BetterMind LabsReviews of bettermindlabs.org

I really liked all the aspects of the program like working with mentors working with other students with similar interests and having creative expression. For incoming students I think a better explanation of the program and the groups for the mentor sessions would help reduce stress on both sides and mabye extending project building time by a week would help too. Overall it’s great value for money.

I have taken both the 4 week AI/ML certification program and the 12 week advanced program. I think the program, despite having some downsides relating to its depth, is ultimately quite beneficial due to the undeniable breadth of AI/ML concepts it covers. To start, the course is online, so that will naturally limit what it can teach you. An online course for me simply didn't feel as immersive and won't be as exciting as it could have been. Also, I thought that a few of the webinar-styled lessons on topics I didn't really like felt like they dragged on. Because the course is intended to teach many concepts in AI/ML in just a few months (when fully learning everything takes years, so this is to be expected), it can't fully dive through deep rabbit holes relating to one specific concept. The mentors do a decent job explaining, but analogies have to be used as opposed to a highly technical and mathematical perspective. Despite these drawbacks, there are some stellar parts about the program that I simply can't ignore. To start, this program does a project for both courses: the first program has a basic project with a team of 2 (plus mentor), while the second has a more complex individual+mentor project that feels a lot more forgiving in terms of timing. These give the real deal. The projects showed me with brutal honesty how hard it is to create an app totally from scratch, and made me regard the experience of finally completing my super rewarding. Even though I forgot some of the concepts, just because of the sheer number of stuff I needed to learn, I will always have a very robust view of what someone means when he/she says "AI developer". I now know that building a model entails not just using a model, but compiling everything about I knew about computer science to build a complex micro-serviced structure with a connected front-end and back-end. I also know that "AI" is a fairly generic term and encloses so many more specific career paths within it, such as ML engineering, back-end developer, and even prompt engineering. To me, it's better to learn how complex a field is and forget a few of the concepts than to not be exposed to the field's complexity in the first place. Essentially, the drawbacks aren't because the program is poorly run, but because it is a few-month online program with a finite scope. Although this program isn't magic and isn't fun every single second, I saw it as a good bang for my buck due to it being realistic and opening doors to many fields within AI development, not just one or two.

I was taught how to use Python on a very deep level, being able to understand each line of code. The Program was great at helping beginners like me, understand coding and the uses of AI and ML on a deep scale. I enjoyed this experience, and would recommend. One downside that I had experienced, was being able to manage sessions. A lot of times, we fell short when it came to trying to meet the deadline. We eventually did, but we did leave out 1-2 parts of our project due to the time constraint.