Berkeley Boot Camps Overview and Guide
Berkeley Boot Camps has a host of tech-related courses for people who want to switch careers. It offers both part-time and full-time programs for aspiring data analysts, web developers, digital marketers, and UX/UI designers. A bonus: Prior coding experience is not required.
So, what else can you expect from this coding bootcamp? This Berkeley Boot Camps review will highlight the coding bootcamp’s top offerings, financing options, career services, and more. Read on to find out how Berkeley Boot Camps can help you break into tech in less than a year.
What You Need to Know About Berkeley Boot Camps
Berkeley Boot Camps is an extension of the University of California-Berkeley that was created to cater to students looking for short-term tech courses. People who do not have digital marketing, full stack web development, data analytics, or UX/UI design experience can benefit from Berkeley Boot Camps. All courses are now online due to COVID-19 restrictions.
- Cost: $8,995 – $13,295
- Schedules: Full-Time, Part-Time
- Courses Offered: Digital Marketing, Product Management, Coding, Data Analytics, UX UI Design, Cyber Security, Fintech
- Upcoming Start Dates: April 22, April 27
Berkeley Boot Camps Curricula: What Can You Study?
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Berkeley Boot Camps offers a menu of programs for you to choose from. All of them start from the basics before delving into more technical topics. At the end of the program, students also receive career services to prepare them for future job interviews.
Coding Boot Camp
This bootcamp program teaches students the core programming skills needed to become proficient in both backend and front end web development. This is also a great option if you’re looking to break into a software engineering career. Among the topics covered in the curriculum are JavaScript, HTML, CSS, MySQL, Bootstrap, and React.js.
Students also go beyond theoretical understanding by gaining practical experience through real-world software development projects. They finish strong with a certificate of completion from the UC Berkeley Extension.
Online Data Analytics Boot Camp
This program offers an industry-relevant curriculum that teaches you how to navigate the most in-demand technologies, tools, and languages in the world of data analytics. These include fundamental statistics skills, front end web visualization skills, and the ins and outs of Python programming, and machine learning.
True to its relevance, the curriculum requires students to build a comprehensive portfolio of data analytics projects completed through real-world datasets gathered across industries. If you’re looking to learn data analytics, this is a great option.
UX/UI Boot Camp
Students of this program receive hands-on training in various UX/UI design processes. These include user-centric design research, visual and web prototyping, wireframing, and user interface development.
Cybersecurity Boot Camp
Offered part-time, this cyber security bootcamp program walks you through the skills and technologies you’ll need to thrive as an information security analyst or a cyber security specialist. If you’re already one of the two, take this program to prepare for professional cyber security certifications such as CompTIA Security+, Server+, and Linux+ and advance your career.
Digital Marketing Boot Camp
Students of this course learn about the different digital marketing strategies one can employ to launch an effective marketing campaign. You also get to explore Google Analytics, Google Ads, WordPress, Facebook Ads Manager, all of which are relevant in today’s industry. You learn all that and more in 18 weeks.
FinTech Boot Camp
This program offers a project-based curriculum that equips students with the skills necessary to build an Ethereum blockchain and model the future financial performance of a company. With cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, becoming a hot topic once again, this is a great way to get in on the conversation.
Technology Project Management Boot Camp
Even the development of software products needs effective management. This course walks you through the different project management methodologies and modern software that you can use to build software applications on time and to specifications.
Berkeley Boot Camps Campuses: Where Can You Study?
Berkeley Boot Camps has nine campuses spread across the cities in the United States. The courses are available both online and on campus. However, all programs are online at the moment due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Berkeley
- Fremont
- Fresno
- Oakland
- Las Vegas
- Santa Clara
- San Francisco
- San Jose
- Richmond
Berkeley Boot Camps Schedules: When Can You Study?
Full-Time
This coding bootcamp has a full-time program that lasts for up to 12 weeks. Students who want to study at an accelerated pace can benefit from this schedule. However, this also means putting in more hours and learning all core concepts with little time for breaks.
Students in this program are expected to dedicate 20 hours of their time per week for classes and 25+ hours for homework and projects.
Part-Time
The part-time courses in this school last for up to 24 weeks. This option affords students more freedom to maintain existing professional and personal obligations while learning. It often includes scheduled instructor-led classes conducted twice per week.
Flex
The flex schedule entails self-paced learning, a great option for students who do not have enough time on their hands to attend either part-time or full-time lectures. While it may take longer to complete the program, it nevertheless allows students to learn at their pace and convenience.
Berkeley Boot Camps does not offer a self-paced option for its programs.
Berkeley Boot Camps Tuition
The cost of the attendance depends largely on the course. For instance, the coding course costs $12,495, while the data analytics program is $13,245. The rest are as follows: UX/UI ($12,995), Digital Marketing ($9,495), Cybersecurity ($13,495), FinTech ($12,995), and Tech Project Management ($8,995).
Berkeley Boot Camps Financing and Payment Options
- Interest-free Payment Plan. Pay an initial deposit upon enrollment and then split the rest of your tuition into monthly installments. As the name implies, this option does not accrue interest.
- Scholarship. Currently, graduates of UC-Berkeley are eligible for a $500 tuition scholarship should they enroll in a Berkeley Boot Camps program. At the time of writing, the coding bootcamp does not provide any other scholarship programs for students.
- Early Registration Pricing Incentive. This means that students can enjoy a discount when they register early and deposit part of the tuition.
Berkeley Boot Camps Admissions: How to Get In
Applicants to this bootcamp do not need to be expert coders. However, to be a part of the program, the students will need to complete pre-course tutorials.
Individuals who have prior experience in the field or those in need of professional development are also welcome to apply.
Berkeley Boot Camps Application
The first step of the application starts with the submission of an online application form on their site. The admissions team follows up with additional requirements as well as an invitation for an interview. After the interview, you will be required to fill out an application explaining your reason for applying.
The next step is the assessment phase wherein you complete a problem-solving and critical thinking assessment. You do not need prior experience to complete the assessment. If you pass, you continue to the last leg of the enrollment process, during which you choose a payment option and make a deposit upon signing the enrollment agreement.
Berkeley Boot Camps Interview
Berkeley Boot Camps conducts a behavioral interview on its potential students. This interview does not require any technical training. The interviewer just wants to know about you more.
Questions could be about what motivated you to enroll in a coding bootcamp and to eventually choose Berkeley Boot Camps. The process is quite straightforward. You just need to be confident and sharp.
Berkeley Boot Camps Admission Rate: What Are My Chances of Getting In?
Berkeley Boot Camps has yet to publish its admission rate, but considering the small class sizes, one can assume that the bootcamp is difficult to get into.
Some self-training may come in handy to increase your chances of entering the bootcamp. It may help to research the basics of your chosen area of study. Researching on what questions to expect during a behavioral interview may also come in handy.
Berkeley Boot Camps Outcomes: Will I Find a Job?
Berkeley Boot Camps is part of Trilogy Education Services. This body does not make job placement statistics public at this time. It is not really clear how many students find rewarding tech jobs after graduating from the bootcamp.
However, reviews from several of the school’s alumni demonstrate satisfaction with the programs and career services. The bootcamp’s heavy focus on completing real-world projects that are later used to build the students’ portfolio has also received good reviews.
Job Placement Services at Berkeley Boot Camps
This coding bootcamp does not provide a job guarantee, otherwise known as a money-back guarantee, for their students. However, they do provide access to dedicated career coaches as well as profile coaches that help students prepare for the job market. This way, students have a higher chance of securing gainful employment post-program.
The career coaches help students develop their LinkedIn profiles, resumes, portfolios, and overall brand. Students also sit through mock technical and behavioral job interviews, prep classes, and industry events.
Should You Apply to Berkeley Boot Camps?
Berkeley Boot Camps has a strong system that supports students through their learning journey. It offers rigorous and market-led programs, career coaches, and a community to share ideas with.
- Dynamic Instruction. The full-time and part-time coding bootcamp programs offer interactive virtual classes and live lectures taught by skilled instructors. Despite being mostly online, students still receive one-on-one instruction.
- Real-World Projects. This coding bootcamp has an updated curriculum that equips students with in-demand tech skills through hands-on learning. The projects give students a chance to build their portfolio as well as a glimpse into the professional life they aspire for.
- Career Services. Berkeley Boot Camps deviates from the classic sink or swim approach by providing extensive career support immediately after the students graduate from their chosen program.
You should apply to this bootcamp if you want a school that offers dynamic and quality programs. There’s also the bonus of earning a certificate of completion that bears the name of the University of Berkeley Extension.
Anonymous
The low cost, good reputation, ability to keep my job while doing the program are huge bonuses. There are a lot of organizational issues that the company running the program could work out – lots of things needed some streamlining and consistency. In spite of that I feel I got a lot out of it and was lucky to have had a wonderful instructor. Bottom line is I would go back and do it all over again for sure.
September 8, 2020
Anonymous
I recently (1.5 months ago) completed the 6-month variant of the UC Berkeley Bootcamp as one of the members of the very first cohort, and just this past week I excepted a job as a front-end engineer at a startup with a starting salary in the 90k range.
Before coming to this bootcamp I had been teaching myself to program for about a year, but slowly, and had also been able to essentially intern(largely for free) for a company slowly learning to write automated tests in Python. So my experience with code was past absolute beginner.
I knew I needed to find a way to elevate myself quickly to a professional developer’s level, and I knew that the quickest way to do this was to focus on a Javascript – front end to full-stack engineering bootcamp.
After researching a number of them, I chose this one partly because it was among the least expensive by far, and also because of the name recognition (Berkeley). I was happy about the prospect of taking 6 months to learn everything I wanted as I knew I would need to work part-time and generally use the time to consume more information on my own.
This bootcamp took me and my cohort through a cirriculum that rivaled if not largely beat the cirriculum of more famous and expensive place like HR, App Acad and Dev BC. This according to notes(and code) compared with my friends who attended each. They cover everything about the front end from your first introduction to HTML/CSS to coding in Javascript all the way through to React powered full-stack applications.
The instructors Michael and David were both excellent. Personable, kind, and (most importantly) genuinely engaged with the idea of transferring as much of their knowledge of the science and art of programming professionally onto all the student. Michael had a traditional CS background and a number of years of work while David was a grad of HR with a couple of years of working experience, which made them each compelling for their individual experiences. They are both excellent programmers.
The same idea carries throughout the organization. Rosa the career director cares for the concerns and roadblocks individual students might face, and Sam of career services is constantly involved in building your public profiles and presentational person for career services. Although, ultimately, this part of the program is perhaps the weakest, as their networks are not the same as your bigger and far far more expensive BC’s.
I also got a chance to meet Pavan, someone from the parent organization of the BC, a company called Trilogy that partners with Universities throughout the country to create these bootcamps for them. Pavan was also smart, kind, and commited to hearing about my experience as a student. They all wanted to see me thrive, and not just collect a check and pepper you with information only to leave you to “sink or swim” as the case in some other programs.
By the mid-point of the program we were already writing full-stack applications with our own server instances(Node.js), and using them to render templated views of custom sites which would both consume various API’s and also access our own SQL or noSQL backend data services. Students would coluntarily explore topics like user authentication with Passport.js or WebSocket enabled multi-user live interfaces. I dove into a Google Maps Api for my first (one of three) major project and came away with a powerful new tool.
It was at this time that I started to peek at the work my friends had/were doing at the more popular BC variants out here in SF, only to discover that their body of work was tiny in comparison. Often not particularly broad. Nothing wrong with checking out the competition once in a while. Right?
Now, like any programming cohort there was a range of stories, many struggled HARD, and some essentially failed or gave up, but to those that did not, the experience has left them with a significant number of projects across the modern Javascript stack and an overall broad knowledge of how the heck a modern web app is built from the ground to the backend MongoDB non-relational databse. Sorry, bad programming humor.
Ultimately no Bootcamp can singularly gurantee you a great engineering education if you just sit there with your arms crossed waiting for the instructor to automatically funnel the information into your head, you have to do the work. And, not only that, but rise to the occasion to exploit the technology introduced more deeply.
Having that attitude may mean that you will be successful at most any Bootcamp, but this one will introduce you and set the stage for a deep variety of topics that you will want to expand on and explore to secure a mastery.
As a student I realize I may have been an exception with my incoming experience and devotion to extra learning on the side. I would constantly look to expand on the assigned hwrk and develop new and unexpected features not explicitly required in the assignment.
However a number of my peers who I now get to call good friends, had not touched code until starting this program, and through constant devotion to learning and playing with code they have all elevated their skills far beyond what I was able to achieve in my very first half-year of programming knowledge.
So if you are serious. Want to learn a lot about the modern web, and plan to build on what this school offers you to stand out from the busy bootcamp graduate field out here in the SF/Bay Area, then this school will help you prosper!
Best decision I have ever made! Can’t wait to get started with my new job on Monday.
October 13, 2020