Springboard India: A Fraudboard to deprive you off your money
So, you’re here because you really care about spending your money and wanted an honest review about the Springboard’s bootcamp offerings.
I’m someone who has enrolled in Springboard’s Data Science career track & I swear nothing could be more worse than that experience for me.
Talking about bootcamp, there is no substitute to the title Get a Job or your money back. Nothing could be more catchy to readers. It really gets someone into thinking that Let’s give it a try. Either way, one would not lose anything. But trust me, you would lose both your time as well as money & get nothing out of it.
Knowing where to put your time, focus & energy are the key things to achieve a result. But if you’d rather find out that after putting all in, you got nothing & ask yourself a question whether it was worth it? How’d you feel?
Same is the result of doing a bootcamp course from Springboard.
Yes, definitely you’re not getting a job after completing it but you would be paying them a hefty lump sum amount of your savings which has neither way of getting returned.
Won’t believe that ? Fine. Ask their alumni’s on linkedin.
But Wait, not all the people have put it on their linkedin because they don’t want others like you to get into that shit & neither they want recruiters to know that they come from springboard. And, for those who have put Springboard’s name, won’t let others know what they’re into, because some people do actually drag others into their situation to let others know what they’re going through.
So, If you’re even getting a thought of enrolling in their program or any others.
Ask their admission counsellor to show their placement results from the previous batches.
Ofcourse, they would lure you with statements like “Oh, we’ve had a 100% placement record but due to pandemic, the education industry has seen a drastic effect & most of the students lost their jobs. But we assure you one.That’s completely a lie. You won’t even get a handful of names & the students who have enrolled in their program exceeds to near about 1000 (combining all programs) or even more than that as of now. I can give you a list of them in case anyone wanted.
Here’s An example of what HYPE does springboard-india-31m-fund-raise.
Raising funds by taking advantage of the hype maybe giving Springboard a chance to survive in the long term. But in actual it has no industry recognition especially in India. No employer gives a damn thing about it, whether you were certified from SPRINGBOARD or any other fancy bootcamp. That certificate has absolutely no value to employers.
They are still running the curriculum with the oldest material (created 2015), along with some youtube videos from PyData Conference(2015-16), some medium blog posts, & a bunch of notebooks that are almost irrelevant from a learner’s aspect, all unchanged from the time of the course’s setup. There is a Huge pile up of new tools, research techniques, papers updated material since then. They just put their focus on advertising & marketing on every platform they can.
Hoping of getting a job after the course?
No one, literally no one cares about springboard, the certificate isn’t even worth presenting to the employer because the industry experts doesn’t give a thing about these fancy courses. If the amount of money & effort that springboard spent on advertising & marketing on big platforms, there would be a decent amount of placement if they’d put that on reinventing the course since it’s set-up.
All that matters to an employer is showcasing your actual real world projects.
And, when I say real world, it doesn’t mean solving or re-implementing kaggle problems using old data sets. It means a problem which is unique in itself or an idea for an app which solves a problem that industry care about. If not this, then you’re doing the same as the hundreds of thousands of other people doing out there. What’s the difference then that could make you stand out?
I can’t comment about other bootcamps as I’m not aware of their program but from linkedin, their is a clear idea that students from other bootcamps are also not happy as well. Enrolling in these fancy bootcamps is just wasting your time, money & effort.
So, the question arises, then where to start from to get into the field. Well, there are plenty of resources out there which doesn’t even take a penny.
Why pay for it when most of the resources out there are far better than what the greedy businesses are giving.
Some of the finest resources out there:-
Stanford’s NLP course http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/
University of Michigan releases Deep learning course.
Google’s ML crash course https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/python-curriculum-is-live/
Amazon’s ML course https://aws.amazon.com/training/learning-paths/machine-learning/
Twitter & newsletters : There are many blogs, channels that publish great content related to data science, machine learning & new research on a monthly basis if not weekly . I would recommend to subscribe to some to enter into this field(not promoting any, you yourself are smart enough to figure out what is better for you) but these two are major sources to get started & remain updated with what’s currently going on. It’s currently the best option out there.
There are many courses on coursera but I would recommend asking redditors before enrolling into some of them. And, Of course financial aid is applicable to them.
At last I would say, instead of wasting your money on something fancy you don’t know about, research & see if you could find a much better valuable option for free out there on web. I wasted all my savings on springboard. I know how that feels like & I don’t want anyone else to go through the same.
Search, Research, Analyze, connect with alums on linkedin, then decide on the action you want to take.
I’ll be happy to answer any clarification,
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tej-pratap-09b4299a/
