Please Don’t Work With Horizons

TL;DR: Don’t apply to the Horizons Fellowship and don’t apply to their coding bootcamp.

I’m sure some of you have read the e-mail about the “Horizons Fellowship”, where a coding bootcamp offers room, board and education for ten lucky students.

An increasing number of people in the TriCo, including myself, don’t want the TriCo to have anything to do with this coding bootcamp or this fellowship. Long story short, this program has a lackluster curriculum, is fraught with shady marketing, and most importantly, is unnecessary for students in the TriCo.

Let’s take a look at their website. They are targeted towards ‘liberal arts/business majors, MBA/grad students, computer-science underclassmen and non-computer science engineers’. (That’s just about everyone, isn’t it?) They claim that their education will “compliment your theoretical understanding of computer science with actual applied web development skills”. To non-CS majors, they claim to teach “powerful, real-world software skills to compliment your liberal arts education”.

Their marketing preys on this one notion: We as liberal arts college students are constantly worried whether or not the education we’re getting has any real-world application. Never mind the fact that Compilers is literally a class where you build theoretical and practical skills by working on a software project for an entire semester. Never mind the fact that you work with a non-profit and build a mobile application in Mobile Development for Social Change. Never mind the fact that students in data viz are using D3.js to produce some seriously awesome things. Never mind all of that. The label “liberal arts” hangs over our head rendering anything practical we do theoretical.

This sentiment is present in their other ‘testimonials’ (none of which are actually related to the program at all). For example, Alex Golub writes that “CS classes are good at teaching basics, but you learn a lot on the job”. Somehow this is supposed to be an endorsement of not getting a job and going to their bootcamp instead. Similarly, all other testimonials are simply people espousing the virtues of learning software development. Don’t even get me started on the large Steve Jobs quote in the middle of their website. Programming is cool. Horizons != Programming.

All of the knowledge that Horizons is supplying is completely accessible outside of their ‘bootcamp’. If you want to learn web fundamentals, there are tons of free resources out there that students here (myself included) can point you towards. In addition, Hackathons like HackNY, HackPrinceton, HackMIT, and closer to home, PennApps, literally pay you to travel to other schools to learn practical software engineering skills from people in industry (who volunteer their time for free at these events). There are so many programs and events out there where you can learn these skills for no cost whatsoever. Why spend this money?

Even if we took all principle aside, this program has been haphazardly put together and disorganized. Just two weeks ago, The Horizons Fellowship didn’t exist and today it does. Just two weeks ago, I was looking for their syllabus and couldn’t find one. Now there’s a button to request a copy of their syllabus. I’ve requested a copy of their syllabus and their system claims it’s in my e-mail inbox. It’s not there, so either their backend is buggy (ironic given they claim to teach these skills), or they’re still putting it together.

This group doesn’t deserve visibility. They even claim that their program (supposedly teaching you real-world skills) is better than a real-world internship. As a community with our own standards, we shouldn’t participate in an institution whose goal is to sell their own service as a viable alternative to making real money over the summer doing a real job. Can you imagine the classist future that they’re envisioning? In addition to the cost of a standard college education, they envision preying upon you for even more money so that you can get a ‘real-world’ education that Haverford already offers.

In short, because they’re: 
* Providing no real value
* Preying upon liberal arts college/major students with the assumption that we’re insecure about what we study
* Envisioning a classist future

Don’t apply to Horizons on principle. If not on principle, on saving yourself a handsome amount of money. If not on that, on getting a better education in Haverford, or outside of the classroom for free. Haverford has no shortage of software engineering courses (look at databases and data science this semester), and ideally, FIG would be also helping with this shortage.

Really, if you want to go into industry, you’re going to do fine. This year, we’re sending graduates to startups, U.S. government contracting agencies, Amazon and Google, etc. People in the BiCo have scored an impressive number of internships including Haverford’s first ever KPCB Fellow (the only one to come from a liberal arts college this year), and numerous Mawrtyrs headed to Google. They did it without paying thousands of dollars or a percentage of their starting salary to a shady coding bootcamp. You can too.

I’m happy to answer any questions about this by e-mail or via the FIG slack.