sugarwater

It's in the third month of the curriculum, after primarily only working with Google Colab in the previous two.

Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.

Can agree with you 100% about Unit 3 in the data science track.

I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows).

But I'm glad you got something good out of CS and Labs. I'd describe CS as neutral for me... It was just grinding CodeSignal. Labs was extremely disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership and its sudden shortened length (from 2 months to 1 month).

Above minimum, I believe. Last I heard the fellowship pays ~$15/hour

Thanks! Nobody's ever told me that about my writing! My email is open if anyone wants to chat, to anyone that sees this :-)

As a student that experienced the changes you were talking about... Before the TLs were removed, my code was vetted by my TL (and she was a good one, thank goodness), but after the changes, not a single person vetted it. I could probably have sent DMs to various people to get some sort of code review, but as a standard process, it wasn't available anymore.

As a Data Science student that just recently graduated from the program, it prepares you for a data analyst position, at best.... which essentially means any job where your primary role is to wrangle data.

I graduated at the end of February and am still job searching.

In the meantime I have a part time job and working through the MIT Computer Science OCW

It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram.

I would qualify that as "underhanded"

As a student that went through the program, I question if their incentives were aligned.

During the middle of my enrollment at the program (Sept 2020), the school suddenly dropped all notion of grading, code review, and attendance, let alone the length of the program. It remained this way for 3 months, 50% of the length of the program.

This is a broad description of the changes, but I want to emphasize that the changes were terrible, _many_ students complained, and the school essentially whistled with fingers in their ears.

Very much blind leading the blind leading the blind from my experience at the school

After Lambda School completely removed code review, grading, attendance, TLs when I was enrolled... I just couldn't see how the incentives were aligned anymore. There was no one looking at my assignments, my assessments, my projects and telling me what I got wrong and how I could do better.

Those choices made by Lambda only hurt students' learning and therefore chances to get a job. And when students complained, the school addressed the complaints but barely made a change.

You'd be better taken care of if you got hired by Amazon in a non-tech role and then applied to this program. What Amazon provides to employees who sign up:

"Applicants accepted into the tuition-free program receive a stipend to cover living costs and a subsidy to maintain their benefits plan."

That being said, as a former student of lambda, I do not recommend the program, at least the Data Science track. The controversial reputation Lambda has received over the internet and social media is well-deserved.

As a former student, I can't recommend Lambda. I am speaking to their quality of curriculum and lack of transparency towards their students. I hope from working with Amazon there'll be some quality assurance.

Well, a LOT of students were unhappy about the changes. Truth is not a lot of students post about their experience on social media, and of those that are unhappy with the school dare not post under their real name. We’re job-seeking with the school on our resume, after all.