Hi Michael,

Thank you for your feedback. We appreciate your candor regarding the challenges you experienced.

Your feedback is not typical of our graduates and we would like to better understand what happened and how we can remedy the situation.

I’ve emailed you directly and I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Sean Daken
Founder & CEO

We’re sorry your RefactorU experience did not meet your expectations. While we may not agree on every point you make, certain issues you raise have concerned us as well. Below are some improvements we’ve made since then.

The job fair we hosted on June 16 was disappointing for all of us. We had over a dozen companies confirmed to attend, but many canceled at the last minute or simply didn’t show. The same was true for job seekers. Our career fairs typically draw 20-25 employers and 100-200 prospective employees from around the area, so these results were a surprise. We concluded that several factors impacted attendance at this event, most notably the timing during a popular summer vacation period, and the steady increase in competing requests for employers to participate. In response, we have renewed our strategy to hold fewer, larger job fairs and to collaborate with other partners (including bootcamp competitors) to produce them. For example, unlike the June event, the recent Denver Start-up Week job fair we promoted and co-sponsored was a tremendous success.

It’s important to note that simply attending career fairs, like responding to online postings, has limited effectiveness. We stress during every cohort that attending Meetups, networking, and directly approaching potential employers tend to be much more productive.

To address an increasingly competitive job market we have made strategic investments to help our students and alumni be more successful. We recently hired Gary Boley and Scott Bowman, veteran Career Services professionals with over 17 years of collective experience with schools like Arizona State, University of Wisconsin, and Florida Institute of Technology. They’ve revamped our Career Services education program and now provide 1:1 coaching from classroom to hire. They also support (at no additional fee) all RefactorU alumni desiring a change to tune up their resumes or brush up on interviewing skills. In addition, Gary and Scott are reaching out and building relationships with employers, large and small, to develop and implement faster, more effective ways to tap RefactorU’s talent pool.

You can reach our Career Services team here:

Gary Boley, Director of Career Services
gary@refactoru.com
720-441-2633 x116

Scott Bowman, Career Services Coordinator
scott@refactoru.com
720-441-2633 x114

Regarding one of your other comments, we’d like to underscore another key point. RefactorU is not a traditional school. It’s self-directed, adult education in which students are accountable for their own learning. We provide quality instruction, challenging exercises, and comprehensive learning assistance. Unlike other coding bootcamps, we don’t “cut” students who fail to meet arbitrary criteria along the way. All students must meet our admissions criteria and final graduation requirements, but each gets gets out of the experience what they invest in it. The final project, which demonstrates the skills the student has acquired, matters most. When it’s a well-designed, technically innovative solution to a problem, employers take notice. When students meet only minimum criteria, employers are unimpressed. Once again, the choice is up to the student, as are the consequences that result from the decision.

Pros:
– Get your feet wet and a basis of what it takes to create websites

Cons:
– Totally disorganized
– No job support after you graduate
– Poor TAs
– No accountability (you can ignore all the exercises and activities and no one will probably notice or care)
– Accepts students who probably shouldnt have been accepted (In the last two weeks of the cohort there was a student in our class who still couldnt write basic html.. and he wasn’t getting any help.)

There was a TA that was supposed to show up once to help on a weekend and they just never showed up. They didn’t have a style guide that they followed so certain instructors didnt know how to read the code in particular styles. During the final project where you were told that there was going to be prospective companies looking to hire there were no company recruiters that showed up. The job fair at the end of the cohort was a joke. There were only 5 companies there. Not all of them were even hiring. Oh yeah, also internet stopped working which made it impossible to do anything. This happened pretty regularly sometimes for a couple hours each day.

If you are looking for a code school, do not be attracted to the 10 weeks. It is a marketing ploy.

Internet crashes and slow connections would making it impossible to learn in class.

Nearly half the class stopped coming because the instructors and curriculum were so bad.

No job guarantee.

Facilities are garbage.

Don’t complain or they will cut off your job assistance and slack access.

old info

The JavaScript-based curriculum is extremely relevant to today’s job market. The instructors are passionate about both programming and the success of the students. The support staff is kind and helpful and works hard to build a community. The learning environment is intense but collaborative and it fosters both growth and friendships.

I very nearly enrolled in another bootcamp and while I don’t know what the experience would have been like there, I can’t imagine it being any better than the 10 weeks I spent at RefactorU.

The instructors can be hit or miss. During
my cohort, one instructor was usually unhelpful, and tended to keep to
himself instead of making himself available. The other instructor was
amazing – he answered questions clearly, and helped you towards an
answer rather than just give it to you.

Overall, the lectures were useful and every day helped me towards becoming a better developer. It was worth spending the time and effort to attend this bootcamp

Pros: Course content/coursework: The overall structure and content of the bootcamp were great. The MEAN stack is in demand, and I found it particularly useful learning AngularJS concepts, and am excited to delve into other JS libraries such as React.
Instructors: The lead instructors are very talented and motivated to see you learn and succeed. Not only were they highly supportive of their students, they were consistent & thorough in their teaching of concepts.
Classmates: I have met some truly incredible people in this class which I can confidently say will be life-long friends & helpful peers as we dive into our professional tech careers. I found my fellow students to be a goldmine of knowledge and it was very encouraging to see other students working together and helping each other.
Model: The number of coding bootcamps has exploded over the last couple years, and this immersive model is here to stay. As a long-time fan of alternative education (after sloughing through the traditional school model completing graduate degrees), RefactorU has hit the nail on the head in terms of providing a specific high-demand skill-set to anyone with the grit and determination to become a software developer.
Location: RefactorU’s location in Boulder is great for those interested in working in the start-up scene in Boulder. The Denver/Boulder metro area is an emerging tech hub and a prime gateway to enter a tech career. This was also helpful for attending the many Meetups, workshops, and conferences in the area.

Cons: Student to teacher ratio. We had three instructors for a class of 33 (we are the largest class yet). This is in contrast to 18 students in the prior cohort, and there were 11 graduates in the cohort prior to that. The classroom was far too small for this many students.

Individualized attention: while the instructors were fantastic, and true champs in terms of being overloaded with students, I had hoped for more individualized attention.
Class distractions: with such a large class it was an exercise in blocking out distractions. While each of us is responsible for getting what we want out of the program, I was hoping for a more professional (and quieter) work/study environment.

Also, on this site it states there is a 20% discount for women, which is no longer applicable. FYI.

I have high hopes for RefactorU moving forward, and I anticipate seeing great things from my fellow classmates in the future!

Edit: The class before us was 19, not 13. My mistake!

Everyone at RefactorU was great – the instructors, administrators, community engagement planners – they are all wonderful.

RefactorU throws a lot of information at you in a short time, but in a really well-structured way so that you actually have time to learn it all, and learn it all well. I’m astounded by how much I learned, and how dedicated the instructors were to supporting our experience: from TAs who come in on the weekends to offer help, to being responsive when not-totally-kosher sexist jokes were being made in class (hey, it’s the tech industry, right?). They organize events with employers and recruiters to help you make connections. They know they only succeed when their students succeed, and they are all about that.

My only complaint is one that is probably actually being addressed – being as successful as they are, they have been growing a lot, and for my personal learning style, our class was too big. We had 33 people, and the class before us was only 13, so there were a lot more of us sharing the instructors’ attention. It was also often a very loud work environment (33 people in one room), which for me usually meant having to choose between leaving and going somewhere quiet to get work done, or being in a room where I have access to help from instructors and classmates, which was a frustrating choice to have to make.

Overall, I’m glad I went and really impressed by what they accomplish as a school. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.

RefactorU was one of the best experiences of my life! The teachers taught me more than I ever could have hoped for. The instructors have set up the curriculum to help everyone learn the way they feel is best. You will have different things to work on but how you figure it out is up to you. I now am comfortable with many different technologies that I didn’t even think to learn.

How the program is set up is to help everyone make it through and not in anyway competitive. This was the perfect learning environment for me and for the others around me.

I would recommend this program to anyone how wants to find a passion in programming.

It has truly been one of the most life changing and gratifying experiences I have ever had. I have a Bachelor’s in Elementary education, but decided over the summer to make a mid-life career change. My family uprooted from Illinois in August so that I could attend RefactorU. We sold our home in IL and my in-laws graciously kept our 2 toddlers in AZ, and my husband traveled between IL, AZ, and CO while I was in school. It was a crazy ride, but I’ve found through it all that I love coding and can’t wait to start working in the field! The course was very intense and I learned so much. If I can make the commitment to change my life for the better, so can you!

Like many of my peers, I was drawn to RefactorU because I wanted to start a higher-paying, more enjoyable career without spending years of my life earning another degree. Even a couple weeks into their ten-week, intensive boot camp, the skeptic in me feared it was too good to be true, but I graduated last Friday and can confidently say that going to RefactorU was one of the best decisions of my life. Several of my classmates had coding jobs before the course even ended, and I am absolutely amazed when I compare the skills I have now with the skills I had from several weeks of pre-bootcamp self-teaching. I can now think up and develop an entire web application on my own, from the database and server to the user interface, and, perhaps more importantly, I know that I have the resources and knowledge to learn new technologies and tackle any coding problems I may face in the future.

Not only does RefactorU manage to teach an incredible amount of material in a short amount of time, the school also structures assignments in a way that prepares students for what a real coding job is like. The vast majority of time was spent on solo projects, but the boot camp is also peppered with several pair programming projects, in which one student writes code and the other plans and coaches, and a larger group project. We also had to do three oral presentations and practice talking about code. It’s crucial–and surprisingly difficult–to be able to articulate something so thought-based, and I’m glad RefactorU emphasizes this skill. The team building and communication will definitely benefit me during technical interviews and throughout my career.

Unlike many other bootcamps, RefactorU strongly emphasizes a work-life balance. While it is true that I never had to ditch my sleep, health, and social life in lieu of unreasonable amounts of stress, what the “work-life balance” translated to, for me, was: “You are responsible for your own success.” Some students chose to work late hours even after the school day ended, others spent more time socializing and attending events. Whatever the case, no one would chase me down if I needed to take a break during the day or tell me I needed to work harder if a particular subject didn’t make sense right away, but the staff was always there to help and encourage. We just had to do the work.

What I loved most about being a RefactorU student was the perfect balance of structure and independence. Every week, we got a list of projects to work on after lectures, but there were no grades and no deadlines (besides for the one big group project and the two major solo projects). The lack of solid structure may be a con for some people, but, for me, it was like being told, “I believe in you.” Those imagined words helped me be successful at RefactorU. So did the smart and passionate teachers, who gave clear (and oftentimes entertaining!) lectures and were there to help when I got stuck. Rob has an unshakable warm, positive attitude that makes him a great teacher in addition to being a great coder, and I enjoyed Raphael’s attention to detail and clear passion for the topics he lectured on.

I can’t think of a single thing about RefactorU that would dissuade me from telling any self-motivated, technically-inclined person to go there. My only complaint is that I would have preferred more early, clear communication about the specific times, dates, and expectations of project presentations, graduation day, and events in general, but I understand that RefactorU is a new business. They’re always working toward finding the best way to do things and tinkering with the course load to include what is most relevant in today’s tech industry, and their 96% job placement rate shows they’re doing it right. If you’re ready and willing to remake yourself and to dedicate yourself to learning, you’ll find, like I did, that RefactorU isn’t too good to be true, at all. It’s real and it works.