 After filming this video. I realized there's actually a lot to say about this topic and a lot of things I went over and I kind of we just went off script and just talked about everything So I want to let you know that I talk about three things mainly throughout the video One is the boot camp pay structures and how they refund you or what happens if you Flunk out or a gate kicked out and how do you get your money back or how does it work? The second thing is how to prepare to make sure that everything goes relatively well when I say that it's gonna be hard Boot camp is not an easy thing to do necessarily unless you've had prior experience There's gonna be struggles But I'm trying to help you out and make sure that you don't get kicked out for something dumb that you could have Prepared for ahead of time and then the last thing is what you need to do While you're in boot camp to not fail to not fall behind to just stay on task and complete it You've risked absolutely everything going to code boot camp you quit your job You're taking a risk on your savings, but if you complete it and everything goes well You'll get a software engineering job paying you a lot more than you're making now and everything will be absolutely worth it Right, that's what a lot of us think when we go to code boot camp But the one thing people don't talk about but you yet think about all day every day while they're doing boot camp and before boot Camp is what is gonna happen if I fail boot camp and I don't make it through or I have to come back on a later What is actually gonna happen to my money what's gonna happen to me and that's what I wanted to talk about first We've talked about the pay structure and the kind of boot camp you're going to this video is gonna be focused about Lighthouse Labs But I wanted to use Lambda school as an example Lambda school has an ISA agreement structure on their payment Which means you have to complete the boot camp and make a certain amount of money Before you start paying them back and there's obviously more rules within there But we'll get there in a second so they make it that you have to make more than 50k a year And that if you're making more than 50k a year You're gonna be paying 17% of your income over the next 24 months and that's capped at 30k Also, if you get a job and then something happens and you get fired or you quit or whatever it pauses So if in the moment you're making 50k or more a year, you'll be paying Lambda that month per month So for example, let's say you get out of Lambda and make their average Student salary, which I think is like $70,000 or something around that doesn't matter Let's say you're making $70,000 that means you're almost making $6,000 a month Which will then translate to you paying about a thousand dollars a month to Lambda Which will end up being about $24,000 over the two years. This is not a show for Lambda I'm just trying to show how ISA is 10 times better than anything out there It's I think it's more encouraging knowing that you're only risking your time and the money you need to live Versus having on top of that a large down payment that you put onto a boot camp That you might get something out of it You might not where Lambda if something goes wrong and you don't finish it or you don't get a job You don't have to pay it back if for five years you don't get a job involving I think it's involving a skill that you learned at Lambda You actually don't have to pay the ISA ever it just expires also ISA agreements aren't like loans They don't collect interest. They don't have any of those issues It's relative to your current living situation if you have a job if you don't we're loans It's just like you got to pay it or the bank's gonna come after you or your interest is gonna grow to a point where the Actual loan is being doubled now and also your credit will get screwed up boot camps like lighthouse labs do it differently They ask you for an upfront payment and that is your only option. You could go with a third-party Loan company, but Usually those are really bad and it's pretty much like going to a bank but worse and that's a lot of money to give up front when you're making 340k a year and you need to save up living expenses and And figure out absolutely everything while you're gonna go to that boot camp now for lighthouse labs The refund agreement works really differently and it's not as good as an ISA So I actually have a couple pulled up It was really hard to find these for some reason actually took me like a decent amount of time But this seems that they have different ones for different locations So the one in Montreal and Ottawa are pretty similar But the ones in British Columbia are absolutely brutal like let me read this to you So if you go between week one to the Monday of week three So there's two week period the first two weeks of the boot camp if you get through those two you can only get 70% refund back If you go between week two and a week five you only get 50% back So if you make it to week three and something happens and you've got to get out You pretty much can only get back 50% of your initial investment in three weeks This is why it's super important and I want to talk about this later on way more I'm preparing for a boot camp ahead of time because you do not want that to happen because at that point They're probably just gonna tell you're gonna come back for a new cohort in the next three four months Which is not enough time for you to get a job and then quit the job so you're pretty much gonna have a giant hole of unemployment and That's gonna suck if you don't have savings also no matter what after week six I think which is the halfway point. They don't give you your money back They just tell you to come back to the next cohort the one in Montreal where I live works like this week one is 75% week two to three is 67% Week three to four sixty percent week four to five fifty three percent and week five to six forty six percent 46% now that we talk about what happens financially. Let's talk about how to avoid it the only situations where people usually end up flunking out or getting out is either they fall behind and That's pretty much it actually but most of the time it's happened because either they're mentally burned out or they're distracted or they didn't prepare properly They they jumped in too quickly and it just comes down pretty much to preparation and keeping yourself Mentally clear while you're doing the boot camp because it is a hard process. There's boot camps out there that are five days a week You know normal like nine hours a day and then you got lighthouse labs that was set up at the time when I was doing it 12 hours a day six days a week and Optionally you can come in on the seventh day, which I can imagine that if you have kids or something like that It's really really hard for you to mentally deal with that So you really have to prepare ahead of time and make sure you're ready to prepare properly The first thing I want to talk about is the pre-work. They give you before you go to boot camp They give you they always for some reason say hours They say like 70 hours worth of pre-course work that you have to complete before joining the boot camp most of it is absolute garbage It's not actually preparing you for the boot camp because if it was why would you even have to go to the boot camp? If you would learn react and your pre-course work and you went to boot camp to learn react like you'd by the time You would do react in the pre-course you'd realize you don't need the boot camp good to go to online resources, right? So they're not actually preparing you properly for what you're running into in the next couple weeks The single strategy that got me through was reading the topic ahead of a week ahead of it So if next week we were doing react and this week we're doing JavaScript I would be reading about react and just learning the general terms and words and exposing myself to certain confusing things ahead of time and getting those You know getting it processing it mentally ahead of time so that when we got to the react week I could just focus on building things with react and actually learning how it functions and Working with it. I always go back to this example for some reason in my videos But it comes down to driving an automatic car When you first learn to drive allows you to focus on actually Driving and learning the signs and the rules and the road and all these things where if you were to drive a manual Car for your first time you'd be focused on how to drive a manual and not on actually driving on a road with other people It's the same thing when it comes to this bootcamp mentality when it comes to code It's really hard to focus on learning react when you barely know how to do JavaScript So you work hard on your JavaScript before you get into the bootcamp or whatever language you're using I'm just using a generic term and then once you're in the bootcamp you want to always stay ahead of the game You want to read up on something that you're gonna do doesn't mean you have to build a react app before you Do the react week but just read about react learn what it does learn what it is learn some terms like when they say a component What does that mean for me when I read on html the word Dom the document object model That literally saved my life that one word I got stuck on for a week But the best part was is that it was the week before we learned html So I was able to get that out of the way and when we walked into the html week I was Boosted with confidence because I knew what this word meant and I actually took the time to realize what it meant and and look Deeper into it and when we got to html I was like damn this stuff is super easy Whereas if I didn't prepare properly, then I saw this with a couple of my classmates You went into the week and that whole week you were stuck on all these words and you weren't actually able to focus on Playing with the frameworks and technologies and languages and whatever whatever you want to call it when it comes to trying to avoid Getting kicked out of bootcamp. It's pretty straightforward. You don't want to fall behind Obviously, I'm not gonna go over Things you could do to get kicked out when it comes to like Harassing someone I'm not gonna talk about that But what I'm gonna tell you is kind of the rules that I created for myself when I was in bootcamp When it came to asking questions to a mentor I tried to follow the rule of making sure I checked everything that includes Googling for 10 to 20 minutes just digging on the internet trying to figure out the solution on my own by finding someone else's solution If that didn't work, I would go through the process from step one to the last step That means following the code from where it first executes Until the air and trying to see along the way where it breaks where something could be going wrong Maybe talking out loud to somebody next to me or you know the rubber ducking method where you have like a rubber Duck in front of you and you talk to the duck and explain to it how your code works that worked really well for me It's just really weird if you do it in front of others Kind of have to do it in your head And then one thing you should always do as well is read the error message properly Dig through it see if you could trace back where the error went to and if you follow those Usually you are more than set if it's still not working and it's been you know 30 minutes 40 minutes 50 minutes Maybe an hour you can go to a mentor Which is what you're paying for in these bootcamps if we're being real right here If it's Mike talking to if you were not like the salesman trying to sell you a bootcamp Which I'll never do that The real thing with bootcamps is you're paying for mentors and you're paying for their time These are people who are in the industry who are working in the industry who possibly own a business in the industry And who are just trying to help others because they enjoy doing it or they want some more money And these are the people you should be taking advantage of not in a bad way But in a good way because that's what you're paying for when it comes to the curriculum of these bootcamps The only real way to say it is they're absolute garbage. They're not valued at ten thousand dollars They're really Udemy courses, but you've got mentors along the way That is that is the real answer. Like they can't revolutionize these curriculums in any way because the content is the same The only thing they could do is take a Udemy course and represent it to you in another way They can make it a cool website where you run code and it fails and tells you what's wrong with it And they can do all that stuff with the curriculum itself the core Things you're trying to learn each to mail CSS JavaScript or whatever you want C++ whatever it is Those things don't change and they can't sell you that for ten thousand dollars What they're selling you is the service of having someone available next to you physically or online Who can help you out throughout the way and you should take advantage of that all the time I knew that I was being annoying to the mentors. I knew that I was bugging them Constantly I would take every minute I would come an hour early to bootcamp and I would leave an hour late. I'm not saying you have to do that I'm a bit crazy. I do that stuff, but take advantage of the mentors while you can you are paying for that Use it up. Also one thing that they always talk about and it's so true never compare yourself to others There were there was people coming into my bootcamp There was people coming into my bootcamp class with degrees in computer science style degrees like computer engineering There was one dude who did chemical engineering, but he did programming within it Everyone comes into bootcamp at different levels and different speeds and hits the ground running at different speeds You got people coming in with possibly computer science degrees I've actually seen that before they had a computer science degree and then they went to code bootcamp And it was an absolute joke for them And you got people coming from art majors who have never seen a line of code and who barely know how to use a Google doc it's mixed and matched from all over the place And you should know that from the start that you are not ahead or behind anybody You just focus on yourself and your progress throughout the whole bootcamp if they were stuck on something day one Figure it out day one whether that's asking mentors or googling or watching videos But figure it out because bootcamps go so freaking fast that within a day or two if you fall behind You're probably gonna just be asked to sit and wait for the next bootcamp and just take your time on that one thing They don't have time to sit and and baby you along the way you got to stick with the pace and You got to do whatever that means you got to figure out whatever that means for you for me Watching videos on transit on the way there on the way home Just trying to relax and think objectively and I'll get emotional or anything like that really helped me along the way Taking a lot of breaks a lot of people didn't know this in my bootcamp, but a lot at the time I wasn't actually programming. I was just watching twitch streams and just like Slightly casually programming on the side and just running twitch streams in the back watching shroud shoe people and pub G Really relaxed me really helped me feel like I was at home because I work well at home And that's usually what I do sometimes it was an audiobook sometimes it was classical music But all you got to do is think clearly and slowly and take your time and when I say take your time I don't mean take two weeks to ask a question because you think you could have figured it out on your own Go through the steps think objectively. Have you tried everything you can yes, okay? Go ask a mentor It's not a big deal to get some help and it's gonna save you in the long run when you're at home And you're studying at home, and you're preparing for a job or when you're at the job It's a total different story You should take way more time to try and figure something out But when you're at bootcamp and we're talking a 12-week bootcamp where you're learning six days a week and every day is something new You don't have the time to to take you can't take that time It's just not possible the one this video wasn't really to scare you or anything like that And I realized I kind of got a little Too too deep there But the point of what I'm trying to say is you need to focus on your growth day by day And you need to make sure you don't get caught up in anything and focus on the long-term goal If this week is a week where you do a project and next week is a week where you learn react Focus on getting the project finished and then when you have free time when you're clear when you're calm Go read a bit up about react and whatever you're gonna learn next week Ahead of time so that you can just have an idea of the concept and also for me personally It kept me way more excited knowing what I was jumping into next week knowing that this week We're doing something and next week. We're doing something super awesome I was like I just want to get this week's work done so I could get on to the next week and just have fun with that Sometimes even on the weekend I'd be starting the week's work just because I was so excited to get to that week If you got any questions or you want to talk about your experience in a bootcamp or you Want to give advice to others? Please do comment it below or join my discord board We can talk about this mean you one-on-one or somebody who's going through the same experience I really think it would have helped me a lot if I had someone to talk to about this while I was going to bootcamp So if you want to do that the links are all below and the comment section is obviously below And I really hope this video helped you out if you did please give it a like Subscribe if you want to see more if you want to see any more types of these videos Just let me know and I'll see you in tomorrow's stream