With so many options available, how can you choose the best coding bootcamp for you? Wouldn’t it be nice to try every option before deciding if it was the right fit for you?
Well, Practicum agrees. Students can begin this coding bootcamp’s three courses at no charge. If they like what they’ve seen, only then do they make a financial commitment to the program.
Though you may have heard of this format before, you may not know how students feel about this opportunity.
So today, for the first time, a Career Karma staff member who has attended the free portion of the course will give you some insight into how this works. But before we get into their experience with the course, it may be helpful to know more about the courses that Practicum offers and why the school has chosen this unique structure to give students a chance to learn more.
Try your hand at Data Analytics, Web Development, and Data Science with no strings attached with Practicum’s Free Intro Courses.
Start Practicum’s free intro course today.Practicum Immersive Courses
We’ve covered Practicum’s merits in more detail before, explaining how Practicum came to be, how its students tackle real projects for real companies, and how they have strong support during the learning process to help them complete the school’s ambitious courses.
Practicum offers three online courses to prospective students covering different fields in tech: web development, data analytics, and data science. Each course trains students on industry-standard tools that real companies use today. Practicum graduates have gone on to work at leading companies, including Tesla, Microsoft, Nielsen, and more.
- Learn Software Engineering at Practicum
The Software Engineering course teaches students the full MERN stack over 10 months. Course graduates often land jobs as software developers, web developers, or full-stack developers. This course has an accessible $8,900 cost, with the option to pay in $950 monthly installments with no interest. - Learn Data Analytics at Practicum
Practicum’s Data Analytics Course trains students to conduct statistical data analysis and exploratory data analysis with tools and cutting-edge languages including Python, SQL, and Jupyter Notebook over seven months. This course costs $8,500, with a payment plan of $1,250 per month. - Learn Data Science at Practicum
The Data Science Course builds on students’ data skills by teaching Python and its essential libraries, machine learning, SQL, and computer vision for nine months. Graduates from this course have landed jobs as data scientists all over the world. It costs $11,000 upfront and also offers a payment plan of $1400 per month.
Practicum’s Free Intro Courses
Each course at Practicum has a free portion that students take before they start any financial obligation. As my colleague went through the Web Development bootcamp’s free intro course, we’ll cover its structure in this article.
The intro course gives students their first taste of the Agile methodology, which relates to the format and timeline according to which most tech companies carry out their work on a day-to-day basis. The learning process in the intro course and the full program is structured in a similar way to help prepare students for their future work environment.
To join the one-week intro course, you’ll need to click on the “Start free trial” button on the program’s landing page, which will take you to Practicum’s registration page. Once you’re all signed up, you’ll get a short introduction that will explain how the intro course works. Then, you’ll be given a link to sign up for the onboarding webinar.
An onboarding webinar is held every Friday, where you’ll meet your tutor and community manager and kick off the intro course together with other students.
The intro course itself will take you through the basics of HTML and CSS on Practicum’s interactive platform, a process that should take you three to four days. After that, you’ll work on a project, which involves creating an “About Me” webpage.
The lessons on the interactive platform include many practical tasks that will help you reinforce your understanding of every new concept you come across. You’ll start writing code in HTML and CSS from Day 1 as you prepare to start working on your project. When the time comes to create your “About Me” page, you’ll get a live coding lesson from William Schutte, the intro course tutor, who will walk you through the steps needed to complete the project.
As you work through the project, Practicum’s community managers and 24/7 technical support team offer all the help you’ll need. We’ve discussed the strong support network at Practicum before, and you’ll have these experts in your corner from the day you begin.
Your tutor will join you on Practicum’s Slack channel, where you’ll also have support from people who are going through the free intro course. After you and your sprint mates submit your code, you’ll have seven days to review and revise with advice on your project from a professional software developer.
No matter what you decide to do at this point, you’ll have already gained a community of budding coders and received several professional advice. If you continue with the program, however, you’ll get even more chances to improve your craft under the watchful eye of Practicum’s staff. All the while, you’ll be enjoying the program’s benefits, such as supportive instruction on industry-standard tools and the chance to work on real projects for real companies.
However, before we go into what’s possible after the sprint, let’s hear from someone who went through it.
A Student’s Practicum Free Intro Course Review
Ethan Scully is the Content Partnerships Senior Manager at Career Karma. He’s been with us for almost two years, and in that time, he’s learned a lot about coding on his own, building games, and more using various coding languages. He has experience with some of the best coding bootcamps available and the coding background to understand quality instruction.
He had to fit in this instruction while also leading a department of writers here at Career Karma, and he found the free intro course worked well with his busy schedule.
“The time commitment was good. It was easy to fit in lessons while working full time,” Ethan says. “I spent around one to two hours for four or so days out of the week working on it. This was just the beginning of the course, so it may be that the time needed would increase through the lessons. However, for me, it was easy to fit them into my schedule.”
Ethan found the course’s interactive platform to be intuitive and easy to understand.
“I really enjoyed how the course was laid out,” Ethan says. “It was fun and comfortable to use, and I loved how many of the new concepts presented were explained with accurate and helpful analogies or illustrations. I really liked that each lesson was presented in a narrative format as if I was actually working at a company and each lesson was part of building a project that I was assigned.”
While the course content was easy to understand, it wasn’t boring or unchallenging. Students learn to use the tools they need without any padding or fluff. You’ll get detailed instruction on projects that will have some real application after graduation.
“I liked that the course never held back code. Everything that made the assignment work was shown in the code editor, but each part was eventually explained,” Ethan says. “The course doesn’t overload you with information while still helping you get familiar with how code looks and feels.” The schedule’s natural progression makes it easy to organically learn the building blocks of web design.
“Another thing I liked is how each lesson started off slowly, but while building on each topic, the course didn’t always hold your hand,” says Ethan. “It felt good to be asked to make a change in the code without any details and to be able to complete the change because I had learned what I needed to do throughout the course.”
You’ll have to create code solutions on your own, even with the program’s support. Even if you do come to them for help, they won’t give you the answer to your code problems immediately. They’ll give you hints and suggestions to help you figure out what’s next. They do it all to help you start thinking like a coder, as your logic skills are the key to a lifelong career in this field.
Even though Ethan didn’t need as much help as an inexperienced coder, he still appreciated the hands-on approach from the support team.
“I really appreciated the help of the community manager and the direction from the mentor,” Ethan says. “The community manager often reached out and helped me make sure I was on course, while the mentor helped me untangle any tricky questions.”
Along with the guidance from Practicum’s staff, he also enjoyed connecting with his classmates during the program.
“The community was really positive and encouraging,” Ethan says. “From helping each other out to just celebrating each other’s victories or even just responding with a supportive emoji, it seemed like everyone in the community was engaged and excited to work together.”
Overall, with the experience behind him, Ethan had a positive experience with the course. Along with his recommendation, he has some advice for people who are considering joining the sprint.
“I really enjoyed trying out Practicum’s course,” Ethan says. “The UI was beautiful and easy to use, and I thought the content was really well laid out. I think my only advice would be to take the time to practice some of the concepts learned on personal projects outside the course if you have the time.”
Begin Your Free Journey into Tech
Every course at Practicum begins with a free intro course to help students get acclimated. And all of the support and community that Ethan mentioned in his course is common to every other course at the coding bootcamp. This course gives you a chance to test out the industry-standard tools that you’ll use in your new career every day without paying anything, which is a hard experience to replicate.
If you’re interested in experiencing this sprint for yourself, start the Practicum free intro course today.
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.
