UC San Diego Extended Studies Boot Camps

The more I learn about web development the more I despise and regret attending this boot camp. I could have learned all of this on my own and in a much more effective way. As a developer, I can't let others make the wrong choice and end up like many of us UCSD graduates.

First the numbers. There isn't any! How many students get jobs after the course? With my class about 3 of 25 got positions. You don't see numbers posted anywhere. A great boot camp is transparent with the numbers.

The quality of the material, similar to the free online version of Codecademy.

Teacher and TA's are great, the only positive note on the course. They really help you out.

Job placement. Still looking for work, graduate in mid-2017.

An alternative, stick to freecodecamp.com and become a self-taught developer. Don't let your education be in the hands of somebody other than yourself. Stick to a roadmap of either becoming a front-end developer or back-end and gradually work your way to full stack. 

I am very satisfied with the 6 months program

- Syllabus is great. The course schedule are all well designed. The program covers most commonly used technologies like JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, Node, Express, React, MongoDB, MySQL, etc. The whole process is done step by step, so all students (no matter if he/she has previous web development experience or not) start from the basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript and use it as the foundation of learning more fancy stuff like Node and React. This is very important because students not only know how to use handy packages like Node and React, but also know what is under the hood and reason for switching to these framework from plain JavaScript.

- There are weekly assignments and three group projects. Weekly assignments push students to spend time outside the classroom on the topics covered in the classroom. Group projects not only provide a chance of integrating things learned in the classroom, but also expose students to real world teamwork environment (merging conflict in GitHub and something like that)

- Instructors and TAs are all very nice. They can be easily contacted through Slack (IM used in the program) and they are happy to answer questions. Lectures are well prepared.

- Some career support like they provide tips on resumes, do mock interviews, etc., are offered. In the program, a few guests from companies like Amazon, GoPro and a few other local start-ups are invited for tech talks or sharing recruitment information.

Overall, I am 100% satisfied with the bootcamp. I’ll give some background about myself to kind of put my experience into perspective. I ended up landing a great job due to the bootcamp, but I believe my background in engineering played a large role as well.

I’ve been coding on a regular basis since around 2011, but it was only with Matlab and VBA. I had tried learning to code real languages (Java, Python, etc) several times, only to get to the point where I understand syntax and how to write a few functions, then lose motivation.. I also tried learning web development on my own, but got to the same point. I was lacking two things:

1.A deep understanding of how all of the languages work together (front end vs back end). I didn’t understand the benefits or even the purpose of each language. I was missing a huge piece of the puzzle.

2.Real projects that I could put my name on and show off on my resume. No employer was going to take me seriously by just having some codeacademy and treehouse tutorials under my belt.

I was growing more and more unenthused about my job, and I knew that coding was my passion. Upon hearing about the UCSD Extension Bootcamp, I think I was enrolled within 24 hours. The main selling points for me were:

1.I didn’t have to quit my job

2.Purpose of the bootcamp was to build your github/portfolio

3.Career assistance once the course was over

I’ll take a page out of Will’s post and discuss pros/cons separately.

Pros:

Projects: The 3 group projects in the course were probably the best things to come out of the bootcamp for me. Literally every single interview I had I was asked to go into lots of detail about each of the projects. The fact that they were coded from the ground up, team projects, version controlled with git, and were deployed. This the full cycle of a real life software (except for testing).

Instructors: Both George Morgan and Brandon Lyon were amazing instructors that I learned a lot from. George has been teaching for many, many years and it shows. He was comparable to (and better than) many professors in the Engineering school at UCSD. The way he would explain difficult concepts was incredibly insightful because of the way he could break it down into simpler high level explanations. I learned an insane amount of information from George about anything and everything coding. He was really accessible before and after class and was always willing to answer broader/off-topic questions about other languages or technologies. Brandon, although having a different teaching style, was a very good professor as well. He helped us learn on our own (valuable skill) by reading docs and doing your own research, which is like the real world.

TAs: Can’t say enough good things about these guys except they probably weren’t paid enough. They were all super helpful and ready on slack all the time.

In class exercises: The in class exercises were exceptional. They broke down difficult concepts/technologies into small chunks where we would complete smaller sections of an app piece by piece. These were probably the most valuable tool for me as they taught proper coding practices on top of learning the content itself.

Career support: Although I landed this job on my own, I learned a TON from Stacey. Her workshops and the guests she brought in throughout the course were really valuable. After the course ended, the constant feed of job leads were also nice coming from the Trilogy recruiter.

Cons:

The curriculum changed throughout the course. Initially we were supposed to spend a couple weeks on other languages such as Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP. I was pretty excited to go through other languages to help me get a better understanding of all of the different languages. I wanted to get a bit of practice with them also, even if we weren’t going to get a lot. However, all of these lectures were scrapped (I think there were 6 total) because the class wanted to focus on ReactJS more. At the time I was incredibly disappointed in this because I wanted some experience with object oriented languages. But after the class ended I dedicated my time to learning object oriented languages and object oriented design, so looking back it’s not as big of a deal to me.

Homeworks:

I think the first 3 homeworks were pretty difficult and they forced us to do a lot of learning outside of class to complete them. However, I’m sure they got a lot of complaints because from there on the homeworks were pretty much copy/pastes from the in-class exercises. They didn’t require much time or effort to complete.

Pace:

I feel like the overall pace of the classes were pretty slow. I feel like I could have spent 30 mins to an hour looking at the in-class exercises and got the same information as the 3 hour lecture. Obviously when we were learning a new technology it was great to be in class to get a high level understanding of the technology, but many lectures provided minimal value.

Overall, I got exactly what I wanted out of the bootcamp. I would take it again if I were to do it over.

Having recently graduated, I can say that the bootcamp assisted and played a role in fully transforming my outside interest in tech and innovation into a full-on career in the field. I had aspirations for a long time before taking the course, but it was ultimately the step that I NEEDED to take to advance myself.  

If you're worried that you don't have enough of a technical background to get started, FEAR NOT. I started the course quite literally at a blank slate (barely knowing the difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, for reference) and within a few weeks of struggle and patience became "comfortable with being uncomfortable", which is something the instructors always preached. Ultimately, you will gain a lot out of this program if you stick with it and think long-term. 

1. Security Policies and Standards: Understand the principles governing security practices.
2. Security Threats: Explore common threats and vulnerabilities.
3. Wireless Networking and Security: Learn about securing wireless networks.
4. Authentication and Access Control: Master techniques for user authentication and access management.
5. Introduction to Cryptography: Dive into cryptographic concepts.
6. Managing a Public Key Infrastructure: Explore PKI for secure communication.
7. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Prepare for handling emergencies and ensuring business continuity.