The main difference between an academic degree and a bootcamp is that we don t start from scratch and we learn with a lot of practice using modern tools and methods. In an academic curriculum in CS or DS, you will start learning all the theoretical knowledge (e.g. hardware layer of your computer for a CS degree, or advanced concepts of linear algebra and statistics for a DS degree) before moving to applied topics like web development or machine learning. This is only useful if you want to be able to navigate between these layers. However nowadays, you can build almost anything while only mastering the last part. That s why we designed our bootcamps this way. Of course you won t work at Tesla as a software engineer or at Google as a Deep Learning expert (unless you already have a scientific background when joining our bootcamp) but you will be able to work on your own tech products, web applications and data science projects or find a job as a junior developer, data scientist, data analyst or product manager with enough skills and knowledge to get started in your new company and bring value. Of course, that will be your role to keep learning in your new job and become more expert in specific topics.