Frequently Asked Questions

If you want to have a career in software development, Fullstack offers you the best launchpad. We want to make you more than just a "coder," we want to make you a Fullstack Software Professional.

Our CTO Program has been developed with careful planning based on our experience founding, building and exiting tech companies and attending and teaching at top business schools. We know what it takes from a professional, personal and mental level to be a top-performer.

We love Ruby on Rails and Python/Django (we built our successful startups using those two stacks). However, the web industry waits for no developer or technology. The future of web development has moved towards sophisticated, responsive and dynamic "single-page" applications running in the browser. Apps like Gmail, Asana, Trello, Facebook and Google Maps have redefined what users expect from "Web Applications" and thus what developers need to be able to deliver. Listening to these industry trends, and after lots of research and conversations with our CTO colleagues at top startups from Y Combinator, we've come to the conclusion that full-stack JavaScript is the future of web development. Consequently, it is what we primarily immerse our students in at Fullstack Academy.

Not only is full-stack JS where "the puck is moving," it is also the best way to learn how to code in general. Modern web development requires keeping many different parts of the stack in your mind at the same time. As a student, this is challenging enough. Now imagine that on top of this, each part of the stack requires you to understand and write in a completely different programming language (e.g. Ruby, SQL & JavaScript). The context-switch required by switching back and forth between languages significantly slows down the learning process. Full-stack JavaScript eliminates this problem as every part of the stack uses one language: JavaScript.

As evidence for how quickly one can be productive when learning on a single-language stack, two Fullstack Academy teams won the Grand Prize at two different hackathons in New York City in February 2014. Both winning teams were using full-stack JavaScript and were only 4 weeks into their semester at Fullstack. They each won $5,000 and $1,000 in cash prizes while competing with other serious teams made up of experienced developers.

We've been developing Ruby on Rails applications since the early days in 2005. Rails excelled in an age of development where sites with a PHP back-end were getting increasingly complex and were becoming difficult to manage and scale. Rails consolidated many of the "best practices" in back-end web development and made it easier for developers to build large sites in an organized way.

A lot has changed since 2005 however. Cutting-edge companies today want to give users highly interactive and responsive experiences that don't require a page refresh at every step. As a result, the web of today is dominated by "Single Page Applications" or SPAs written in JavaScript using frameworks like Angular.js or Ember.js. Increasingly, the role of Rails has shifted to serve as an API layer to the back-end of web applications.

To ensure you are prepared for today's market, we do offer Ruby on Rails in the latter part of our course (starting at Week 7). However, we have you focus on how to use Rails to serve as an API layer to powerful JavaScript front-end applications. We have found that Week 7 is the perfect time in the curriculum to learn Rails because at this point, you will have a solid mental model of where Rails' "best practices" fit in the Web development stack.

Our curriculum is based on the most cutting-edge tools in the industry right now. However, we know that tools, technologies and processes are constantly changing. Our goal is to make you an expert at the timeless fundamental concepts that will stay with you throughout your career. For more information about the current technologies that we're teaching across the full stack, please see our curriculum modules.

In addition, we've developed a specific learning path called the CTO Program that will prepare you for more than just an entry-level programming job. Go beyond just code to learn how technology leaders think about hiring and growing their development teams and how to make yourself the best candidate for the position you want.

Each day will be a mixture of lecture, lab and personal development. Our lectures will give you a strong grasp of fundamental programming concepts and our labs have been developed to quickly cement ideas.

The 3-month program will start more heavily focused on personal and module based learning and transition into project and team based learning.

Tuition is $12,500 for the semester. See the next question for more information about scholarships! If cost is prohibitive for you, please email us after applying - we have made special financial arrangements for exceptional candidates who can demonstrate need.

We're proud to give all women at Fullstack our $1,000 Ada Lovelace Scholarship for Women.

At Fullstack Academy, we have several methods to make sure you get a great job after our program. We'll have a Hiring Day where employers will come and see the projects you've been working on, Speed Interviewing sessions where you can meet many of the top talent in NYC and help through our own private network of startups and companies. We also have a dedicated Placement Coordinator who will help connect you with the right person inside any company you're interested in applying for.

We also know that the cost of Fullstack is more than just the tuition. We will work with you long after graduation to make sure you stay sharp and prepared to get the career of your dreams.

There's a great amount of resources available online to learn coding these days and we think that's great. However, we understand from personal experience that self-driven learning can be difficult, you easily get stuck, you don't have strong commitment methods and you have to develop your own path.

We think of it like having a gym membership versus having a personal trainer. For years we had a gym membership but never got the results we wanted, it wasn't until we started investing in coaching that we were able to reach our own personal goals.

If you've done Codecademy, Code School or TeamTreehouse and are looking for the step to take your programming career to the next level, apply to Fullstack!

Most importantly, you'll need to bring an open, well-rested and hungry mind ready for learning. We highly recommend using a Mac, but students have also had success using Linux (e.g. Ubuntu). We will provide you with a desk with monitor, keyboard, and mouse (not to mention, all the coffee and snacks you can handle).

We will accept candidates on a rolling basis. You can apply at anytime for any semester. After your application, we will contact you to complete a Stage 1 online assessment, followed by an in-person interview. We try our best to let accepted candidates know within one week.

Please email us at hello@fullstackacademy.com with any additional questions. We'd also be happy to schedule a call in case you have more questions.

Absolutely. During the day we are usually busy working with students, however, we are happy to schedule campus visits after class hours, as time permits. Please email admissions@fullstackacademy.com with the subject line "Campus Visit" to schedule a visit. We give preference to prospective students who have already submitted their application.