I believe the Turing School is a very good school and one definitely worth attending if you want to enter the industry of web development.

Before I go into what I think about my education and the Turing School as a whole, let me first say that nothing I write here has been influenced by any instructor, investor, or founder at the school. One thing I really dislike about Glassdoor and Yelp and any other review site is the inherent bias in the review process. The only people who seem to post on Yelp are people with extremely polarized views, and I believe people who are upset have a greater tendency to vent than the content. I’d wager that yelp reviews skew lower than if the reviews were from randomly selected individuals. Glassdoor, on the other hand, seems to have a huge upward skew problem where employers pressure their employees to write glowing reviews (or at least they pull a new or soon-departing employee aside and have them write a glowing review). There are quite a few companies out there where the average rating is not only several standard deviations away from the mean, the reviews seem to take a similar form and were all written within a very brief period of time. So let me be clear and separate myself from the typical company review: I have decided to write this post on my own volition and these words are my own.

In addition, I also want to say that I have high standards for schools and work environments. I went to Amherst College, and I say that to establish that I have a high bar for education and pedagogy. I also worked on Wall st, startups in NY, and I would say that Turing has surpassed the bar for its learning environment and quality of people.

Anyway, my thoughts and verdict: I am a believer that 7 months is certainly not enough time to make me an expert in anything, especially for something as mentally demanding as computer programming. But, thanks to the Turing School of Software Design, I not only have a solid foundation to build future learning on, but I also have a hirable intermediate skill for the first time in my career. I am a programmer, and the skill belongs to me. Most of all, I loved my time at the school and the community there.

For 7 months straight, I studied Ruby, Javascript, and their related frameworks of Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and Angular. I built mock applications, solved sorting algorithms, read source code for Ruby and Javascript, implemented traditional computer science problems like binary search trees and linked lists in Ruby, learned about Big-O notation, recursion applications, caching, and databases queries in SQL and ActiveRecord. I also built applications while consuming real data through APIs like Google’s QPX flight data API, and the US government’s census API. For 7 months, I lived code, and I dreamt in code.

Where has this work gotten me? Well, in my 6th month at Turing (before I graduated), I obtained a job as a software developer and teacher at a startup school/talent accelerator called Andela which teaches Africans how to program while paying them a middle class wage. I also had interviews at various companies and mid-staged companies where friends of mine at Turing either got offers over me or were currently working. I left my finance career to partake in more interesting and worthwhile (albeit in a different sense) work and the teaching + software developer position at a school like Andela fit the bill. I wouldn't have gotten the job without the Turing School. I gained a lot during my time there and it was refreshing to just be around an equally goal-driven group of learners and I owe so much to the mentors, the teachers, and Jeff Casimir for helping me get back on track in my career.

So my short answer to your question of "is Turing a good school" is that yes, it's a good school to learn the skill of programming, but it's also good for other reasons as well (quality of the staff, self-motivated students, all-around good people).

My only critique of the school is this: I personally want to do other kinds of programming other than web development. I would like to return back to school to learn about topics that are most interesting to me (machine learning, big data, data analysis). I feel like these are the coolest parts of the field. With that said, I have a foundation in programming and basic computer science concepts and can build web software and a lot of those concepts will make learning easier in the future. Additionally, I wouldn't have discovered these interests if I hadn't gone to Turing.

So that’s my opinion. Turing gave me a solid foundation in Ruby and Javascript programming and web software design, my first technical job in the field of my choosing, and a wonderful 7 months around my kind of people. In short, it was worth the time and tuition and I give it my highest recommendation to those seeking a career in software design.