Senior Year at Make School’s Product Academy

Acceleration & Leadership

The first year at Make School prepared you to get an internship at an SF startup. In your second and final year at Make School you have the opportunity to take your skills and your career to the next level. Here is a list of things the Make School community can support you to accomplish in your final semester.

Start an Ambitious Startup

So now you’ve had some agile experience, you’ve been exposed to major frameworks and languages, you’ve seen how a major company looks from the inside, and you probably have made a few startups already. Now its time to hit the reset button and go after something really ambitious. Make School’s senior year is the perfect place and time to do just that. Start with customer development and interviews, move onto a careful (but brief) design phase, then start running sprints and doing user testing. How are you going to grow? How’s that YC application coming along?

Participate in the Student Contracting Company

Make School would like to prompt Seniors to found and run an independent, not-for-profit software consulting company. As a not-for-profit, all revenue will be distributed to project teams and company expenses like marketing and snacks. Each client project will be quarterbacked and managed by Make School students with the help and advice of an instructor. Instructors can bring valuable industry and business knowledge to everything from sales and marketing, to scaling, to customer experience management.

Prepare for the Big One

So you got through year one and you interned at a startup for 6 months. What’s next? What’s the next step step in your career to get you to your dream job? During your senior year you have the time and support to develop your portfolio, your network, and your skills to prepare for a shot at a reach company.

Keep Working

Loved that internship? Stay on working 20 hours a week there while you continue to learn and plan the next step in your career.

Multiply Your Network

Make School is a home base for your personal and career development. A big part of both of those is to meet lots of people and make friends and mentors. People you meet at events and through mutual contacts will become your friends, your colleagues, maybe even cofounders. Senior year is the time to multiply your network, follow up, and drink a lot of coffee meeting with new contacts.

Take Specialized Advanced Classes

So far classes at Make School have been about web and mobile technology — the bread and butter of tech. But there is much more out there. Did you know Alan has a masters degree in machine learning and data science? Did you know that Shannon is an IoT wizard? Did you know Make School can find instructors for other advanced topics such as VR, AI, and anything else you can think of? In Senior year we are offering a full gambit of advanced classes and projects.

Mentor Juniors

You’re a senior now and that means that there are juniors at Make School that you can befriend, help, teach, and learn from. We are accepting over 50 new students next year, that means 50 new super smart, motivated software developers who are eager to walk the path that you all just hacked through with a machete. As seniors, you all are the leaders of Make School’s Product University.