UC San Diego Extension Boot Camps

This course was amazingly worth it. $9500 for a bootcamp is pretty cheap compared to others, but it doesn’t come with a job guarantee. I was in Chris Stead’s cohort, and I absolutely love his teaching style. The man truly knows his stuff. He gave the most in-depth answers for all my questions. He is truly a Sr Software Engineer who can code circles around most Javascript developers. The man is a legend. He was also incredibly patient when answering questions. Him alone made this course entirely worth it. I would be down to have this guy as a teacher for the rest of my life. Overall, I truly loved this course, the TAs were very supportive, and I learned a lot. Being able to have someone sit down next to you and help you solve a problem is not something you can get from a Udemy course. But honestly, if you just did Udemy courses and hired a tutor, this might work just as well as going to a coding bootcamp. I definitely had to depend on Youtube and Udemy to learn some things that they didn’t cover in the bootcamp, but overall Chris was amazing, so I have no complaints in that regard.

If you put in the hours, this course is totally worth it. I met four people who actually put in the hours, and they’re on their way to making six figures in the Silicon Valley.

Now here are my gripes with the Bootcamp:
1. Trilogy Education needs to work on their sales reps because my representative totally came off as a car salesman, and it honestly doesn’t serve the program justice because you think it might be a scam, but the teachers are legit. Stop being so pushy, and don’t ask silly brain teasers for your interview questions. If I told you what my interview question was you would laugh honestly. I literally almost decided to not to do the program anymore because of these red flags. If my dad hadn’t pressured me to take it anyway, I would have never done this program.
2. Also it would have been nice to get a demo video of the teacher that I would be learning from. I literally walked into the program not knowing who my teacher was. If he sucked, then I would have instantly lost $2500 because they don’t refund the deposit. But it was a relief that my teacher was amazing, so I’m glad for that.
3. Their program is good in the sense that they adapt their content to the current market. For example, we spent time learning about React Hooks, but I kind of wish we didn’t spend so much time on Handlebars. I felt like we had to do so many assignments with it, and I would have rather spent more time with React, or maybe even introduced AngularJS, or TypeScript, but even my TAs agreed that Handlebars was a waste of time because hardly any jobs hire for it.
4. In the beginning of the course, they say you have to put in at least 20 hours a week outside of class. To be honest, I don’t know a single person who did this besides me out of the 10 people I talked to at the Bootcamp. I feel like the program should put more pressure on students who aren’t trying. There was a guy in ALL THREE of my group projects who didn’t write a single line of code. Not one! I literally had to do most of the work for all of my group projects, and I was lucky if 1 or 2 others in my group could help.

November 14, 2019

Four months in to UCSD Extension’s 6-month bootcamp, I’m very pleased with the course.

I chose to pay for a bootcamp because I absolutely needed the structure and the human element that I could not get by taking online courses. UCSD Ext. has done an excellent job on both fronts.

The class is well thought-out and organized. The technologies taught are relevant, extremely effective for building robust web applications, and work well together. The infrastructure for the course, including the online learning portal and the class Slack channels are useful and modern. I particularly like the pacing of the 6-month course, which covers a lot of material but is spread over a long enough period of time to be digestible.

In regards to the human element, I’ve found exactly the support I needed to transition into a web development career. Our teacher, Jeremy Ahrens, is perfectly suited to his role. He is an experience developer, but more importantly, he is extremely approachable and genuinely interested in his student’s success. Learning web development at a bootcamp can be a daunting, sometimes overwhelming experience, and it is huge to have a teacher who relates to and supports his students.

Currently, I feel very confident in my new web development abilities. It’s super exciting to be able to actualize my web app ideas, and technologies like Node and React make that possible. My method has been to heavily supplement the bootcamp with additional online courses on the specific technologies I find most important. I’ve actually achieved more technology-specific learning from online classes than from time I’ve spent in class. However, I attempted to learn web development on my own before attending the bootcamp and made exponentially less progress. I absolutely needed the structure of a defined curriculum and regular homework assignments and projects. Especially in the beginning, with no real perspective on the web dev landscape and no confidence in my abilities, I needed someone to push me to keep writing code. I gained a lot of confidence from completing projects and engaging in peer-to-peer and TA reviews.

The UCSD Extension Coding Bootcamp is the real deal. The curriculum and the staff are, in my experience, all of a high quality. It’s easy to see that the course was developed with the intention of providing students a new career opportunity, and not just to capitalize on the popularity of coding bootcamps. I would absolutely recommend the course to friends and family.

November 14, 2019

A well designed and challenging program. Be prepared to work really hard if you want to maximise your investment and you will not be disappointed. I have learned so much in these 24 weeks compared to trying to learn coding on my own. The level of support that I’ve gotten from my cohort and teaching staff is top notch.

All 3 projects that I’ve developed during the course are ready to be shown to employers by the end of the program. You will get to learn from scratch to building industry ready full stack projects that will value-add to your portfolio.

Coming from an IT background with around 10 years of data analytics experience, I’ve never worked as a developer professionally but always wanted to pursue a career in coding. I’ve landed myself a full-time position as a front-end web developer one month after graduation and this will not be possible without this excellent course.

I’ll take the course again in a heartbeat!!! Keep up the good job!!

November 22, 2019