42 Silicon Valley: An Exercise In Learning Failure
For years I searched widely to find a like-minded group of software developers who were interested in sharing their knowledge of programming. I would go to every engineering meetup event but I had little success.
Though my journey had come up short in the barest of terms, I kept networking. As fulfillment in life is often found in random acts, I heard from a stranger about a school located in Silicon Valley in California that was offering just what I was looking for. It was called 42 Silicon Valley.
42 Silicon Valley is an innovative engineering college in the San Francisco Bay Area. As the leading college for software engineering, coding, and programming, we’re disrupting engineering education and tech talent pipelines in the Bay. Think tech is just for nerds? Think again.
The founder behind this institution is Xavier Niel, a visionary French billionaire businessman, who made his fortune challenging the telecom industry in France. He inaugurated his first campus in Paris in 2013 and has since opened several other campuses around the world.
The name “42” comes from a science fiction book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the answer to the ultimate question of life, is, you guessed it, 42.
🏊 Put your swimsuit on! 🏊
There is no other institution of higher education like School 42. Anyone between the age of 18 and 30 can apply for admission. No prior coding experience is necessary. Moreover, there are no teachers, only administration staff. Everyone learns by doing, focusing on assignments, working together in a peer-to-peer learning environment with the latest state of the art technology. There are also no classrooms, only one huge open floor space, called the Lab, which is split into the zones and crammed with a network of connected iMacs. The Lab is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Registration is easy and smooth. The trick is that the school year starts with the first month called the Piscine, (French for swimming pool) which is excruciatingly intense. Piscine resembles Army BCT (Basic Combat Training) but transforms civilians into coders. It is an initial step for a selection process for a 3 to 5-year general program at the school.
Hundreds of aspiring programmers with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and cultures, travel the world at their own expense to gather and occupy the premises of a School 42 in Fremont, California for allegedly one month. But each week in this month-long program, dozens would become disillusioned with their own skills and progress and grudgingly pack their bags and leave. Many would cry out in frustration. Some would openly weep and collapse from exhaustion. It amounted to a fast-paced, insanely intense, emotionally challenging roller-coaster ride.
I was hardly prepared for this. But it would turn out to be one of the best experiences of my life.
👨💻 EAT. SLEEP. <CODE>. REPEAT 👨💻
The usual day begins every morning at 8:42 AM, with a staffer recommending all within earshot to do 42 push-ups. The school day ends at 11:42 PM with everybody applauding to express appreciation to people around and gain a strength for new challenges of a new day. One is expected to work an average of 12 to 14 hours a day, every day of the week. I routinely devoted 16 hours a day to the challenges at 42. In spite of the ridiculously long hours, one often does not complete all of their daily assignments.
Every morning’s assignments must be completed by 11:42 PM the next day. This means days overlap and one ends up juggling a multitude of assignments they can’t get their hands around.
At the outset, attendees learn the basics of a powerful command-line interface, into which you can type text commands to perform specific tasks. Then one tackle the fundamentals of a C programming, to write different sorts of functions and libraries. And finish the course with sophisticated exercises like recursion, structures, binary trees and etc.
Friday evenings are exam nights which is a helluva a way to spend a Friday night. Results are immediate:
Within the first ten days of the program, I had flunked almost every single one of my daily assignments and a weekly exam as well. If I continued on this pathway, my love affair with 42 Silicon Valley would end and I would not have an invitation to advance and get into the school for a future program…
Though the 42 program is three years in total, no one has ever completed it. One routinely advances through different stages and then jumps ship because they have more than enough skills to acquire a job at a S&P 500 company or at local startups that desperately need their skills.
The grading system at 42 is remarkable. On a typical day, one submits his completed work before the deadline at 11:42 PM. Then two randomly selected students within the next day had to critique my work and give me a mark. After some classmates had analyzed my work by sitting down next to me and sympathetically discussing my work product, the school’s computer program then issued a final numeric death sentence. This is an automated, non-forgiving grading system called “Moulinette”, which stopped grading my work once it detected a single mistake.
What is terrifying about this system is that one may well receive a perfect score and praise from peer graders and then because you made the simplest mistake by forgetting to place a “semicolon” or a “space” at the right place in your first assignment, you end up with a failing a whole project! The daily psychological highs and lows students encounter at School 42 rival the highs and lows of the most traumatic roller coaster rides.
But I still was not going to give up. I continued my struggles and decided to make it whatever the cost would be. I started to work late nights, with a perpetual sore throat and aching body, until I received the maximum scores in the last 5 days of the course.
Self-discipline had paid off. I aced the final and completed the course successfully. Though I had lost 10 pounds, the challenge was worth it.
Within the next two weeks, I received an acceptance email at 2:42 pm which read as follows:
SUCCESS !!!
Though I was overjoyed when I received an acceptance email from School 42, many other participants were not so lucky. But among my classmates, almost all who had failed hung out for a few days in the Bay area and re-enrolled for the next course. Name me another institution where a majority of failed students would do likewise.
But they understood that School 42 is on the cutting edge of a new educational revolution that places practical, learned content traditional class rankings and test scores. This is the real stuff. Not memorizing and regurgitating terms. School 42 is about learning how to accept and respond to failure in a real-world environment.
As cliche as it may sound, if you put the time and effort in, there’s no reason you can’t succeed. If you will enroll in School 42 and challenge yourself it will be definitely worth it. Dare to struggle, dare to win.
