LEARN Academy

I came to LEARN to disrupt my mid-career boredom. There were a few bootcamp-style options, but I was drawn to LEARN for several reasons: the unique internship aspect of the program; a commitment to diversity I saw in their staff, alumni, and community involvement; their place at the center of an active tech community; and the fact that, because they are local, they would be in touch with the needs of San Diego employers.

I'm over 40 and approach all new situations with skepticism. I started LEARN waiting to find out that it was all a sham, that I'd been taken for a ride, or that the level of learning was nothing I couldn't find in a few YouTube videos and I am SO happy to say I was wrong. All of what drew me to LEARN in the first place proved to be true. The educators are so passionate about the success of each student, as is the management - they have a reputation to uphold in this community, and that start with putting well-prepared program grads into the workforce. Beyond the tech curriculum and the amazing educators, two extremely valuable pieces of this program are the Career Services and the Internship. Students have real interviews with real companies, no smoke and mirrors. And the professional development portion of the curriculum combined with ongoing career services advice is WAY more than I ever got from NYU.

I will preface that reading the reviews on this site is what finally sold me on this bootcamp.  I believe I also applied to LEARN through this site. 

I moved from Chicago to San Diego to good to this bootcamp. I previous worked as a marketing admin doing product management type stuff.  Mind you, I am not extremely analytical so I knew that going into it I was going to need to step up my logic and analytical game.  It was no light decision - I had researched the various bootcamps in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco to find the right one for me.  I knew I wanted to be a part of a community, I wanted to be in California, and I wanted to learn how to build a website. Mentorship was also on my mind.  Most importantly, I was looking to do all of this AND on top of that, get a job.  

I worked hard during this bootcamp.  It truly is a bootcamp if you treat it that way.  It can also be a perfectly good way to waste three months if you allow to as well.  Let me explain.  

Bootcamp was from 9-5 with instruction in the morning and challenges in the afternoon.  Pretty standard for any bootcamp that i've seen with some being more intense and some longer.  I was extremely lucky that I had a great cohort filled with people who were like-minded and came to work hard.  The onerous was on me, though. I took the concepts we learned during the day and continued to learn things I didnt understand.  I spent hours on my off time learning the concepts, sticking with the fundementals, and going through as many of the exercises as I could.  I out myself through as many "tests" as I could during the time and still management to have fun and have a social life outside of coding.  That's not to say that I didn't think about coding and development most of the time.  One could easy sit there and do the coursework and expect a "certificate" only to find that it's rather hard finding a job.  It's not easy finding a job, there are countless ways employers will knock you out of their candidate pool.  Don't do the bare minimum if it's your goal to get a full-time job.
 
During our week of job preparedness, I took all of the instruction and truly applied it to whereever I could. I'm not the most disciplined, but I was disciplined enough to take the information and continue to apply it throughout the rest of my time.  It goes by quickly and you can't possibly learn everything you'd want in three months, but if you pay attention and work hard to grasp the concepts to apply to greater world, I think you have a better chance than most people in landing that job in development.

The instructors and network of people around LEARN is absolutely amazing and I'm continuing to meet people from other cohorts which has given me an extended network of some truly talented and amazing people.  It's an honor to give back to this community whenever I can.  (To put it into perspective, I haven't been back to my undergrad college since I graduated)

Through a concrete curriculum, extremely strong network, public speaking opportunities, and intensive job prep, LEARN helped me land my first job as a developer within a week after my internship.  Even after graduation, LEARN continues to provide me with tools to get out of my head and get into the world and make an impact through extended education opportunities at meet ups and various networking events.

I went to Learn Academy in 2016. I don’t know that I was prepared for it. I had studied JavaScript for months before I began, but still felt unprepared. It’s a whirlwind – it’s difficult, it’s exhausting, it’s stressful. It’s also rewarding- it’s a place to join a new community and to meet new people, and it’s a great way to challenge yourself and your brain.

We studied HTML, Bootstrap, JQuery, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We had a professional week in which we made resumes and our own websites, and a month-long internship. It was grueling. A fair number of people in my class didn’t have jobs when the bootcamp was over and some of them recently got hired and I think that there are a couple that still don’t have jobs – nearly a year later. So be prepared to work very hard at this – bootcamp won’t magically get you a job – there is a lot of networking and applying to jobs in there as well. In hindsight my internship could have been a lot better and I wished that I pushed harder to get in a different company. My internship didn't help me get a job after I finished the program. 

In order to get the most out of your time in bootcamp I would recommend studying before you go and possibly taking an online intro to CS course, so the concepts won’t be completely foreign. I would also recommend taking courses through Code School and Code Academy.  When I decided on this bootcamp, it was the only one in San Diego. I would recommend that you research all of your options – do not rely solely on reviews – go to meet ups and meet people from the different bootcamps, and contact different bootcamps so that you can make the best decision for you.

In the end I don't think that this was probably the right bootcamp for me. I am thankful for everything I learned, I am thankful for all of the friendships I've made, I'm thankful for a new career which I would not have been able to get without Learn. But I also think that a different path to my new career would have been better for me. Be prepared to teach yourself, test yourself, and take responibility for your education. 

LEARN ACADEMY SIMPLY ROCKS! 

What mattered to me the most were the people. I found out about LEARN from attending an SD Ruby Meetup. One of the people, Rob Kaufman (co-founder of LEARN) was giving a talk that broke things down in a way that made it easy for me understand how parts of Rails functioned. That was huge because at that time, I did not have a clear idea of what Rails was. I think it also says a lot about how LEARN is so heavily involved in the San Diego Tech scene. The lead instructor of my cohort was influential with his style of instruction. It was not so much the learning of languages and how to use a framework but the building of good programming habits (both technical and with concern to general programmer happiness). Instruction had more to do with learning to think and communicate like a programmer. Without the insights of Lisa (the outreach coordinator) and Chelsea (CEO), the transition to becoming a software developer personally would have been stifling. I’ve been working as a junior software developer now for about five months and to this day, I find myself with so much gratitude for this community of great people.

I did hit some rough patches with parts of the material, and that's natural - it happens to EVERYONE. However, I always had someone to ask for help during and after my time at LEARN. Another beautiful thing about the people at LEARN is that they are also very concerned about burnout prevention. They want you to still have a life outside of the bootcamp because they truly understand that humans are humans; that our brains can only handle so much input before you collapse into a burnout—you learn better when you’re not stressed out. This was a very winning point for me because I’m aware that programmer burnout is a real thing. I experienced something similar to it when I was in architecture school. I appreciate intensity but I just don't think being at a computer for 15+ hours a day is conducive to maximized learning or good programming. And LEARN did a great job at providing a healthy environment. 

LEARN provides an internship after three months. I cannot emphasize how important this internship was both in terms of what I learned and how I used it to build my resume. My peers have gone on to work for companies that partnered with LEARN to provide internships. A month after my internship ended, I had four in-person interviews (plus three phone interviews). I received three offers. The job hunting process was no joke. It was a  constant hustle, but I was prepared for it because of all the groundwork that was laid during the Professional Development week at LEARN. Did I happen to mention that I work at a pretty cool fin-tech startup in San Diego Downtown? That’s right — Thank you, LEARN.   

They have it down when it comes to helping you build a network of people who will help you not only get your foot in the door, but also one that will help you throughout your programming career. LEARN is a co-op space for alumni. I've been back many times (and I wish more), to ask for help, to share my knowledge, to attend meet-ups, and to just be there and work among other programmers. I have seen that they have made an already amazing program even better. 

I have no doubt that LEARN will be the right choice for anyone looking to take the leap into the world of web-development. 

I had a great experience at Learn! The 3 months of full time class and 1 month internship where challenging but so fun! I learned Ruby, Rails, Javascript, HTML and CSS. I am very grateful to now be a part of the supportive and engaging Learn community too. I ended up getting hired from my internship and have been employed there as a Ruby on Rails Software Developer for over a year now and couldn't be happier! Thank you Learn for everything you've done to change my life. Keep up the good work!

At LEARN you's actually learn: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, TDD/BDD(testing), AJAX, JSON, REST API's, PostgresSQL, SQL, Git, Github, PAIR PROGRAMMING!!!, group projects, guest speakers, field trips, internship, interview practice, SEO education, Resume help, and networking. Each class gets better and better! The thing about Learn is that they realize there's a burnout point and once that is reached you can't learn anymore at that moment. That's why their course in M-F 9-5. It gives you a weekend, and free time to recoup, and work on your own things. The other part to LEARN is that they teach you how to learn, and how to get unstuck. I loved LEARN. The people are great, and once school was over it's not like they go away. We still talk, have great friendships, and are actually working on an alumni project together. 

Bootcamps are not intended or the faint of heart. I went to Learn because I know some of the Ruby developpers in San Diego and I really like the inclusive and friendly ethos (MINASWAN!). Learn offers soiid full-stack immersion and it will surely kick your ass to cover material this fast but the team is flexible and fully involved in getting you through. The instructors and administrators really care about the individual students in the class and how where they are going after the end of the course. 

Attending Learn Bootcamp was one of the best things I could have done for myself. The adminstrators, teachers and fellow students were great to work with. I was able to learn a tremendous amount in a short period of time from people who are knowledgeable and passionate about coding. Learn not only provided the education, but also the motivation and support to get us all through this type of intense learning. They are very open to feedback and work very hard on our behalf to get us placed in the most ideal internships. I will always look back on my time at Learn fondly. I plan to stay in touch and continue to be a part of the Learn community.

If you're looking for a challenge and you want your career to be a creative outlet, this bootcamp is a good jumpstart into the inventive world of computer programming. LEARN will introduce you to the popular technologies used by many companies (Git, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, SQL, RSpec, Ruby, and Rails) and give you the space to create webpages and web applications with motivated peers. A big plus with LEARN is that they're well connected in the programming industry so you're exposed to meeting a lot of developers from around the world. Also, you're given real world coding experience by being placing into an internship at the end of the program. 

I was apart of LEARN's third cohort.  As many of my classmates and instructors would say, we looked forward to (almost) every day :) 

Pros: Nice location, instructors are nice.  1. The only saving grace for this program is that you get to intern for a company and get real work experience. A lot of the people I met had great internships (myself included) where I learned more than in 3~ weeks than I did in the 3 months I spent at LEARN. You can build great connections with your internship boss and use that to branch out and find work.    Cons:  1. Instructors are all alumni from this program. All 3 instructors graduated less than 2 years ago and now they are in charge of teaching the new cohorts how to code. When I asked Hillary (the person who "interviews" you before you officially start the program) who the instructors would be she responded, "The instructor is someone who has 15+ years of experience in this field and is very knowledgeable" only later to find out that he retired and taught us maybe 1 course out of the entire class.  The "lead" instructor was this guy who looked high all the time and had no idea what he was talking about. And about 90% of all lectures were done by the Associate Instructors (again alumni who graduated with less than 2 years of actual developer experience. Some of then never actually got a job and just got hired back so LEARN could inflate their hired numbers) When asking questions, instructors often times would say "Let me get back to you" and never really get back to you with a coherent answer. Often times during lectures, there were students who would correct the "instructors" because they were making errors or doing something incorrectly.    2. Job Hire.  In my initial interview with Hillary, I asked what the success rate was for students. She told me that the percentage of all alumni was around 84%~. I asked specifically about the previous cohorts and still got that same number. Fast-forward to "Professional Development Week", the career coach person throws out the same exact number despite maybe 2 months going by. Then fast-forward again, I have completed my internship, I reach out to ask about employment numbers and get the exact same number. There are no specifics, no real data, no concrete evidence ever presented. Just a random statistic that never changes. So in about a 4-5 month span, the success rate has stayed exactly the same? Yea I don't buy it and neither should you.    3. Cohort Group  There is no pre-screening or assessment done before you do this program. Looking back, that should have been a huge red flag that LEARN just wants your money. People in my cohort ranged from being geniuses and having comp-sci backgrounds to people who could barely type. As someone who was middle of the road and understood the concepts after putting in extra work, it was difficult to learn because LEARN operates using paired-programming. Some days I would get steamrolled by the students who already had tech backgrounds and they just wanted to finish the assignment. Other days it was like pulling teeth trying to explain a topic to a student who didn't know the difference between JavaScript and Ruby.  Overall, it was difficult to learn topics consistently and would require HOURS of extra work outside of class to try and understand it. (Also in part because the instructors couldn't/wouldn't help us --> it was part of the learning process )   4. Outdated Technology LEARN would always try and flex and say things like "We are constantly evolving and teaching things that meet the demand of the marketplace" in regards to their curriculum. However, they have been teaching the same React/Ruby on Rails curriculum for the last 2 years at least. Newbies reading this should know that Ruby and Ruby on Rails is not big anymore and definitely not big in San Diego, Orange County, or LA (where I am assuming most people attending this program would be from). Rails is popular in San Francisco and New York and even then, you find other programming back-end languages like Java, Python, and Go WAY more in job postings than Ruby on Rails. Is Ruby/RoR a good skill to have? Sure. It's easy to learn but when you’re applying for that Junior position that requires Java or Python, they're not going to choose you. Also, half-way through the program, the instructors decided to stop checking in on student progress. Students had lots of questions and nothing every got answered and we just moved on, wasting about 2 weeks’ worth of projects that got no real answer. Overall, if you're paying this much money for a boot camp, you should be learning the latest and greatest not something that was popular 10 years ago.    5. Professional Development Week You have a whole week break during the cohort where you update your professional appearance on LinkedIn and build a portfolio. You get lecture after lecture on topics ranging on elevator pitches, updating your resume, and updating your LinkedIn. If you want to save yourself the time and energy doing this, just find a portfolio on YouTube and spruce it up and make it your own. Go on LEARN Academy on linked in and just search any alumni (literally any of them that have it) and you can see the paragraph that every single alum has in relation to what they did at LEARN. Also, you get a professional headshot done for all your professional online presence. The Elevator Pitch is just a YouTube video, the portfolio template they give you, and again, you're going to have the exact same blurb as anyone who has ever attended LEARN on your LinkedIn. At the end of the week, you send your resume to Bryan who is the career coach person for feedback. The feedback is honestly not even remotely useful because after independently testing that resume against job postings and resume critics from real developers, my resume would have been instantly scrapped and ghosted.    Conclusion: Would I do LEARN Academy again? Absolutely not. There's mediocre student support wrapped in "we are a family" mentality which means their niceness covers up the fact that they are in fact, pretty useless.  From teaching yourself, working against other cohort students to try and figure out issues when pair programming, and doing the bare minimum when it comes to updating your social presence, it’s obvious that LEARN is not in it to truly help students succeed and just want your money. Nobody, from the CEO down to the instructors, really has a solid tech/developer background and it shows. I would highly encourage you to consider doing another program that is actually student-focused, has actual instructors that have experience in the industry, and a large reliable network. You are paying 14-20k for this and it should be worth that. But in reality, you are paying 14-20k for a 1-month internship with a local tech company which really makes no sense. 
 

I joined LEARN in 2019 to pursue a career as a web developer and was told by them that 85% of their graduates have jobs within six months. I have since found out about 8 months after graduating that, that number is completely made up and it is much harder to get a job then advertised. They make it seem as if it is so easy to break into the tech industry. In reality, you need much more experince then they can offer. They also preach that you don't need prior experience, but that is also a lie. They do give you a good environment to be around and help you start to understand what you are doing, but this is not worth 15k. I strongly advise someone who is looking to joing a coding bootcamp to find one that actually invests in you finding a job. The staff at LEARN are very nice, but I would be too if you paid me 15k to hang out for three months. I'm not saying not to join, but don't expect to get hired afterwards. 

I understand that this program seems to have been a success for a handful of individuals . The technique of teaching they provide may work for some, but not all. Everyone has a different learning style and Learn only supports one way, which is peer programming. I understand this is great within a working environment, but not everyone is able to solidify information in that manner when learning something new. When I am spending  8 hrs. a day, plus $14,500,  I should feel I have used my time wisely, rather when I going home frustrated. Expressing my concerns, which they don't like you to complain about anything, just constructive criticism, I was pretty much told maybe this program was not right for me. Which it was not and I withdrew. But that kind of attitude towards some one interested in learning a new skill is undiscerning. They should be more understanding and accommodating to each person's learning style.

Learn promotes that their camp is for beginners, which it is not. It is more geared towards people with some kind of background in programming, not just an interest. I feel their screening process should be more thorough, with a technical part before officially being accepted into the program. The curriculum was disorganized and hard to follow at times. There are reputable sights to learn Web Development, build a portfolio, provide you skills for interviewing and finding a job. These sights do not cost much or are for free. Not sure what Learn feels they are providing for $14,500, other than  lining their pockets with money. Please consider other options before throwing your money away or going into debt. 

Pros: 
- Excellent career services 
- Internship included, and some were paid 
- Curriculum reflected current trends/job opportunities 
- Flexible with daily lessons based on student needs 
- LEARN is very involved in the local tech community, so there are a lot of connections to be made 
- Good work/life balance 
- School is understanding and respectful of students' external commitments 
- The people who work at LEARN are wonderful 

Cons: 
- Learning material on website sometimes unclear or had mistakes, and continued uncorrected despite student feedback 
- Few opportunities taken to assess students' knowledge, no code reviews 
- Morning lessons frequently ended with "So does that make sense to everybody? *silence* Great!" 
- Instructors always willing to help, but not always experienced enough to be able to help 
- Pair programming required, but can be more inhibiting than helpful depending on individual learning style 

Bottomline: 
- Glad I did LEARN, certainly a good way to change careers and get your foot in the door with the internship. At the end of the day I'm confident I'll get a job and I'm excited to start a new career, but it was a windy road at times 

Advice to LEARN: 
- designating a scrum master would help with continuous improvement 
- if resources allow, code reviews would be very beneficial to students

This Ruby on Rails bootcamp has a solid curriculum. It starts with the basics, HTML, CSS and moves on to JavaScript, JQuery and Ruby on Rails. Their instructors are patient and help you with problems without giving you the answer. They are invested in their students and really want you to succeed. They push the importance of getting out in your community with volunteering, meet-ups etc. Overall, I would say Learn was a good experience and helped me to level up in my coding career.

I'm also glad that they got rid of the instructor because he wasn't the right person to be teaching coding to total beginners. He was impatient and demeaning to those that needed support that most. Isn't the point of attending bootcamp in person is to have hands-on experience and get support when needed?

Overall, I had a good experience at LEARN and learnt some but it would be a mistake to assume to you'll come out prepared to be a developer from day one. Once you start your first job as a developer, you'll realize there's a huge of gap between what you need to know and what you learnt in short 12 (actually 8 weeks because of "1 week of professional development and 3 weeks of final project").

 

 

 

 

I attended this bootcamp on a scholarship in which the entire tuition was waived. So first I wanted to express my gratitude for the people at LEARN for providing me that amazing opportunity. I probably would have not attended had it not been for this scholarship. I just wanted to preface my review with that so you understand the context of it since it might not contain the same kind of cost/benefit complaints that many other reviews contain.

I think the great thing about this bootcamp is that it's run by a husband/wife team and that the wife is actually the CEO. I think that is quite inspiring for many women coming into this industry filled with sexism. She advocates for inclusion and has given talks on such topics in the community which I think is something different than other bootcamps. This place feels like a safe environment.

My cohort was small and we all managed to bond very well with each other. This bootcamp was very adamant about not studying any new material once we left after 5pm. Though I definitely think that reviewing some material for a while when you go home by yourself is great to solidify the concepts. 

This bootcamp labels itself as a Javascript/Rails focused bootcamp but that may be misleading. Of course when building web apps Javascript is going to be dabbled in much of the time so it never really goes away. But we don't necessarily focus on it too much. We spend about 2 weeks doing Javascript and we actually learn programming concepts through this language. I think this the time period during the course that I actually felt my mind being stretched. After this period, we move into Ruby but I felt like we should have spent more time in it. The curriculum didn't feel as challenging during the Ruby portion which was about a week.  When we moved into Rails I lost that 'stretchy' feeling and I didn't really feel like I was doing any 'programming' but merely managing this vast library that is Rails which is fine, but I felt like concepts were beginning to slip away from my mind.

Now this kind of segues into why I titled my title the way I did. During the course we pair program everyday. We would have a standup sessoin in the morning where we talk about what we 'Mad, Sad, Glad, or scared' about and check-in. then we would have a presentation on a topic, and after that we would pair up and practice what we just learned. 

In certain respects, pair programming is great because if you get stuck, your partner is there to provide an alternate perspective and you are able to keep moving fairly quickly. The thing in my mind that I felt like could have been improved and this is might be a  more a personal issue, is that you inevitably come to a point where your stuck and your partner may find a way to get unstuck for you but you might not understand how they came up with the solution they did. Asking questions and requesting them over and over to explain something to you sometimes isn't effective and isn't in the best interest of time. Some people work very fast, and some things click for them more readily whereas others learn differently. People going into bootcamps come from VASTLY different backgrounds, some may have had exposure to programming, some have math degrees, some have no exposure whatsoever. I found myself taking a backseat a lot and letting the other person drive because I just didn't think I was grasping things as quickly as they were. In this short time period, your going to have vastly different outcomes depending on the student. 

This is where the time-based nature of the course comes to the forefront and I think is the biggest obstacle to truly learning concepts for some people. Keep in your mind that this is a BOOTCAMP, with all the implicatoins that that entails. You will be exposed to concepts and then PUSHED through the curriculum whether or not you understand them fully. There were times where I felt like I was just going through the motions and was completely lost but didn't feel like reaching out realy helped me out either. The TA's couldn't really provide the personal attention needed to truly help, they always seemed to be pre-occupied with other things, or perhaps they are just introverted. This is the problem with time-based education, or the factory model which bootcamps emulate from the traditional school system. You need to realy dig into these concepts that your learning and your going to need repetition, and when your only their for a few months, your inevitably going to feel pressure.

What I wish was that they had more instructors who had experience in the industry. We had one head instructor who was very knowledgable but I don't think he knew how to relate to people too well despite having a degree in counseling. I perceived him as being impatient, elitist and authoritarian. He would frequently 'hush' or interrupt what they were saying to people when they would try to explain their disagreements, or get quite short with them when they weren't getting something as quickly as he wanted. This kind of behaviour doesn't encourage students to want to ask questions if they feel they are going to be attacked subtly by doing so. I'm not the only one who felt this. The TA's were helpful at times and not so much at other times, as they were also grads of the same bootcamp.   

This bootcamp is also unique in that they provide a one month internship with a local company. These companies rotate every cohort. Some were looking to hire someone, some weren't. Some are paid, some are not. Some companies came and gave presentations and we would rank them. After the rankings the LEARN team then setup interviews based on wht we ranked, though not everyone gets what they want. Then after the interviews we would rank them again, and the companies would rank the the interviewees, and again LEARN would try to find the best fit.

The companies are vastly different in size, ranging from startups without office space with 5 employees, to established companies. But I think on the whole the internship is valuable to providing real world experience that you can use on a resume'. There is also a group project during the last two weeks where we built out a complete web app from scratch utilizing the Agile process with daily scrum sessions. At the end of the two weeks we had a demo night to the local community. This experience was very valuable as well, as now we have an app that we can use in our portfolio.

 The bootcamp industry needs a lot of work and I don't know how much longer it's going to be around, but despite my criticisms, I am grateful for the exposure I received to a new field. I feel the large part of the value of being in a bootcamp is being dropped into the middle of a pre-existing network of people who are in the industry and who can help you navigate the waters of moving into a new industry. You can go to meetups with people from your cohort, find out about jobs through your network of peers, and for that the experience is valuable.

Thanks to a presentation that the CEO Chelsea gave about finding your motivations. I was able to really clarify what motivated me to be in the tech industry. This clarification was something that definitely boosted my confidence and helped me figure out a way to present myself to people that I felt was true to what I am passionate about. I think that was one of the most helpful things during the course because there were times where I was questioning myself asking 'What am I doing here? '. I discovered and connected my passion for open source, with sustainable agriculture, social justice and worker co-ops. Now I have a clearer picture of where I want to go in the future. 

Overall I am very grateful for my experience and I feel confident in the direction I need to go now in my learning.