Data analytics bootcamp by Trilogy Education Services

I am in the trilogy boot camp right now in Denver. I would not recommend it. I am a little over halfway through.

Here's my situation. I am desperate to change careers (I work in education but I'm not a teacher). I too, had no background in data analytics although I studied statistics in grad school and interpretation of statistical data is a regular part of my job.

Also, I have taken a lot of courses in my life and I usually don't struggle to get an A with moderate effort (including college-level Calculus). I'm not trying to be obnoxious but for some reason, school and taking tests just comes naturally for me. Probably because I have decent inductive reasoning skills.

That being said, I am seriously struggling with this Data Analytics boot camp. I am now significantly behind in getting my assignments in despite putting in 3 hours a day studying(the recommended time for the boot camp). I have a tutor that I am able to utilize 1 time a week. I am not able to study more because I was under the impression that this was a part-time class so I didn't quit my full-time job.

I dread my assignments and going to class. This may be because I am not good at coding/programming, which is 99% of the class. You will only cover statistical analysis for like a day and it won't be part of your very tedious and, I believe, unnecessarily lengthy homework assignments. However, programming is a deductive reasoning skill. So I may be struggling due to the fact that I've finally taken a class that emphasizes a skill in which I have no natural aptitude. Although, I have always been good at math, programming is a different beast altogether.

I would recommend you take some coding courses online for free in order to get a taste for what you will be doing. I want to be clear that you are not taking a data analytics course but a data science course that focuses solely on collecting/ organizing and not on interpretation.

I put all that in just to make sure you understand that it could be me and my experience. However, I believe that it is a bad course in terms of it's programming and curricular design. The quantity of material you will cover will make it difficult for you to develop mastery of any one skill, making it unlikely for you to change careers by the time you finish the course. You will more than likely need to continue study in up to three of the areas covered in order to be job-ready.

As a classmate of mine said, you are paying 10,000 to trilogy to teach yourself these skills as the curriculum, instruction and homework are all so haphazardly put together that it is impossible to benefit from. The assignments in class are so haphazard that I sit in class most days just wondering what is going on. While they give solved versions of the assignments, much of the code in the assignments actually do not work and have to be debugged. I go home and teach myself what I need for the homework from you tube videos.

BTW. The class sells itself on getting you "portfolio ready" by the end of the class. The portfolio you build, however, is a joke and there will be thousands of other former students with similar projects on Github, if not with the same exact code.

What's more, I believe I would immensely enjoy this course, despite the challenging content, if the class structure itself wasn't so poorly designed. The instructor and TAs we have are awesome but they all have full-time jobs and there is not much they can do when given the POS curriculum that they have to work with.

Trilogy spends most of the 350,000 it makes from each class, no doubt, to line the pockets of its extremely wealthy CEO and whatever is left it probably spends on sales/marketing. A miserly pittance, I would wager, is spent on curricular design and paying the instructional staff. There are better boot camps out there.

/r/DataScienceStudents Thread