About Second Syllabus

Second Syllabus started as a newsletter in 2022, written from a kitchen apartment while I was most of the way through a part-time bootcamp I was paying for out of restaurant tips. I'd spent twelve years as a line cook and then a head chef, and I was retraining as an instructional designer because the hours were killing a knee that had already been rebuilt once. Nobody I found online would tell me, in plain numbers, what a program actually cost once you added the laptop, the software subscriptions and the months of reduced income — so I started writing it down myself, and sending it to a few hundred people in the same spot.

That newsletter is this site now, moved over from Substack in 2025 — if you spot an odd leftover subscribe box in the middle of a post, that's why. The subject hasn't changed: bootcamps, online learning platforms, tutoring and the long, unglamorous work of changing careers as an adult with bills.

Who writes this

Second Syllabus is written by Renata Cole. I cooked professionally from 2007 to 2019, finished an instructional design bootcamp in 2020, and have worked in corporate learning and development since, writing this site on evenings and weekends. I'm not a career coach and I don't have a credential that makes me an authority on which bootcamp is "best" — what I have is a habit of calling admissions offices back with a second question, and enough of my own tuition receipts to know what these numbers feel like from the paying side.

How we report tuition and outcomes

Every price on this site is the published tuition or subscription price at the time we checked, pulled from the program's own enrollment page or a call with their admissions team, with the date we checked it noted where it matters. Placement rates, completion rates and "graduates reported" figures are exactly that: self-reported by the program, usually in an outcomes report they publish themselves. We did not independently verify a single graduate's employment status, and neither has almost anyone else writing about bootcamps online — we say "reported" every time specifically so you don't read it as audited. Ask any program for their full outcomes methodology before you enroll; a program that won't share one is telling you something.

Affiliate disclosure

Some links on Second Syllabus — to bootcamps, learning platforms and tutoring services — are affiliate or referral links, and we may earn a commission if you enroll or subscribe through one, at no extra cost to you. This doesn't change how we describe a program: a bootcamp that pays referral fees but had a rough cohort experience gets written up that way, and we have declined placements from a couple of programs whose numbers didn't hold up when we asked follow-up questions. Pages on this site may also carry third-party advertising served by an ad network, separate from and not vetted by our own editorial process.

Corrections

Tuition changes, cohorts get cancelled, and outcomes reports get revised — if something on this site is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it. We'd rather issue a correction than leave a stale number up where it might change someone's decision.