I'll bite. The negative aspects, to me, were ultimately minor in my experience but consequential for a lot of the students.
This might have changed, but if you had the money, they will take you in. There is an interview process that they use to screen applicants, but my impression is that if you can pay, you get in.
This creates issues where there are students that are heavily invested in a successful outcome but might not have the ability to grasp the material. I tried helping some of my colleagues but some of them just could not grasp the material and it was hard for me understand what obstructed their ability to do so.
It might have been a confidence thing ("I don't get this and I never will"), but again, failure was encouraged in the program.
Additionally, there were issues that occurred due to a lack of diversity in race and gender. I do not want to get into it because it's really complicated and I lack the ability and the time to give this a fair evaluation. The gist of it is: General Assembly facilitated open dialogue but not all of the participants wanted to participate. I will leave it at that.
Halfway through the program, we had a teacher give pretty uninspiring lessons. The subject matter wasn't super dry or uninteresting (it was on SQL and relational databases); my feeling was that the teacher had some personal issues that were affecting his work.
This sucked more for the people that had zero background in development because he was poorly teaching crucial material and none of the students were feeling it. A lot of the students complained about this and he started turning around after that.
I also get the feeling that there was some "drama" in the inner workings of General Assembly. The director of our cohort quit towards the end of our immersive (week 10 out of a 12 week program); she was basically the one that ran the show and made sure that our needs for learning were met.
From my understanding, she was fired because of student complaints. She was very personable and very protective of the students so I feel like there must have been some pressure from above.
This might have changed, but if you had the money, they will take you in. There is an interview process that they use to screen applicants, but my impression is that if you can pay, you get in.
This creates issues where there are students that are heavily invested in a successful outcome but might not have the ability to grasp the material. I tried helping some of my colleagues but some of them just could not grasp the material and it was hard for me understand what obstructed their ability to do so.
It might have been a confidence thing ("I don't get this and I never will"), but again, failure was encouraged in the program.
Additionally, there were issues that occurred due to a lack of diversity in race and gender. I do not want to get into it because it's really complicated and I lack the ability and the time to give this a fair evaluation. The gist of it is: General Assembly facilitated open dialogue but not all of the participants wanted to participate. I will leave it at that.
Halfway through the program, we had a teacher give pretty uninspiring lessons. The subject matter wasn't super dry or uninteresting (it was on SQL and relational databases); my feeling was that the teacher had some personal issues that were affecting his work.
This sucked more for the people that had zero background in development because he was poorly teaching crucial material and none of the students were feeling it. A lot of the students complained about this and he started turning around after that.
I also get the feeling that there was some "drama" in the inner workings of General Assembly. The director of our cohort quit towards the end of our immersive (week 10 out of a 12 week program); she was basically the one that ran the show and made sure that our needs for learning were met.
From my understanding, she was fired because of student complaints. She was very personable and very protective of the students so I feel like there must have been some pressure from above.