With prep courses, you get what you pay for
In 2015, there were half-a-million open positions in the software development and engineering fields. Tech companies, in other words, couldn’t hire people fast enough. Yet even with 60,000 Computer Science majors graduating that year in the U.S., they couldn’t meet the high demand.
The disparity between available positions and skilled people who can fill them — compared to broad underemployment across the country — shows there’s incredible opportunity in coding. Bootcamps provide an essential service of bringing talented students into tech.
How big of a difference can attending a top coding bootcamp make? Graduates from top bootcamps earn over six-figure salaries in their first job at companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, and more.
However, getting into a top coding bootcamp like App Academy isn’t easy. App Academy only accepts around 3% of applicants and its grads earn the highest median salaries in the industry. Simply said, it pays to get into a top coding school. That’s why App Academy created a prep program to increase students’ chances of getting into bootcamps that land over $100K in salary.
It’s a Better Value Because It Offers Top-of-the-Line Rigor for the Price
Quartz writer Alice Truong reports that to qualify for acceptance into a bootcamp, schools require “50 to 100 hours of prep work as part of their applications,” as well as coding challenges and technical interviews. But even if completing the right prep program can help candidates make the admissions process easier, students still face a tradeoff between rigor and price: More rigorous programs tend to cost more while shallower programs cost less.
According to Bootcamp Prep Manager Alvin Zablan, free and reduced-price courses can’t afford to provide tailored instruction. Cheap courses, he says, only give students practice problems and an answer key. If you’re stuck on a problem, there’s likely no support for you. Rigorous prep courses, on the other hand, provide deep support.
Zablan says Bootcamp Prep teaches you that it’s more important to know how to do a problem than to get it right all the time, which is something the bootcamp has learned through experience over the past two and a half years.
It’s a Better Value Because It Helps You Get In Anywhere
App Academy offers in-person and online versions of Bootcamp Prep seeking to be to coding bootcamps what SAT Prep is to universities.
But what are you getting for your money? The best quality instruction in the industry, according to independent reviewers. App Academy was recently rated as the #1 coding bootcamp in San Francisco and New York, while Flatiron School, Actualize, and Fullstack Academy followed behind.
App Academy’s Bootcamp Prep’s individualized teacher support also makes a difference. The in-person and online versions have the same curriculum and high level of support, and, unlike cheaper courses, Bootcamp Prep students receive both technical training and non-technical training during Bootcamp prep, like live 1:1 tutoring, grading, feedback, mock interviews, and more.
It’s a Better Value Because Its Personal Instruction Methods Work
Students of Bootcamp Prep can ask TAs questions at any time through Slack channels, which, Alvin Zablan explains, means students can quickly develop a trustworthy, personal connection to them.
“There are public [Slack] channels dedicated to Bootcamp Prep and Bootcamp Prep Online students. TAs monitor these chatrooms,” Zablan says. Scheduling formal tutoring sessions Bootcamp Prep students is easy before and after classes. App Academy encourages all students to study the curriculum and use teaching resources to prepare for their assessments.
Most students find the in-person and online courses useful because they include multiple test assessments. Each assessment tests students’ knowledge of learned material and requires them to write code. If students have never written code, by the time they get to this step, they will know! Plus, assessments are hand-reviewed by App Academy staff, who annotate student’s submitted code. Teachers and TAs give you line-by-line feedback to ensure you become a web developer.
Instructors write in-line comments directly on student’s submitted code. You can see an example of some in-line comments below with Bootcamp Prep Instructor Alvin Zablan’s initials (-AZ).