On an August morning in Paris, when most of the city is in an advanced state of summer torpor, hundreds of young men and women are sweating it out in the third week of a grueling month-long endurance test.
While the trial is called the piscine (swimming pool) and towels dot the ultra-modern building, the contest is not about physical prowess. Welcome instead to the tryouts for Ecole 42, a free computer coding college founded by French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel in 2013 to help young people find work in IT or, better still, become their own bosses.
Named after the offbeat answer to “the ultimate question of life” in Douglas Adams’ comic classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the college, with neither teachers nor conventional tuition, quickly gained cult status.
Photo: AFP
About 40,000 people apply each year for one of about 1,000 spots in the program. About 3,000 make it to the daunting piscine stage, in which the candidates spend 10 to 16 hours a day over four weeks completing projects and doing exams.
Some, such as Aristide Rivet-Tissot, even sleep and shower on-site — hence the towels.
“When you’re here, you’re so immersed that you sometimes forget the outside world exists,” the bleary-eyed 19-year-old told reporters as he greeted his parents, who had traveled up from the countryside to offer support and collect his washing.
When Niel announced his plan for a free coding college open to all, including school dropouts — 40 percent of the students do not have the school leavers’ baccalaureat — France’s main IT employers federation gave a muted response, noting that the country already had an abundance of engineering colleges.
Six years later, Ecole 42, which is based entirely on project work and peer learning, has disproved the doubters with a 100 percent employment rate among graduates.
“You feel like you’re walking into a school from the future,” Evan Spiegel, the chief executive officer of social media giant Snap, said describing a visit to 42 in Paris in a promotional video.
Now Niel, who founded the world’s biggest start-up incubator in Paris in 2017, is taking his revolutionary model global.
After founding a Silicon Valley sister college in 2016, he has his sights set on Rio de Janeiro, Novosibirsk, Tokyo and a slew of other cities, as part of a plan to have 20 partner schools in 14 countries by next year.
While completing the course’s 21 levels takes on average three years, many students are headhunted beforehand.
Bastien Botella, the 33-year-old cofounder of Clevy, a start-up that develops chatbots, left 42 one-third of the way through the course to take a Web design job.
A former hotel manager who failed his baccalaureat, Botella had previously been turned down by several traditional IT colleges.
“Forty-two was a turning point in my life,” said Botella, whose staff of 21 includes six fellow “42ers” working alongside graduates of top engineering colleges.
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