Most coding bootcamps are tough and there’s a good reason.
Coding bootcamps squeeze huge amounts of information into a short amount of time. And much like real bootcamps, students have to show their commitment by sticking with the programs no matter what. Even if this commitment means that students sometimes sign up without really knowing what they’re getting into.
Practicum is a bootcamp that’s looking to change the way students enter the workforce. This bootcamp is backed by one of the top companies in the world, and it’s setting out to make a difference with its emphasis on availability and support.
Friendly drill sergeants will guide you through your bootcamp and build you into a high quality coder. Although the program is tough and your will is tested constantly, you’ll have support from the Practicum team around the clock. And as you work your way through the program with your classmates, you’ll develop strong bonds that will help everyone succeed.
What Is Practicum?
Practicum is an online bootcamp with a strong curriculum, 24/7 support, and career acceleration. Practicum offers six to ten-month online coding bootcamps. Students can currently choose from three tracks: data science, data analysis, and web development. All bootcamps incorporate real-world know-how you won’t find in any textbook and are designed for career switchers.
Each bootcamp includes full access to an interactive online platform, real-life projects, tutor support from experienced developers, code reviews, online webinars, and live-coding sessions.
A Supportive Foundation
The hardcore practice-oriented bootcamp starts with a strong curriculum, but the support students receive from their friendly drill instructors and fellow cadets make it all possible.
Practicum employees like Anton Eremin, the Data Science Project Manager, can attest to the gap that Practicum is filling in the market. Eremin has worked for the bootcamp since the beginning, but before that, he was an early adopter of online learning options.
“When I was in high school, I lived in a small town close-ish to Moscow,” Eremin said.
“I was pretty good at math and physics, but I didn’t have a lot of teachers who could teach me the advanced concepts for competitions. So I stumbled upon a website that was an education service for high schoolers.
“They used to stream the top Moscow university professors explaining school materials in advanced physics. That was pretty helpful to me, and I saw the benefits of the internet as an educational tool.”
Eremin went on to attend the university that employed those professors after graduating high school. His first job after graduating from the university was at the same company that recorded and posted the lectures which got him through school.
“I met some people who didn’t want online education to be what it had been for so many years,” Eremin said.
Eremin and his colleagues felt that many of the options around them were overpromising and underdelivering when it came to helping people successfully change careers.
“All marketing and no product, and nothing in terms of delivering on promises. You’d get out of it and couldn’t do anything,” Eremin said. “We saw that there was a difference in the Western market, and we cared more about the [instructional] design, so we went on to start a new product.”
How Practicum’s Student Support Leads to Success
Eremin and other Practicum employees care about student success above all. And students do succeed, as the many reviews you’ll find on the school’s site and around the internet will attest. Students from around the world are learning that this bootcamp’s support can give you a head start in your new career.
Why does Practicum stress support so much? As we mentioned above, a bootcamp is trying to squeeze so much learning into such a short amount of time. Because of the rapid pace, students may find themselves falling behind or putting a lot of pressure on themselves to make the situation work.
Students are never alone during their time in the program. They have 24/7 technical support at their disposal to ensure they can get an answer to any question at any time of the day. They also get tutors to help them with the fast-paced curriculum, and community managers to guide them through the learning process.
“You can talk to people 24/7, be it your mentor or your community manager, or the support team, or code reviewer. There’s really a lot of people who try to see that every student succeeds,” Eremin said.
Your community managers will provide emotional support, and help you with any questions you may have through direct messages and in the bootcamp’s Slack channels. They’ll also serve as educational advisors through personal calls to help shepherd you through the challenging learning environment.
Those Slack channels also give students spaces to form lifelong bonds during their time in the 10-month curriculum. Practicum encourages students to build community with its communal learning atmosphere.
The support doesn’t end after graduation. Practicum supplies students with the career support they need to strengthen their portfolio and job hunting materials before they go out into the wild. Students also get access to a three-month acceleration program which gives them a clear direction on their network, resume sourcing, and more.
Students get to know the job opportunities around them with a career map, then identify a unique value proposition (UVP). A UVP is a promise that incorporates the unique benefits you offer over the competition. After you’ve identified your UVP, you revise your job search materials and interviewing strategy around it.
Through weekly career Q and As, bi-weekly group coaching sessions, and reviewing career tips, students in the acceleration program prepare for the road ahead with mock interviews and more. And your classmates help you through the process by providing moral support and reviewing materials from a peer perspective.
Jackie Lu, a Practicum grad who now works as a data analyst at Tesla, mentioned what he likes about the career track in a recent blog post.
“It’s good to not feel alone, and to have a group of people you can come back to that can share the same kind of struggles and celebrations that you have,” Jackie said.
Practicum believes in its support system and curriculum so much that students get a six-month job guarantee after graduating from the program. If students don’t find a job within six months, they get back every cent that they paid for the program.
The support system is strong, but the curriculum is the other side of the program’s success. There are a few reasons why the lesson plan has become a highly reviewed facet of the Practicum experience.
Practicum’s Curriculum
Practicum prides itself on the affordability and clarity of its program. No matter where the program expands, it’s an easy sell according to Andrew Urodov, product manager at the web development school.
“[The mission] is one of the things which helps us connect to people across continents,” Urodov said. “Our mission is really simple and that’s why it’s really easy to explain to everyone we’ve been approaching. We just want to help students change their careers and change their lives. We want to give a chance to everyone who’s ready to push forward.”
Students of all different backgrounds are welcome at Practicum. And the school doesn’t take advantage of inexperienced coders. There’s a unique offer from this school to help students decide if the world of coding is for them.
Anyone can take the first 20 hours of any of the three courses for free. You’ll be experiencing what the school has to offer to make an informed decision on whether the school is right for you.
The free courses also get straight to the point. You’ll be coding from the very first session, not wasting the limited time you have with information you won’t understand or be able to use. If you choose to progress into the full courses after taking the free portions, you’ll get a quality education at a reasonable price on industry-standard tools.
Practicum’s free courses give students a taste of the full course’s storylines. These storylines are narratives where you learn skills by completing projects that you might see at real industry jobs. Though the free courses end just before students start the sprints that define the full programs, they can still get a sense of the course is right for them.
Projects in the full course take place over multi-week sprints. The sprints take the same basic shape, where students learn new skills and practice through the first week or two, and then fix bugs and have professionals code reviews in the last week.
The first three sprints take three weeks, as students lay the groundwork for the rest of their time in the course. As students get more comfortable, the rest of the sprints speed up to two weeks. These sprints balance time spent learning on your own with class time and professional reviews and feedback.
In the full courses, students can even choose to complete projects with real companies after their 10th sprint. Students team up with a tutor that leads them through the sprint where they get real-life experience as a team in their field. Two Practicum students have even gotten job offers from this process, as the companies they worked for liked what they saw.
Students have access to professional code reviewers throughout these projects to make sure their learning journey goes smoothly. At the end of their time at Practicum, students will have compiled all of their projects into a strong portfolio to show job recruiters.
Web development students learn how to build sites and applications using the full JavaScript stack with React, also known as the MERN stack. Data analytics students learn to collect and structure data, form hypotheses, identify patterns, and draw conclusions using Python. Data science students learn to structure and analyze large data sets with machine learning using Python as well.
All three of these programs are available at a significantly lower cost than you might expect. The data analytics course costs $3,000, the data science course costs $4,000, and the web development course only costs $5,000. Each program also offers financing options, which splits the already manageable cost into easy, interest-free monthly payments.
Practicum is so confident in the strength of its material that it can offer a job guarantee and 20 hours of free coursework to anyone. This confidence is a testament to the strength of the program, and how successful it is at helping people enter the industry.
The Practicum staff takes pride in the work that the company is doing, and they firmly believe in its mission.
“We join the team because we’re really enthusiastic about education, and we believe that we can democratize it somehow and help more people jump into tech,” Urodov said. “It makes Practicum a really exciting place to be right now.”
Conclusion
Students all over the world are taking advantage of what Practicum has to offer. With its easy to access curriculum and cost, along with its strong support system, you can see why this hardcore practice-oriented course is so popular.
You will be challenged in this rigorous program, which the school has worked hard to make into something amazing. And you won’t be attacked or abandoned. You’ll have amazing help from your first day in the program, and you’ll have everything you need to succeed after graduation.
If you’ve liked what you’ve read so far, feel free to visit the Practicum site to learn more. You may be its next success story.
About us: Career Karma is a platform designed to help job seekers find, research, and connect with job training programs to advance their careers. Learn about the CK publication.
