School 42 programming in the US - the American dream available to everyone

The innovative school of programming 42 school provides free training and living in Silicon Valley, even for those who do not understand anything in coding.

This planet is unstoppable: the world is obsessed with programming and people are ready to enter IT after thirty-five and even forty. Of course, such a demand could not but generate an offer - an avalanche of schools, courses, online formats and anything else appeared. 21 days - and you are god C ++, JavaScript guru, Python Jedi. Just pay, and then the card will fall. Meanwhile, effective learning is first and foremost the practice, motivation and experience of teachers. There is a school that combines all of the above and almost completely eliminates fear. We think you have heard about 42 school more than once, but did not go into details. We will tell you, since we went through her pool (Piscine) on our own experience.

About Us

We, Daniel Brodovic (Head Of Product) and Anastasia Westphal (Director of Marketing and Recruting), want to share with you our story about what you can learn absolutely free of charge at a programming school and what a modern innovative school in the USA looks like. We hope that our story will inspire you, future and real IT people, to take another step towards your dream.

This experience helped us to immerse ourselves in the IT environment, to see the tremendous enthusiasm and energy in solving a multitude of tasks, which you often cannot see in the most dynamically developing start-ups, not to mention traditional educational institutions.
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School feature

The main highlight of the 42 school is the lack of control over students by the teachers. The works, at the first stage, the students themselves check here, after which the work of the students is analyzed by a computer program. In this case, the work can be failed even if it is successfully completed by 95%, if you make a mistake in the first of 20 tasks per day!
There are no special standardized textbooks here, there are only small short videos, and the creators believe that a student can already find all the necessary information on the Internet from other students.

The process of learning in 42 school is similar to the game in the quest genre. Performing tasks, the student gains experience points, thanks to which he moves to the next levels. So, only on its own performance depends on the speed of movement on the material.
Every day, the program provides a new topic for study and a task for it. Students upload the completed task to GitHub, where a fellow student will check it. However, it even happens that successful work is rejected at the last stage by a computer program, if all the conditions were not met.

History of creation

The founder of the innovative school is the French businessman Xavier Nehl, who has taken a solid place in the field of telecommunications in his country, launched a free cellular connection and continues to develop mobile business. In 2013, he created School 42 in Paris, in order to confirm that the classical studies at colleges and universities are outdated. By the way, Niël himself did not graduate from the university, but studied programming in the parent garage.

In 2016, the second school of 42 silicon valley was launched in Silicon Valley. More than $ 100 million was spent on building and operating a school in California. According to his idea, until 2020, school 42 should train as many as 10 thousand students.

In the spring of 2017, the creator of VKontakte and Telegram Pavel Durov visited the school, calling this school “the future of the education system”.

"Difficulties" of learning

The first month of training is a real test. All students are driven into tight timeframes, they throw up more and more tasks, the complexity of which increases with each subsequent task. The concept of a holiday in this month does not exist, since on Saturday and Sunday you need to work on team projects, and the school day lasts from 8:42 to 23:42.

Only after the successful completion of the first month, the load decreases slightly, and there is time for rest or entertainment. For this, there is a special game room with board games, table tennis, etc.



The work area of ​​the school is a huge computer lab, equipped with about a thousand one-block iMac systems. All of them are united in a single network, each student stores the data under his login on a common server. The laboratory is open 24 hours a day, therefore at 4 nights you can meet students.

It is worth noting that some of the tasks are allowed to be written off from friends and then do reverse engineering. But when tested by students and sometimes by cadets, they often ask for a detailed description of the solution. As practice shows, if you did not realize how the task was solved, then writing off made it worse only for yourself and you risk getting an assessment for writing off “-42” for the whole school day, which is very negative in the system in the personal progress profile.

Having successfully completed a one-month trial at a school that passes only 10% -20%, we were able to continue studying, but having received an excellent experience, we had to go back to 1World Online - one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley, according to Inc. 5000 In just one month, we got enough to apply this knowledge for a better understanding and more productive work with our team of programmers, for example, to quickly find work on GitHub when it is necessary to quickly refine the product.

How to proceed?

Absolutely anyone can enter the school, regardless of nationality, social status, age or university education. The most important advantage is that it does not even need to have basic programming skills for admission. Training will give a chance to live in the heart of California, make new friends and improve your English.

Formally, for admission it is necessary to fill out an application on the site and pass the test of "compliance", which will be tasks on the quality of memory and the ability to think logically. After, you can go to the open door. When entering, no one checks the programming skills.

The school provides free housing for a month, so the only financial difficulties will arise when buying a ticket to the United States and processing visa documents. It should be borne in mind that the school does not provide a student visa, but it is not required when entering the school, they just ask in the questionnaire whether you are legally in the country.

The main differences from traditional learning

Innovative School 42 is fundamentally different from the traditional education system around the world:

• Lack of entrance exams and diplomas;
• Training is automated and presented in the form of a game process;
• There are no teachers and textbooks here;
• The student is responsible for his studies. Only those who really need knowledge, and not a diploma, study here;
• Intensive presentation of information in a short time, seven days a week, instead of stretching the training for several years;
• The school combines the principles of teamwork and independent achievement of the goal;
• Constant development and updating of information that meets current industry trends.
• First, language C is mastered, after which the student chooses which languages ​​he wants to learn, following a certain hierarchy.

It is also worth noting that the branches of school 42 work in Russia and Ukraine. In Ukraine, the institution operates under the name UNIT Factory, and in Russia, as School 21. Teachers are also absent in these organizations, the principles of teamwork and equality prevail, and free tuition.

Thanks to such bold discoveries, it is no longer necessary to fly to the USA in order to gain modern knowledge of the programming languages ​​C, C ++, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. The innovative tendency has every chance to take its rightful place among educational giants and even make them a solid competition .


If you have any questions about 42 school, write in the comments.