The Tuition-Free Coding School 42 in Silicon Valley
The start of a journey to become a world-class computer engineer, at 42, and it’s absolutely, totally free.
After a series of unfortunate events, the answer to life, the universe and everything started slowly unfolding. Forced to quit my job I had to re-evaluate my life’s purpose, my career, my goals and as it turns out, the answer is 42, a non-profit, tuition-free coding school. Here’s my story of this experience, and the start of a epic new journey.
A non-profit, tuition-free coding school, 42.
A tuition-free, non-profit coding school? When I first heard about it I couldn’t believe it was real. It sounds to good to be true right? Most people around me where skeptical, heck even I was.
After weeks researching and months of getting the money together I managed to fly for the first time in my life to the United States. I attended their intense 4-week selection process, and it was totally worth it. Let me tell you a bit about the school itself first, and then tell you about my experience during those 4 weeks.
Xavier Niel, who made his fortune by taking on the telecom industry in France with his Free ISP and mobile businesses, founded 42. He founded 42 to make a statement to the outdated educational system of today, and to give back some of his wealth to the world.
42 France is the first campus that opened up in Paris back in 2013. It gained tons of international publicity and interest. They opened another campus in 2018 in the heart of technology of the world, Silicon Valley. The perfect place to boost my career in software engineering and development.
Anyone can apply, no coding experience required!
It isn’t anything like a another university or college out there. First of all, anyone between the age of 18 and 30 years old can apply. No matter your educational or social background. You learn coding from-scratch, which means you don’t need any coding experience beforehand.
There are no teachers, no degree and there are no classrooms. You learn by doing, working on projects and assignments, working together in a peer-to-peer based learning environment with state of the art technology.
“Anyone, as long as you have the merit, and the motivation, and the skills, you can come regardless of the amount of money you have, where your background is, who you are, anything!”
― Tony Fadell (Founder / CEO at Nest)
Instead of classrooms they have the Lab. The Lab is a huge open floor loaded with a ‘network’ of connected iMacs. The Lab is always open, 24 /7, with your files, applications and settings ready at your disposal at every computer in the Lab. Yes, it’s all connected. Really. It’s scary sometimes.
You learn by doing a continues stream of assignments, projects and exams in a gamified digital learning platform. For each assignment, project or exam you get a certain amount of experience points, so you level-up based on your performance.
The projects and assignments are designed to teach you coding from the bottom up. To get into the school and attend the selection process you first have to do an online logic and memory test.
After that you can sign up for the insanely intensive 4-week selection process, called the Piscine, to get into the full 3 to 5 year program. Brace yourself, anything you've ever done before the Piscine was easy compared to this.
The Piscine
The Piscine is the selection process for the full 3 to 5 year program at 42 Silicon Valley. Piscine is French for swimming pool, and it totally makes sense as a name for the program, you better learn to swim.
We’re thrown into deep, deep waters. It’s a fast-paced, stressful, fun, depressing, exciting, heart-breaking and insanely intense for 4 straight weeks.
What You’ll Learn
The boot-camp starts off by learning you the fundamentals of the bash / shell command-line, which is something you’d have to work in for the rest of the Piscine, heck as I am looking back it’s something you’ll probably have to work in your whole life if you want to become a good developer.
You’ll learn how powerful this tool actually is and why you’ll prefer it over time, as you get used to it, to using a regular interface.
The rest of the program is designed to teach you the fundamentals of C. C is a very fundamental programming language used by most operating systems today. Compiled, it can run on almost any hardware device out there. In the Piscine, you’ll be (re-)creating a lot of library functions to teach you algorithms and how higher level languages work.
Higher-level languages, like Java and C# are mostly based on C. Learning C as a basis makes sense, because you’d truly know what is going on behind the scenes of higher level languages that make a lot things a easier to write these days.
What your average day will look like.
I heard that we were expected to work an average 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, I clocked in an average of 12–16 hours a day, and yet you still won’t be able to finish all your assignments of the day and probably will get a zero the next day, yes it’s that intensive.
During weekdays you get assignments every morning at 8:42 AM, which have to be turned in before 11:42 PM the next day, which means the days overlap, and I often caught myself working on previous day exercises while still needed to finished the exercises for today, a little advice here, don’t get too far behind.
There are exams on every Friday evening, those are the moments you really get the chance shine, to show how much you are progressing, and gain some experience points. Yes, it’s a game. You won’t be able to use Google or ask your neighbors for advice during exams, it’s just you and your skills that you’ve build over time.
Don’t forget to signup for the exams, I forgot to signup for the first exam (the intranet and assignments can be confusing sometimes) which means you won’t be able to login, and staff won’t help you, try to be a step with those things instead of a step behind so you can help other people.
In the weekends there is a group assignment called The Rush, starting at Friday evening 8:42 PM until Sunday 11:42 AM. At the same time you have a individual project you can do. They consist of projects like making a puzzle solver or drawing a complicated pyramid in your bash shell using C.
The most peaceful time is after your weekend projects at 11:42 PM, where for once you don’t have any work to do. This is the perfect time to hang out, socialize, breath, chill, worry about your grades and dream about getting in, and no, next week won’t be any easier. Look around, who’s missing? A lot of people will drop out early, keep going!
The Painful Grading System
Next to the peer-to-peer grading there is an automated, non-forgiving, grading system called Moulinette and she’s not forgiving of mistakes. You make 1 mistake, you’re out! Zero points! Done!
Moulinette stops grading your assignments for the day once it finds a mistake, which means that if you screw up the first assignment you get zer0 points for the next assignments for that day, no matter how well you made them.
Expect to fail and fail, a lot of times, but don’t give up, fail and rise again. So how do you get in? My guess is that it’s not just about the grades. The criteria of getting in is only known by a handful of people, it’s not just about the points, even people with the lowest points get in sometimes.
Think about it, what skills are needed in the tech workforce of today? I suspect that they select people based on their ability to handle stress, overcome failure and work together in groups. Those are the skills, next to coding, needed to survive in the stressful, fast pacing tech industry of today, and tomorrow.
The Culture of 42
What I learned from students at this school is that 42 is a community, it’s a brewing place for problem-solvers and engineers. The school being tuition-free and in Fremont also offering free dorms, allows for the students to dedicate their time to creating and manifesting their dreams.
It’s a gigantic mother-ship of creatives and engineers working on their projects, assignments, on improving their skills, and the flexibility in the program allows for students to also work on their own projects, startups and companies.
Most of the students are actually working on their own side-hustles and projects. Already working on their next algorithm, AI, app or software, building the next big thing in tech. The best thing is that all the code you write in 42 is your own intellectual property, it’s all yours, you don’t ‘sign’ anything to them, you technically don’t own them anything.
The school forces you to step outside of your comfort-zone, to work, create, and solve problems together. Everybody is dedicated, open, hart-working and willing to help the 42 community out in anyway possible, everybody that I met truly wants to be there, is grateful for it’s existence and is contributing to the positive vibes and improvement of the school itself.
The start of a new, grand journey.
This is only the start of a journey that’s bigger than everything I’ve ever done. I got accepted into 42 and now it’s time for me to get my shit together, make my way back back to Silicon Valley and continue my journey from there.
For me, doing The Piscine was the easy part, it’s now that the hard part begins. Because even though the school is tuition-free, I’ll still need to make my way back there, and get enough money together to sustain.
Even though there is a school a Paris, which is a lot closer to home and easier to start into, I am aiming to do most part of my studies in Silicon Valley, now that Ive
Because it’s been a childhood dream of mine to go to the United States, and follow the American Dream. Even though dreams have changed, I still believe that it’ll be more valuable to me to study in the states, because this is where it is all happening.
I’m excited and already working hard to make it an reality, follow this journey here on Medium, and read about the projects I’m working on, my journey to get back to Silicon Valley and my experiences within the program of 42.
