apparent dwindling in popularity in my development market. I understand later WDIs incorporated more JavaScript/Node, which I wish I had had more exposure to throughout the course. 

It's important to understand how little you actually know even after intensely working for 12 weeks, but as long as an incoming students expectations of both the process and the results are appropriate, I'd recommend it. The real value in the course (for me, anyway) was in providing enough knowledge and experience to enable continued self-teaching with the vast supply of tutorials, articles, and other online resources.

I can't speak for campuses across the country and world, but the New York campus I experienced was a tremendously helpful/open community of people interested in learning web development and growing in the tech industry. I never experienced (though I have heard stories) of people who felt ostracized or put down by those with more knowledge/skills. Overall, I think the community as a student is a good one for fostering learning.

In terms of the coursework, we had very experienced instructors who had taught multiple immersives and TA's who had taken them themselves. We primarily focused on Javascript over Ruby (I believe we were one of the first classes to do so at GA), which I felt at the time was a good decision considering the movement in the industry towards using JS across the stack.

In terms of my background, I was coming from a tech role (I was formerly a product manager at a tech company) so I had had some experience in coding in my free time. I think due to that I felt frustrated at times by the pace of the class which spent a good deal of the first month on beginner aspects of web development. While I understand why it's structured that way (not everyone comes from tech), I wish a few of those weeks had been moved into pre-work. I think moving that work into pre-work would have helped prepare students for the rigors of web development and allowed us to get into more advanced topics quicker. One of the things I heard while interviewing is that students don't come out with enough exposure to the computer sciency aspects of development that some companies don't feel confident hiring grads because of that. There's just too much unknown that the student can pick up those concepts.

On that topic, I was somewhat disappointed with the career placement services. I felt it was a lot of resume and cover letter re-writing, as opposed to introduction to hiring managers and advice on how to continue your growth following the class. I actually felt I got better advice from a handful of recruiters I met who openly told me that they didn't have any jobs for me, but helped out of the goodness of their hearts. I felt, at times, that I was left to fend for myself when it came to meeting hiring managers and given GA's considerable size that it should have been able to leverage its community more productively than it did.

That being said, I did get hired within 3 months of graduating as a developer so all in all I'm a success story!

General Assembly is great if you only focus on the teachers, the environment, the students, the curriculum, and the outcomes. But, after all, these are for-profit businesses. More and more you started to see these things creep into life at general assembly. While they say not everyone who has the money can get in, I'm not sure I believe it. They have less of a focus on paying upper echelon teachers now than when they started. There's more of a reliance on TAs who get paid fairly low amounts (and are typically previous students to keep those outcomes numbers high). They cut benefits like happy hours and lunches that bring students together and improve networks. They raise tuition whenever possible (despite the fact that all they are providing are a space and knowledge, they charge more per hour than even the most vicious private colleges).

Would I do it again? Yes. It is solely responsible for getting me where I am today. But if they're not careful, bootcamps will be analagous with low-quality in the years to come.

Work hard, make awesome projects (and rockin portfolio), network, and you'll be fine here.

Product Managment Certification (Part-Time)

I found the program solid and helpful. I’ve been in product management for about seven years now. This program is much for new professionals or those seeking to enter the profession. However, I went in with the objective of defragmenting my knowledge from years of various PM roles is very different kinds of companies and products. The program did its job, I was able to:

• Defragment my experience into core best practices.
• Understand what kind of product manager I am vs. what kind of product manager I want to be.
• Have confidence in customer centricity and testing assumptions and hypotheses using scientific method. (…and fighting for that in the organizations I work for where needed.)

I would recommend this part-time course to anyone interested in product management and is NOT YET a product person or within their first three years.

Where this program did not serve me as a senior level product manager:

(But I didn’t expect it to…)

• We didn’t spend much time on
• Product Strategy and strategic thinking
• Steering a product with metric data or refining KPIs and metrics as a result.
• Product finance
  • Pricing
  • Profit and loss

This class was a complete waste of time. The teacher sped through all of the crucial aspects of basic Photoshop, but spent an exorbitant amount of time going over the simplest tasks (like opening a new file). I expected to come out of the class having at learned at least the basics of inserting an image onto a different background. The teacher was obviously very skilled with the program, but was not good at slowing down to repeat herself and show how she made her changes. The teacher also didn't handle individual questions well - she told several students she didn't know the answers to their questions and was visibly irritated when the class didn't catch what she said and asked her to repeat. I was VERY disappointed in this class and learned nothing new from it. If you want to learn Photoshop I'd suggest saving your money, repeating free online classes, and if you want one on one help, spend the $60 on an hour of tutoring. You'll learn more that's actually useful. 

Part-time course taken on campus in Austin, Texas. Designed to give students an all-encompassing and actionable understanding of digital marketing best practices. Upon enrolling in the course I had about 8 months marketing experience/learning and was employed full-time in a marketing position (note: by a company that knew as much about marketing as Jon Snow knows about anything) and pursuing my own venture on the side. This course was great for filling in the knowledge gaps for me and giving me the chance to ask questions of an experienced marketing professional (instructor). Prior to the course I did not in any way know how to build a marketing strategy from scratch- now I do and the class was worth every penny and minute in that regard. 

I took the User Experience Design Immersive course that ended in May 2016.  Overall, I had a great experience.  I feel like I gained a really solid foundation for understanding what UX is, and also some great practical skills for moving forward.  I think the fact that the GA course is structured around 5 projects allowed me to gain invaluable experience in working on teams, and design presentation/storytelling that will be very useful for me as I move forward in my career.  I found my classmates to be interesting to talk to, and generally very nice people, and they definitely helped push my thinking and understanding forward.  My instructors pushed me just the right amount, while also being available for support as needed.  The curriculum does a great job of hitting on the fundamentals.

All that said, it's important to point out that my experience is that this course is planned pretty much as well as a 10-week course on UX design could be planned.  But that 10 weeks by itself won't be enough.  In order to find your first job, you should expect to have to do some networking during the course, and also more networking after the course, as well as additional work on your portfolio after the course.  All that said, like anything else, UX is an ongoing learning process, and I felt like my 10 weeks prepared me well to move forward in the field.  Overall, I recommend the GA class highly for anyone is motivated to enter the field of UX design.

I am deeply disturbed by this program and its lack of professionalism, and it makes me really sad since I had great expectations.

The curriculum is poorly managed and developed. A lot of it is borrowed from, or exactly the same as, free online resources like code school and codeacademy. Yet for this program, you pay 13,500.

The grading and supervision is all over the map. I've gotten perfect marks on assignments where multiple other students hit the criteria better than me, just because of the luck of the draw on the instructor you get grading you.

In my class, 1/4 of the near 15 students failed out after the second unit. Another half of the class was 'held back' because the instruction was so spotty, and missed out on an entire unit that we paid to be taught. 

The assignments that you do on your own are very misleading. A lot of this work needs to be structured into your weekend, which is fine -- however frequently assignments will say that it is expected to take four hours when reality it is more like 12. It causes a lot of confusion and makes it impossible to plan your schedule. 

The outcomes, or career support, is nonsensical. Anyone with half a brain will know most of the content anyway, as it pertains to developing a resume and your professional brand. 

The projects, which are supposed to be building your portfolio, are often really just excuses for the professors to regroup or plan lessons. You get no support while you are trying to do these projects, and for that reason usually half the class's projects are unfit to use on any portfolio worth a recruiter's time.

The lesson plans in particular, are atrocious. Often half the class is eaten up by troubleshooting because the lessons haven't been updated for the latest version of a given technology, or because half the professors are on an older version of that technology. One half of our class was taught a language that is eminently expiring, so they will have to relearn that entire unit. Just poor, poor planning. 

When you bring concerns to the staff, they have a very typical bubbly young startup reaction, which is to try to compliment you and be jocular to get you to buy in to the premise again. In reality this is just a terribly, terribly run program, and a terribly, terribly poor product.

I wish I would have done more research, or gone with any other school. They are all roughly the same insofar as pricing, and I can only imagine they would be a vast improvement. Steer clear. 

GA's Front-End Web Development (FEWD) course was a fantastic way to kickstart my career and make a long-awaited transition from journalism into tech. 

I came across the FEWD course shortly after GA moved to London and after meeting Devin Hunt (the lead instructor) and the GA support team I was excited to enrol in the program.

I had no prior programming experience going into the course and I must admit I was a little nervous but the instructors adapted to the pace of the class well throughout and I now have a great website which utilises HTML5, CSS3, JQuery.

I not only learned alot on the UX design immersive course, I grew and developed into a UX practitioner, honing and developing my craft as I work on more projects.

Without GA I would not have been able to change my career and make so many wonderful friends along the way. I think the course has changed my life and it has helped me do what I always wanted to do, make a small contribution and impact, improving lives, products and services incrementally a little bit day by day.

My hat and thanks go out to my instructors and our course producer Laura who made it such a memorable experience.