Bloom Institute of Technology

I am a recent graduate of Lambda Schools Full Stack Web Development Course. As of two days ago, I had two job offers almost a year from the date of starting my course, and my life is forever changed. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has the determination to change their stars.

Let me explain, I was a computer science major for about 2.5 years before dropping out. I had to pay for some additional expenses and life got away from me. I was never hurting for money and despite my unfinished degree, I had been a General Manager and eventually Director of Operations at a water park making $30 per hour and after that, I had been an API support engineer making $67500 per year at a tech start-up. When COVID hit, I was laid off along with most of the company's workforce and I had to start from 0 at a new company. I was so beholden to my employers since they knew my value but I couldn't transfer that to others and getting laid off was essentially starting from scratch with a new employer. I was soon to turn 30 and was wondering what path to take and I got the advice to take this time to invest in my skills. I wondered if I should take out loans and go back to school to start over my degree but I was intrigued by the invitation from Lambda. I read plenty of reviews both positive and negative and applied at a few different boot camps but in the end, Lambda's Income Share plan was hard to pass up. I knew it would cost more than other boot camps in the end, BUT unlike college, I wasn't left holding the bag. They backed up their instruction with their own money knowing if they can't teach me the skills of the trade AND the skills to actually land a high-paying job, they were the ones bearing financial responsibility and not me. 

With this confidence, I enrolled in the course and dove into the prep work. I am not going to cover all of the aspects of teaching but here is a basic pros and cons list of what I went through:

Pros:

• They update their curriculum regularly BUT made sure to teach older concepts that were still widely used to make sure we were still able to work at the broadest amount of companies. 
• The courses were built for remote learning and don't feel like they are a bad port of a classroom lecture
• They have a rigorous Computer science course that covered almost everything I did in 2.5 years of college courses and actually does a better job at retaining them. 
• Your tests are actually mock interviews and are built from the beginning to prepare you to get a job
• You get to work on projects for real companies
• If you are struggling, you can just repeat the month. It doesn't cost you any extra. It allows you to take more time if you need it. 
• They keep in contact with you after graduation to coach you through the job search and they set realistic expectations
• They have recordings of previous lectures if you forget something or fall behind. 

Cons

• You can fall behind. 
  • It is a fast-paced course that builds on the material every day and missing even a single day can be costly since you won't understand what is going on tomorrow. Every day missed almost counts as two since you need to understand your missed day before you can comprehend anything going forward. If you get behind, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and catch up, no one is going to do it for you. 
  • This was tough, but I can't fault the school for this, I definitely had to catch up a few times and it was hours of extra work, but it's nobody's fault but mine if I can't reach out to a classmate for help. 
• Group projects can suffer from different levels of mastery and dedication. 
  • If you have a team member who decides to repeat a month during a project, all of their responsibilities have to be accounted for. This happens regularly so you have to be ready and willing to adapt or ask for help to fill in missing team members. 
  • This one is tough and Lambda does try to fill in gaps with teachers to fill in codebases, but there are projects that I wouldn't put on my portfolio when I had completed my responsibility but our backend member fell behind or our front end team never finished
• They are always improving/adapting
  • This can be hard when halfway through a unit they need to change a topic or switch the way teams are set up. 
  • This can be jarring but the alternative is taking too long to change. If given the choice I would prefer this 

I hope it is clear that I don't have blinders on. They aren't going to guarantee you a job or do all of the work for you. After graduating, I was in the job search for nearly 6 months. However, this is not a fault of Lambdas as much as it was my goal of not just taking an easy Jr position. With what they trained me, and my previous experience, I knew that I had the chops to land a Mid to Sr level position if I work on my interviewing skills. I coded 6 hours per day and through hours into Leet code as well as practiced technical interviews on dozens of jobs I didn't want or was underqualified for and have now landed a job that pays 120k as a Software Engineer. 

In short, I know the school isn't perfect. They didn't guarantee me a job and there are a few things that they are still working on improving, but I can't give them anything less than 5 out of 5 stars. It was the first time in my 3 decades of life that I felt like a school was in my corner. 

To put this in perspective, my old job offered me my position to come work for them before. I remembered feeling so beholden to them since they knew my value but now, I felt liberated since I was currently interviewing for companies that paid more and could see value in the skills I had gained from my time at Lambda. 

If you are looking at boot camps and you have the drive to succeed, ask yourself a question: Do you want to invest in them, or do you want them to invest in you? I promise, if you have the dedication and diligence, you are more than worth the investment and Lambda can change your stars. 

I would recommend Lambda School to anyone without hesitation. I began Lambda School's part-time full stack web development program in January 2020, simply as a way to follow my passion and curiosity for tech/web development without any economic risk (because of the income share agreement). After I completed the curriculum in March 2021, I accepted a fellowship with a startup, and was offered a full time position at its conclusion, which I accepted. The curriculum and student experience did indeed change significantly during the 15 months that I was a student at Lambda, but I don't see that as a negative. Lambda School is constantly trying to improve, so things change by design. 

I've been a student since May 2020 and in the beginning everything was great and what I was hoping for. The TLs were great, lectures we awesome and the students were very helpful when anyone needed help. 

Fast forward 4-5 months and things are not the same. Lambda switched up alot of things. They've done away with TLs l, which alot of students valued when it came to 1:1s for code review. The positive and constructive feedback would only better ourselves to become better developers. The forces us to become mentors and to be mentored as well. Not every student can lead nor teach. Fortunately, my mentee dropped out of lambda and I was able to get back that time to work on the assignments.  I told my mentor I will not participate in the meetings. How can I trust the mentor to provide the guidance I need when they're forced into this role in which they probably didn't want to participate in. 

The track team is an awesome idea but execution was extremely poor. This is another idea that lambda should have let their students opt in to. Most students do not attend these meetings, probably because it runs into our allotted project time or they simply don't find the value in having these meets. Nobody takes the meets seriously. We didn't need them in the beginning and we don't need them now.

Implementing canvas was, in my opinion, a decent improvement from the TK we were used to, but we just didn't get any help to figure out how to navigate through it at first. The quizzes were a great idea too.. the downside to this all is none of our assignments/sprints are graded. How do we know if we did it correctly, dry and effectively? Sure we can test but to make sure it works but like everything else, there's more than one way to solve a problem. Technically, we can clone and fork the assignments/sprints and submit submit the git repo and nobody cares to check to make sure it's been completed. Lambda doesn't care if you do the assignments, which is ironic since they are relying on us to learn and graduate and get a job in order for us to pay them back. Which leads me to believe that they will change the ISAs and we'll have to pay back regardless if we get a job or not.

There are tons of options, cheaper options out there that will give you the same skill sets that lambda is attempting to teach us.. 

codewithmosh.com
Codingphase.com
Udemy.com
Freecodecamp.com

Do your research.


Most of us are in to deep to back out and will need to finish the program. Students make lambda, without us there is no lambda. Students who feel even the slightest way against these changes need to stand up and speak and together, and only together, can we be heard and hopefull  lambda will care enough to hear.

Lambda was a 9month FullTime Fullstack Bootcamp. 
it started out great
you have a careers session every monday
you have 3weeks of lecture and 1 week of build per unit
you are assigned into a TL team where in you have a teamlead that you can go for when you need help or to help you debug 

each lecture week would be 
4days(mon-thurs) of 2hours lecture, a daily project, and an afternoon standup
1 day(fridays) have a thing called sprint wherein you have 3hours to finish a project and hit mvp. after that there are afternoon meetings

every unit there is a thing called a build week
where in you work on a project for a whole week, and work on what your specific unit is taught its like a culmination thing and have it submitted by friday end of week. 

the first months lambda was great, my study habits had structure the instructors were great, there were some hiccups here and there but overall id say it was worth the 30k ISA

they had a hirings team, where they help you get interviews with companies that lambda is partnered with. 

this was all great until lambda decided to roll out with some changes

they cut the course from 9mos to 6mos. 
they said they have a better curriculum, but they didnt. they just removed stuff from the curriculum without really giving any concrete reason why aside from `trust me ive talked with the hiring partners`. when you ask them why they do it this way they just dodge the question and say , trust me this is a proven way. 
now there are no more TL's to guide you, and you are forced to "Mentor" students from earlier class and you get a "Mentee" from 2 classes ahead of you to build your leadership skills. the concept is great but then not everyone wants to be a leader some people just want to learn how to code. but for this thing you dont really have a choice on the matter and are just forced to roll with it. 

a lot of people are complaining that this is a breach of contract from the ISA we signed and they still did not acknowledge that.
they continued to roll with the changes even if majority of students complained about it. questions are left unanswered and everyone is wondering if this is forced labor because it does seem like it

lambda was great this i dunno

This program was great until it wasn't. I had been withdrawn after only inquiring about withdrawing, I was only seeking information, but they have decided to move forward with the process. So after snapping out of a depressive state from me losing my job from Covid-19, losing a parent, and while all being pregnant,  I sent a letter of appeal, for them to still not work with me and have not have the best open communication, whereas I wouldn't hear anything for a week so it prolonged everything. I've been with the program for a year before all this has happened, I put in hours, stressed and cried over it while working a job that had ridiculous overtime where I had to pull all nighters just to try and keep up and they still denied to help after just one stressful week.

I believed in this program and all they said to me was I can reapply after 6 months...I have written back more questions and how I felt and haven't gotten a response in almost 3 weeks. I honestly feel like I would've been better off purchasing classes from online courses, at least I wouldn't have to now owe $30,000. I would not recommend. 

Opinions about Lambda vary but I'll outline the bottom line.  Is Lambda perfect?  No.  In any organization?  No.  Will Lambda get you where you need to be if you put in the time?  Yes.

For me a program like Lambda needed to do one thing: give me enough experience to get my foot in the door with jobs that were previously inaccessible. There are rough spots in the curriculum and organization but at the end of the day I have gained the skills needed to find work in my desired field.  What's more, I have developed a network of peers that will serve me well into the future.  This is all the more true because Lambda is driven to improve by using feedback and data to fine tune the process. 

If you want to gain the skills to change careers while joining and ever improving network you will be hard pressed to find someone doing it better than Lambda.

I had been working in hotel management for about 6 years when I decided to pursue my passion for technology and problem solving and become a software engineer. I looked at many options from University, State College, Online University, and bootcamps.  There are so many options to choose from but after research I knew the bootcamp route was the one for me. I researched and found the best bootcamps for me, put together pros and cons and ended up choosing the Full time Full Stack Software Engineering course at Lambda School. Let me start off by saying I have absolutely no regrets about my decision. Now that I am graduate and working in the industry, I will share a list of some of the pros and cons of my experience with Lambda. Notice some items are on the pro and con lists.

Pros:
Class/group structure - Its very similar to a lot of real world work environments. Students are split into smaller groups/teams that are led by a Product Manager(which is typically a senior student at Lambda). These small groups were vital to my success at Lambda. They become your support system, friends, family, etc. We learn together, fix bugs together, tell stories, laugh, vent, etc. Having a great group makes all the difference at Lambda.

Agile environment - Lambda is very agile and adapts quickly. From operations flow/procedure to last minute curriculum changes to based off whats needed/used in the industry and what hiring partners are looking for. This is incredibly nice cause you are not stuck learning tech thats not used anymore and your skills are more relevant during the job search. Lambda believes in finding the need for a change and making it quick, not waisting time or making excuses why not to change.

Instructors and staff - When I attended Lamba(5/18 - 12/18) the instructors and staff were amazing! They were all very involved and personally invested in each students struggles, concerns, and ultimately their success.  Lambda will not hold your hand the whole way but for someone that is dedicated they will find the level of support very helpful and way above what other bootcamps and universities offer. I even unofficial was mentored by one of my instructors who helped me grow, network, and prepare for where I am today. The school has grown so much and many of the instructors are now directors over different programs and have hired more instructors. Hopefully they maintain the culture that was there when I attended.

Income Shared Agreement - The way Lambda uses ISA to pay is beneficial in so many ways. To name a few, it gives those without the opportunity to down pay for the program or cant get a loan or whatever the case may be an equal opportunity. Talent can come from anywhere and Lambda is giving everyone the chance. Its also beneficial because it aligns the goals of the student and the school. If the student isn't successful, nobody will benefit. Lambda is just as interested in your success and job hunt as anyone else.

Job Search Support - I received so much support when I graduated and began my job search. Besides the instructor that became a mentor to me, I was assigned an amazing career coach named Gigi, I received many follow ups from instructors, staff, and even the founder of the school Austen. Through their help and networking like crazy in my area I was able to land my dream job at an amazing company. Lambda Mission Accomplished!!

Cons:
Class/group structure - This is also included as a pro from above. The reason I included this on my cons list is the very reason it was on the pros list. If you dont have a great PM group with great vibes this can make your experience really challenging. Since this becomes your little family and support group you learn to really lean on each other and without that I dont know what my outcome would have been like.

Agile environment - This is also included as a pro from above. The reason I included this on my cons list is because as great as agile methodology, if not done correctly it can cause its own set of problems. On some of the changes while I was a student it was so sudden and without any preparation that nobody including staff were completely ready for it and it created issues, confusion, and frustration. I think remaining agile is definitely best but Lambda should understand the issues it can cause and try to be more prepared for the change with the appropriate tools and resources in place.

Saturated Market - The market in a lot of places is incredibly saturated. Yes the growth of the industry is huge and more and more jobs are becoming available, however, there are also a ton of juniors looking for their first job as well which really saturates it. This is not Lambda's problem directly, however, I feel that staff, instructors, and career coaches need to do a better job at making this issue clear and expectations are set correctly. From talking too many other students, it is a common feeling that Lambda painted the industry as growing and that there is a deficit of engineers and finding a job should be easy. Upon graduation you learn that about the saturation and confusion starts to kick in. It is what it is, but would be nice to have been aware the whole time so expectations are realistic.

Overall I love Lambda. No bootcamp or university is perfect but of the options I truly feel this is the route to take. If you are thinking about the bootcamp route, do your research, make a decision, and jump in full speed. Lambda will help support you along the way and will be there even after you graduate and find your first job. Above everything else, Lambda values feedback and takes it very serious. Every single piece of feedback is listened too and will be followed up on. This feedback is what fuels the rapid growth/success of the program and the agile practice. Once you are a part of Lambda School you will always have that network and support system that you belong to and again, I could not be more excited and without regrets about my decision.

I am going to just say this may not be for everyone.

That being said if you don't put in the work you will not succeed, there is ever opportunity to get you where you need to go, and even if you are new and not sure you can do it there are people that will help you every step for every level no one who is willing to get put in the work gets left behind, Lambda does a lot to make sure the students are getting the support they need to succeed, this only works if you do.

The course is incredible value for money.

I went from working construction in the Arizona heat to making a very good Salary working in Boston, It took a grind and a lot of hard work and effort to get there, I won't say it came easy, but I got it and Lambda showed me the way to get there.

Passion for programming is really a must, that is not a Lambda thing that is a developer thing, if you don't want to be doing this than it's probably not for you, if you can find the joy in solving difficult problems with amazing developers and friends than you will do fine, for me solving hard problems with unique thinking, finding out fun ways to solve hard problems, it's really amazing.

I will say if you are not a team player this may not be the course for you, there is a lot of pairs work and working with teams, and really if you are not a team player it will be hard to find a place inside of the industry, to get the most out of your time at lambda be sure to make a lot of connections and you will grow as a developer and as a person, meeting so many people from different background and learning to approach code in different ways.

 

The instructors are Lambda are just amazing, really I don't have anything bad to say about them, some of the most inspiring and great teachers I have had, the are some of the best and they impress me with how well they do, I am really glad I got to meet and learn from each of them. 

 

Job assistance was amazing Kelsey my career coach is one of the main reasons I never gave up on my job search, and they are improving they the way the connect the students with the hiring partners all the time, so I can only see it getting better from here.

 

Curriculum had a few hiccup but overall it was very good, in my class we learned MongoDB and I know they teach the students SQL now, I don't regret learning MongoDB though it's really awesome I enjoy it, however I use SQL at work so MongoDB has not come in use beyond personal projects.