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Holberton School
p/holberton-school
Become a Full Stack Engineer through project based learning
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Kiren Srinivasan
Holberton School — High-quality software engineering education for the many
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Holberton preps you to launch your tech career through project-based learning. You'll build your problem-solving skills by tackling real-world challenges alongside your peers. Holberton invests in its students who don't pay until they land a high-paying job.

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Kiren Srinivasan
Maker
Hi PH, my name is Kiren! I’m in the unique position where I went through the first 9 months of the Holberton program as a student and now I’m working there full-time as a software engineer. As a software engineer at Holberton, I build internal tools for staff to free up their time to do what they do best and maintain/iterate on the core product that we have for our students. I hunted us on PH today because we just opened up a new location in New Haven, Connecticut! We just had a grand opening party at our SF location this past Friday to celebrate the start of the first New Haven cohort in January 😊 Our mission at Holberton is to provide high-quality education for the many. Even though the school in San Francisco has been open and successful for 2.5 years thus far, it has been inaccessible to many potential students because of the high cost-of-living. Initially with our free upfront tuition, and now with our new New Haven location, Holberton as a company is better fulfilling its mission. If you have any questions about the Holberton experience, feel free to AMA! Our CEO @julienbarbier42 will also be on periodically during the day to answer questions about the school in general and our new New Haven location. Thank you so much @rrhoover for the PH platform where we can engage with a community interested in discovering technology that’ll change the world for the better ❤️
Abadesi
@julienbarbier42 @rrhoover @srinitude What a great initiative! How do you engage employers to maximize the change of your grads landing work? And how do you decide which cities to launch next?
Julien Barbier
Maker
Thank you @abadesi ! Re: How do you maximize the chance of your grads landing a job? The curriculum - on top of teaching computer science, software engineering, coding, and SRE - is actually helping students find jobs by themselves. In order to make sure they are well prepared, we do many things at different levels: - We emphasize a lot on soft skills. Coding is NOT enough, and you need to be ready to talk, write, sell your ideas, help others, work in team, collaborate, etc. More specifically for the interview process, you need to express yourself clearly, sell yourself, be prepared to talk to different people, etc. - We do have a lot of “reefineries” during the program. Reefineries are essentially very close to what an actual interview is, with coding, white boarding, etc. but also answering hr questions like “where do you see yourself in 5 years” or “how do you deal with criticism” etc. It’s one thing to master CS and SWE, but it’s a total different skill set that will get you succeed at the interview process. - As you already know, we are also big on community building. We do have mentors who come and do mock interviews, Alumni who come back and tell you about their experience looking for a job, giving advice and tips etc. - And MANY MORE things The result is that when a student decides that it’s time for them to look for a job, they already have a network, have been through mock-interviews many times, know what type of questions the HR will ask, and can rely on our community to help. That being said, we are helping companies get in touch with our students. For instance we do have job fairs where companies are invited to meet our students. Some companies also invite a few students for visits or lunch. Other companies will send software engineers to mock interview students, etc. Again, we are here to help the community, companies are part of this ecosystem. Please send me a mp if you would like to know more :) Re: how do you decide which cities to launch next? In order to launch the new campus in New Haven, CT, we essentially did the same as when we launched the campus in San Francisco: we partnered with the local community. It is very important to us, because this is part of the Holberton DNA. The second part of the answer, and this is specific to our new campus in New Haven, is that we wanted for our second location to have a more affordable city for students to live in. As you may know, accessibility is part of our mission (that is why we have an unbiased admission process and no upfront tuition), but in San Francisco, because of the local cost of living, so many students were unable to receive our Education. So New Haven is the perfect city: awesome, very positive and dynamic community (including local tech and non-tech companies) who supports the school, a city with a lot of students (we’re next to the Yale campus), a more affordable cost of living, and it was on the East Coast too.
Bennett Dixon

I've been attending Holberton for close to a month now. The learning environment is both professional as well as welcoming. Your peers are from varying aspects of life and provide a unique culture that is not seen at many big name schools which require high SAT/ACT scores coupled with a high GPA. Holberton simply cares about your motivation. That being said, you have to be both motivated, and capable of learning to be successful. Coming with a bad mindset will no doubt spell your downfall. If you chose Holberton, be prepared to work, struggle, be professional, and most of all interact with peers to achieve success in your projects, professional, and personal life.

Pros:

Great school, with an amazing learning framework that is applicable to further life learning. Not to mention the building is beautiful.

Cons:

You must be able to learn without being spoon-fed. That is, without someone there to answer your every question. This is not a con to most.

Spencer Taylor

Hello there. I've just completed Holberton School year 1 and I'm currently working at my first company. I started Holberton in January and the journey has been amazing. There are some things about Holberton that you should know.

Holberton doesn't have teachers. That's right. No teachers, no lectures. We are project and peer based learners in this neck of the woods. Our projects have deadlines and we have to find resources to get them done. Resources include Google searches, technical blogs, Youtube videos, error messages with more google searches, and maybe even the person sitting right next to you. That's where the peer based learning comes in. While you are trying to become an independent learner you will discover that you do your best learning by collaborating with others.

Holberton focuses on more than just being a great programmer. Writing code is only one piece of the equation. Soft skills are equally as important, if not more. You have to be able to explain your ideas, work effectively in a team, and be able to compromise. Maybe you write the most beautiful code the world has ever seen, but it means nothing if you can't convey your ideas. Social media is a required portion of the course as well. We tweet and we write Medium posts. Maybe writing isn't your thing, but it's a great skill to have in the tool box. There is significant emphasis put on developing these skills.

Holberton will push you to better than you were yesterday. Although there are no teachers we have a staff that truly cares about the success of it's students. I had a few hard situations come up during my time in the program and I was pleasantly surprised by the support i received. These people really care about your future.

I've appreciated my time here and glad to be apart of the Holberton family. Nothing in life is perfect and this program isn't an exception. That being said, I'm really glad that I decided to attend here. I'm a testament to the fact that if you put the work in you can thrive in this program and succeed. feel free to message me on Twitter if you have any questions @mrspencertaylor

Pros:

Amazing community. Solid, comprehensive curriculum. Progressive learning model. Teaches modern concepts and tools.

Cons:

(Not really cons)

No Teachers

Challenging curriculum

San Francisco $$$ (Hello New Haven)

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Igityan Hayarpy
Wish you success
Kiren Srinivasan
Maker
@igityan_hayarpy Thank you so much! Means a lot ❤️