I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience at the bootcamp. It isn't for everyone, and I don't think I would recommend Signal to people who are looking for what you wanted out of the bootcamp. I wish that it had been otherwise; nevertheless, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts in such an honest and frank manner.

However, I think it's important to separate out your own experience from the experiences of other students. In many cases, including my own, they were radically different.

I'm not personally comfortable with your comment insofar as it seems to implicitly speak for all the students in the bootcamp. I know that my life improved greatly because I was able to come down here, but if I were a prospective student now, your comment might have dissuaded me from coming. For that reason, I believe it's useful to be more specific in your epistemic claims here--it may very well be true that the program is unsuitable for people in your reference class, but I think it would be bad if that fact ended up discouraging applicants for whom the program would be a great fit.

I'm surprised that you think the instructors don't know very much data science. On top of having a strong command of the underlying mathematics, Jonah and Sam were able to teach me things that aren't explained in textbooks, like the intuitive explanation of why the sum of squared error is minimized in linear regression and the fundamental importance of dimensionality reduction techniques. The numerous discussions I've had with Jonah have shaped my intellectual growth generally and made clear to me many of the more obscure aspects of data science specifically--for instance, I had been reading a couple papers on boosting out of personal interest and offhandedly made a remark to Jonah about something I found fascinating, and he was able to immediately understand and rectify a minor point of confusion I had been having.

Again, your perception of the instructors' competencies may have been the result of a mismatch between the sort of environment the program was trying to offer and the sort of environment you were hoping for. I wish that your experience could have been as positive as mine and hope you're able to find what you're looking for in the future. Based on your feedback, Signal is giving higher priority to giving prospective students a clear sense for the program's environment so that they're are well equipped to make informed decisions.