Bloom Institute of Technology

Hi prospective programmer,

I imagine right now that you're in a similar position that I was in about a year ago. You have a passion for programming and have heard about the industry breaking down walls of entry. So you gave it a honest shot, but quickly realized it's still pretty difficult to break in. They want you to know technologies you've never heard of, to have experience doing things (pair programming, agile, etc.) you couldn't possibly have without being on a team already, and even if you know these things, lots of times they'll tell you even though you know your stuff, you just don't have the experience. It's still tough and feels almost impossible without the right tools and knowledge on how to overcome these objections and prove your value.

I  tried the self taught route but struggled. Maybe instead you're confident with your programming abilities but want the opportunity to network and get some job assistance to boot. For me personally, I had zero experience and knowledge and went into the Lambda School program with a lot of fear and second guessing. The whole first month was me considering dropping out. There were times where I felt I would never get this stuff, more than I would like to admit truthfully. The project manager's, my classmates and the instructors helped me overcome those moments of self weakness though.

That was part of the value of the program. I was forced to be accountable to other people who relied on me to do well. Over time, things that I struggled with became habitual and tedious. As the program extends into the final month before Labs, you start to wonder where the time went. For me, I saw the end and grew anxious. How was I going to find a job? Was I sure I had the skills and knowledge necessary? That struggle was almost negated by my career counselor, Courtney. She taught me how to look up companies, competing salaries in different geographies, how to fix my resume, how to talk to recruiters, interview tips, elevator pitches, briefcase pitch, and once I got my job offers, she taught me how to negotiate a better rate. 

There was not a single point where I felt like a nuisance or neglected. Everyone at the school is invested in you, and just the other day I was struggling with some new software I had to learn at my new job and I mentioned it to one of the instructors and we ended up going onto a Zoom (webcam) session and he shared his screen and showed me how to navigate the program and use it for what I need to at work. That's the real value of this program: it doesn't just end, you're always a Lambda School alumni and the staff are legitimately invested in your success. It's their whole business model!

I now have a job making over the $50k minimum and have begun paying back Lambda School. The cost is well worth it, for the first time in my life I feel fulfilled and a lot less fearful about my future and my family. Lambda School didn't just change my life, they gave me the tools to change the lives of others too. Once I am rich I plan to pay it forward by donating to the Lambda Success Fund and giving other people like me the opportunity to do something that has the potential to change their life.

So let's break this down:

Curriculum: 4/5

The curriculum is excellent, you're learning cutting edge technologies from people who are well versed in how they align with enterprise application as well. However, due to this, the curriculum may pivot in the middle of it due to the way Lambda School works which can be frustrating, but it is for the best. Trust the system, they're doing this because they want to give you the best information possible.

Instructors: 4/5

The instructors are for the most part excellent. They have Beej Jorgensen who is one of the smartest people I have ever met. Josh Knell, Sean Chen, Ryan Hamblin and Luis Hernandez are all excellent as well and each while being very intelligent are still approachable and have all spent time assisting me outside of lecture time and even outside of class time. It's just the kind of people they are.

Job Assistance: 5/5

The job assistance is probably the best in the industry and is truly what makes Lambda shine. It has a dedicated team of career counselors and other business people related to getting Lambda hiring partners and exposing the program and its students to the professional world. They understand the importance of networking and encourage students, alumni and staff to engage with each other and keep each other apprised of their job progress. This adds another level of that accountability which makes the process even better.

Social Environment: 4/5

Lambda School, just like any other organization that has hundreds of students and staff all working together everyday for at least 8 hours a day, experiences periodic drama. It's unavoidable in my experience but the way it is always handled is impressive. The staff are very open minded and do their best not to punish people but to understand. This is a hard program and causes it to be a high stress environment at times, but thankfully the structure of the program allows students to capitalize on their teammate's, their project mangager's, instructors, and counselors to support themselves during those hard times. When it comes down to it, this is a professional environment and most of the drama occurs when people seem to forget that. 

General Advice:

Practice good communication, don't be afraid to speak up and voice your concerns, but do it professionally. Don't worry about how others are doing unless you're done and want to help. Your time in Lambda is rapid and you will want to utilize every minute of your day to dedicate to your project and growth as a developer. If you focus on yourself, your team, and then the rest of your cohort third, ask for help when you need it and participate in your class time, you will be successful. It's a good program, but you only get from life what you put into it. I believe in you!

Overall: 5/5

Lambda School changed my life. I currently work as a software engineer and love my job and all of my new Lambda friends. For me, it was the best thing that's ever happened. Hopefully I did my best to remain objective during this review and that maybe if you had any questions or concerns, they might be answered in this. If they weren't or you would just like to chat about Lambda, me, or anything software development, tweet at me @justinmrigler

Like most people that end up at Lambda I stumbled on to coding and found myself really liking it. So I learned as much as I could using free tools before I decided to find a structured program. I know for a lot of programs the financial requirements have changed since Lambda’s popularity but when I was looking Lambda was one of the few programs that didn’t ask for anything upfront. Nada. So I said what the heck, worst case scenario I drop out and waste a couple of months and best case scenario they live up to the hype and I end up a software engineer.

 

The short version? Lambda worked for me! I ended up with a really great job as a software engineer.

 

Now for the somewhat long version. To start Lambda is a startup that is constantly changing. That means if there is some part of the curriculum that isn’t working they’ll take the feedback and push an updated version pretty fast! And students and graduates will always have access to the new and older versions. The other side of that coin is that you’ll have to deal with the bumps along the way and if you want to see these changes made you’ll have to participate in the feedback loop, publically or anonymously.

 

The instructors and project managers, in my opinion, make the Lambda learning experience special! Instead of someone just lecturing and giving you an assignment that’s due by a certain day, don’t get me wrong the course material and lectures are fantastic, you get a more personal education. You get split into smaller groups where your project manager knows who you are and will hold you accountable. You get to work with your cohort-mates, ask as many questions as you have, and get continuous feedback on how to improve.

 

After the main course material, there is Lambda Labs an opportunity to work with a team to build applications for other. This portion of the program is grueling by design but its honestly led by some of the most passionate people at Lambda. They work really hard to get you over the finish line and prepared for interviews. And even after finishing, they keep working with you to find the right job.

 

Lambda was first introduced to me via an add on Facebook. It was advertised as a Software Engineering program that requires no payment if you don't find a job in the field paying an annual salary of fifty thousand dollars or more. With a strong background in troubleshooting electronics and a deep desire to learn how to code, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. Being a skeptic, I dug up as much information about the program as I could to see if any scam reports were made or any concerns of legitimacy had arisen. To my surprise, I dug up blog after blog written by students participating or graduated from the program that expressed nothing but gratitude and gratefulness that they had the opportunity to attend. I thought, how could this be? Not a single negative review? It scratched the part of my brain that doesn't let good exist without condition, so I decided to apply so I could do my own reviewing.

Living in a small, the only opportunities to establish a lifelong career are provided by factories and retail stores. I've worked in various retail and factory positions and let me tell you, I was miserable. With strong research and troubleshooting abilities, I was able to gain feelings of accomplishment and joy by volunteering to help an online gaming community in my spare time. I quickly became their "goto guy" when a new game server needed setup or if there was a serious problem with one of their existing servers. They quickly gave me a title as their "scripter". I really thought I had a solid grasp of coding concepts until I began attending Lambda School. I quickly learned that I had no clue! The more I learned at Lambda the more addicted I became to learning. Absorbing so much knowledge in such a short amount of time is the most invigorating thing I have experienced and I am not afraid to admit that I am addicted! Being a Software Engineer/Developer is just that, a career of learning. Of course, the salary is great but it's more than money for me. Lambda opened doors in my mind that I couldn't have opened myself.

I have been liberated!

On graduation day I was winding down from the most intense learning experience I had ever endured when I began reflecting on the program. It came to me, the conditions required for something this great to exist. I had to be willing to put in the time and effort to persevere through an extremely steep and difficult learning curve. I had to stretch and bend my mind to reshape the way I learn and think. Those are the conditions required to be successful at Lambda and for me, they were worth every drop of blood, sweat, and tears! 

  After over a decade in food service, I decided to pick my high school hobby of programming back up. I approached it the same way I had as a teenager - tinkering, breaking things, making toy programs that solved a tiny problem in a really inefficient way. Just a hobby really. The difference was that now I had a wife and a kid, and this kind of hobby, while intellectually fulfilling, wasn't going to magically pay the bills. Going back to college for years just to accrue massive debt wasn't really on the table for me. A friend of mine had graduated from a coding boot camp and got a high-paying job, and his testimony sparked my interest.

  After a lot of research, I found Lambda School. Lambda puts its students through a full stack education in three months. Instead of sending them off like a lot of schools, it holds on to them for two more months to teach those fundamental, transcendental CS concepts like runtime complexity, data structures, searching, and sorting. Then Lambda School puts the students into groups and gives them one last push to make an app using everything they've learned while in the program, teaching them how to apply their skills in a collaborative, professional development environment. For someone really wanting to break into this field and have staying power in the industry, it sounded like the perfect fit.

  Now here I am, six months later, and what has changed? Last Friday I finished my Labs assignment. Sunday I submitted my resume to a Front-End Dev position. Monday I connected with the recruiter. Tuesday I interviewed with the head of the development team. Wednesday I got an offer.

  Thanks to full stack curriculum at Lambda, I had the skills they were looking for. Thanks to Labs, Project Weeks, and Lambda Hackathon, I had the projects to prove it. Thanks to the CS curriculum and the whiteboarding practice, I aced the technical interview. Thanks to the career team, I had the negotiating skills to increase my starting salary by at about $25k from what it could have been. The level of support that I've received from this school cannot be overstated. I went from front-of-house to front-end developer in six months. That's real. I'm still in shock to be honest. Choosing Lambda School is choosing to bet on yourself. I can't recommend these people enough.

I am 45, 46. About a year ago, I lost my job. I had a mountain of debt, I hated my career track, I had no retirement savings, etc. And I wasn't sure where to turn.    I knew I liked computers and believed that I could get a career going in computers if I could only get the right chance.    I got on unemployment. They had a program to train for CompTIA A+ certification. My friends with previous work in the IT industry said I would get bored with that though. And I wouldn't make as much money as I would if I became a developer.      I had written HTML for websites when I was in college, but that was 20 years ago. I started finding some free online courses for JavaScript. I'm not great at self-discipline, so I knew that self-paced would mean I would have the skills in about 10 years.   I wouldn't be able to afford to go back to college for 4 years at my age. I needed a new career launch ... NOW. So I started looking at coding bootcamps.   There was no way I could afford an upfront payment for a bootcamp that was $9,000.00 for 12 weeks. Besides, like I said, I was in debt to my eyeballs already, so I could not qualify for a loan anyway.   Let's talk about the 12 weeks thing too. I was starting from scratch. I had a master's degree in the humanities and tons of life experience and I could find my way around an HTML doc.   What would 12 weeks get me? I could learn to write some JavaScript, and some Front end frameworks. This would give me the bare bones to get a very specific job. This would not prepare me for a software engineering career.   So then I found lambda school. Here it is almost a year later and I have launched my software engineering career. I'm making the kind of money I could never have made in my previous career.   And I got here without paying a penny. I am paying them now, but I can afford it now, and there is no interest or debt. They invested in me and it turned out to be a worthwhile investment.   Besides that, I have a new joy and passion for my career. I have learned so much at Lambda school. Sure I got the full MERN stack (Mongo, Express, React Node) training. But I also got a solid foundation in tons of computer science principles. I know operating systems, algorithms, data structures, computer architecture. I even have a decent intro to assembly language. I have learned so much more about what is going on under the hood.   The most important thing I learned at lambda school was HOW to learn and confidence I CAN learn. Whatever hot frameworks and trending languages are today will not be the languages and frameworks they're going to want you to know in 5 years.   I learned to program at a basic level in C, and also picked up Python in a matter of weeks. I am a full stack engineer now thanks to Lambda ready not just for a job, but a career.

I was lucky to be accepted to the second cohort of Lambda School’s computer science program.  Before I joined I spent months researching coding bootcamps and none of them were feasible for me at the time.  In addition, many of them appeared to lack core fundamental principles of programming and were bolstered up by inflated statistics.  When I found out about Lambda School it seemed too good to be true, but with the school taking on much of the risk I decided to take a leap of faith.  Now, I can tell you firsthand that Lambda School is 100% the real deal.  I graduated in February and began a full-time position as a React developer in March.  I’ve been amazed at the amount of information I’ve retained from the school and how well I was actually prepared for the job.  Within 3 months on the job I’ve already been promoted and am leading my own team.  I have Lambda School to thank for that.  There are a few reasons on why this program works for me and can work for anyone with the drive to make it in this industry:

 

1. Curriculum is top notch.  I think it may be the best Web Development curriculum out there and why I was so willing to take that initial leap.
    
2. They hire the best instructors in the industry.  I don’t think I need to explain this more all you have to do is look at their credentials.
    
3. Community.  While being online can be a disadvantage it also allows more students to access the program.  One of the things that many online schools lack is a sense of community.  That’s not happening at Lambda School.  There’s a sense of togetherness here.
    
4. Feedback loop.  This school is one that actually listens to it’s students and makes adjustments in realtime.
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5. You spend everyday working with people that are hungry.  People that were never given a chance before ceasing on this opportunity.  It’s truly inspiring and an environment that will bring the best out of you.  To me this is the real magic of Lambda School.

  So, if you’re thinking about joining Lambda School it’s a no brainer.  It’s what education should be.  You have little to lose and everything to gain.

I took a chance on a school that promised a lot and delivered more than I ever thought possible.

I graduated in the first Lambda School Cohort back in January of 2018. I was quickly set up with a job at a startup company in SF. I was worried about what would be expect of me from a small company and most of my knowledge coming from a 6-month boot camp. What I didn't realize at the time was that not only was I taught the fundamentals of what a software developer needs to code but how to continue to learn and grow.

I thought what they were promising was too good to be true but I ended up receiving more than I could have imagined.

Best decision I've ever made.

As a graduate of one of Lambda School's earlier cohorts, I still have access to the school's internal messaging platform with all the current students and teachers. Lambda School continues to get better, and for me, it was already the best. Today I am a Senior Software Engineer earning the highest salary I've ever earned in my life, and Lambda School is the only Computer Science education I've ever had.

Before I applied to Lambda School, I looked into another program local to me. That program didn't do much to alleviate my initial hesitations, and when I was introduced to Lambda School I was still hesitant. But Lambda School made it easy to consider them because they provided the best answer to the one question at the center of my doubts, will this work?

Before committing months of my life to a program, I wanted to know that it would be worth it.

Lambda School's teachers are talented professionals from some of the best companies. Their curriculum was developed with input from the companies I wanted to work for. And the daily schedule is structured to keep students engaged and moving forward. They commit their full arsenal to every student free of charge until that student is able to secure a high paying job.

What makes it even better, after graduation, they help the students to get that job.

I had been a student many times before becoming one at Lambda School. Lambda has been my favorite learning experience by far. It is not self-paced, but you do feel some sense of independence. Only later did I realize how valuable that was. As a Software Engineer, you are expected to be able to find answers on your own. At its core, Lambda’s curriculum instills this in its students.

Lambda School is worth it. I would definitely make the same decision again today. If you’re trying to decide whether you should apply or not, do it. Focus instead on getting admitted.

I graduated from Lambda School’s first full-time computer science class back in January.  I didn’t have much coding experience when I started and it was really hard but I enjoyed the program and feel that I learned a lot.  There are were a few things that I did not like about it, though.  I was in the first class, however, and I know that things have changed since I started in July 2017, but I can only speak to my experience. 

Pros:

- Their free mini bootcamps are great (these are how I found out about Lambda School).

- It’s 100% online.

- They have an income share model so I don’t have to pay for the education until I find a job in the field (and I feel like they’re invested in helping me find a job, otherwise, they won’t get paid).

- They have great TAs who were really supportive and helped me understand the material whenever I would reach out to them.  There were mostly 2 TAs when I was in the program, but they have many more now.

- Their instructors are very enthusiastic about the subjects they were teaching.  That kind of enthusiasm is pretty contagious (for me, anyway).  They’re also willing to help me understand any concepts that I struggled with whenever I reached out to them.

- The first half of their curriculum was great.  It was pretty organized and well put-together.  They knew what topics they wanted to cover and went over those topics.  They changed the format of how they were teaching those lessons a few weeks into the program based on our suggestions/complaints, but they still went over the topics in the syllabus.

- They were really responsive to feedback.  I’m not sure if it was because we were the first class, but we saw a lot of changes.  They really request a lot of feedback and are open to improving their teaching model as needed.  I think that things have stabilized for the more recent cohorts, but I’m pretty sure they still request feedback every week and take that feedback into consideration.

- They have career coaches who are supposedly very good, however, I’ve only had one session with my career coach due to personal circumstances that are delaying my job search.

Cons:

- The second half of their curriculum was a bit of a mess.  They seemed to be flying by the seat of their pants and had some things on their syllabus that they didn’t seem to cover and other things that they covered that weren’t on the syllabus.  I was in the first cohort, though, so I think they’ve fixed this portion of their curriculum.

- They didn’t really have windows support.  All the instructors I had were either using Mac or Linux and couldn’t help me troubleshoot my Windows problems (e.g. installing mongodb).  It’s also little annoying when every lecturer is using the Terminal with Mac commands and I had to adjust some of the commands to work on a Windows Command Prompt, but I got used to it.  I think they’ve since hired someone who knows Windows.

- They were a little disorganized towards the end of the program.  They had stopped updating our class calendar and had a hard time setting some important dates, but when we actually complained to them, they set up a meeting to answer all of our questions and updated our calendar.

All in all, I had a great experience with Lambda School.  I really feel like this school is invested in helping me learn the skills to become a programmer and get a job.  Even now, I feel that I could go to anyone in the school for help and they would gladly help me.  I would highly recommend Lambda School for anyone looking to learn to code.

In my previous field, I was a top performer, but having bills and kids, my 18/hour job wasn't cutting it. I wasn't living very happilly when every paycheck was taken away for bills. I never quite had enough to do anything for myself. I had been programming since my teens as a hobby, and I decided it was time to persue my passion.

After being accepted to 3 other coding bootcamps, but unable to afford the outrageous down payment of up to $15,000, I came across Lambda School. I was sceptical at first that Lambda was offering a complete 7 month CS course for 0 upfront, but after speaking directly to Austen Allred on the phone, I was reassured. I decided that since there was nothing to lose, to why not give it a shot! 

Like I said, I joined with some hobby level experience, which definitely helped. Although there are prerequisets to joining, I would definitely recommend to get the basics down of html, css, and javascript before starting. The classes are very fast paced, and learning curve is high, but Lambda wont let you fail. Instructors did stop frequently and take the time to make sure everyone was keeping up. Any student who was having a hard time learning, would be given extra help or be moved to another class behind to gain more experience. But overall as long as you have the motivation to succeed, Lambda School will not let you fail!

I just graduated with CS4 in April 2018, and I've gotta say that everything Lambda has promised has so far came true. What really amazed me is how I started getting offers and recruiters contacting me only based off of the Lambda School work. I am currently heavily focusing on landing that job, but with the skills and career development that Lambda provided, I don't think it will take very long at all!