How a Holberton Student Went from Working at a Trader Joe’s to Becoming a Well-Paid Programmer

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Many think that becoming a software engineer is reserved for math geniuses who spent their lives in front of a computer – “I am not smart enough for that.” Yet, the stories of countless Holberton School students show that their background does not matter and that they have enough motivation and passion; that becoming a developer really is possible.

Dora Korpar is one of these stories. She first came to Holberton with no former coding experience but went on to become a software engineer at a San Francisco startup. And now, Business Insider has decided to highlight Dora’s amazing story.

About four years ago, Dora Korpar was looking for her next adventure. She had finished college but could not find a job and wasn’t interested in continuing her college studies. To pay the bills, she took a job at Trader Joe’s.

As she was catching up with a friend, he told her that he had recently got a job as a software engineering at Apple. He was a philosophy major in college, so Dora knew he never studied Computer Science. That intrigued her and she realized that she too could give it a shot.

Dora went online and tried a few online coding tutorials, learned some HTML and understood that this was something she could both do and enjoy! But she was stuck. “Amidst the sea of resources that are online, I was lost. I was looking for more direction. I ran across an article on an IT site talking about a program called the Holberton School.”

She decided to apply and the application process, which guides candidates to build their first website, sealed the deal; she loved coding. She was accepted, and, long story short, Dora is now a software engineer at Scality, a San Francisco storage company. She could not be happier with her decision to attend Holberton. If you want to read more about Dora’s story, check out the Business Insider article!


Welcoming Holberton first international cohort

Posted by Sylvain Kalache
group pictures of cohort 8 students in our 3 campuses

This January, on our the third anniversary of the school, we are very proud and excited to welcome cohort 8, our first international cohort, spread across three locations: in San Francisco, New Haven, and Bogotá!

Holberton pioneered a project and peer-learning based approach to train Software Engineers in the US, leading graduated to work at companies around the world, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla and more. Our tuition model, based on ISAs, where students pay nothing until they find a job, is tearing down the financial barrier to a high-quality education and attracting a student body that is shattering the software industry’s lack of diversity. As the model succeeded in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are thrilled to bring it to the state of Connecticut and to open our first international campus in country of Colombia.

Did you know software developer tops the list of the new US News report on 2019’s best jobs? So why not see what all the fuss is about? You have three locations to choose from and more to come!

Join me in welcoming the new students to the Holberton family!


Let 2019 Be the Year Your Career Takes Flight

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Year-end and year beginning, is a great time to take stock and think about your profesionnal life. As we move into 2019, think: are you happy with your career?

If you dislike your job, you’re not alone. 70% of 17,000 US employees surveyed said that they were thinking about or actively looking for a new job. According to Glassdoor, 13 of the top 25 best-paying jobs in America are in the tech industry; and by the way, tech is not only hiring like crazy and paying well, but they also offer incredible benefits, perks, and work cultures. Tech is the future and by being part of it, you can help chart the future rather than having it charted for you.

Have you ever thought about becoming a Software Engineer? Not sure you have what it takes to become one?

Holberton students, now working as Software Engineers, show that pretty much anyone with enough grit can make it. They come from diverse educational, income and geographical backgrounds. Ages range from 18 to 58, more than half of the students are people of color, and 35 percent are women. They used to be Delivery Driver, Sociology student, Artist, Sport Coach, and Fruit Picker and now make an average of $105,000 for their first full-time job. With a variety of employers including LinkedIn, Apple, Facebook, and Tesla but also smaller businesses like Scality, Taos and Change.org.

Still not sure? Our free application process is part of the student experience at Holberton. Going through it will give insight into what you would be doing as a student. You will build your first website, no prior coding experience is required!

As Holberton Trustee NE-YO said “Technical education is the ticket to inclusion in our technology-driven economy”. Becoming an engineer is within your reach – and it can be done without taking out a loan. Holberton is no-upfront tuition school. We invest in your education, and you contribute back financially only when you get a job!

We, at the Holberton School, can train you in two years or less. The application deadline is January 13th, for schools in San Francisco, New Haven, and Bogotá. 2019 be the start of your new career – and your life – to take flight. #NewYearNewYou!

Holberton Is Now An International Phenomenon

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Holberton School is going international! As TechCrunch reported – we are thrilled to announce that our first campus outside of the US will open on January 28th in Bogotá, Colombia!

We welcomed our first Holberton School cohort in January 2016. Our mission: to offer affordable, high-quality technical education for the countless talented individuals who would never have access to it otherwise. Since the beginning, Julien and I have aspired to positively impact our society at scale. It was always our hope that Holberton would not be bound only to Silicon Valley, but instead would grow nationally (and it has: to New Haven) to internationally. We are incredibly excited to begin our international expansion in Colombia.

Why Colombia? The country has been experiencing strong economic growth for the past few decades and is determined to be a leader in the digital era. The country is already known to be among the fastest growing sources for IT and digital services. And as large companies experience digital transformations and as founders create vibrant new startups, the need for software engineers is absolutely exploding.

Rappi, Colombia’s first “unicorn” startup valued at over $1 billion, is joining us on this quest. The YCombinator alumni recently raised $200 million, with participation from storied venture firms Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Rappi is partnering with Holberton and will contribute to the Bogotá school opening costs, provide mentors and hire Holberton graduates.

The initiative is led by Coderise, an organization that empowers underprivileged youth in Latin America through software programming education as a means to provide skills and access to opportunity for upward social mobility.

Sounds amazing, right? We think so too! That is why we will open a second school in Colombia in June 2019 in the city of Medellín! All of this is only possible thanks to the hard work of Coderise’s Andres Barreto and Hernando Barreto, as well as the amazing Holberton School team. To you all we say THANK YOU!

As NE-YO said, “Let’s make Holberton one of the biggest schools on the face of the planet.”

NFL Player Kelvin Beachum Helping to Offset Living Expenses for Holberton Students

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Aligning with our mission to provide high-quality education for the many, we are proud to announce that New York Jets’ Kelvin Beachum has joined our cause. Kelvin, who was recently recognized NFLPA Community MVP for his philanthropic efforts, donated a $10,000 grant to help students offset living expenses.

While San Francisco is the hotbed for developing a world-class software engineering career, it is also one of the most expensive places to live in. Beachum, NFL player by profession, fiercely advocates to increase STEM education for young people, particularly in underrepresented, underserved communities.

“I’m committed to supporting STEM education, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or who just need an alternative approach to help them get started,” said Beachum. “Holberton is filling the gap by offering an alternative to college, making cutting-edge software engineering training available to everyone with the desire to succeed. I’m proud to be part of it.”

Holberton School founders and Kelvin Beachum pictured in front of the Holberton logo
(L to R) Holberton School co-founder Sylvain Kalache, Kelvin Beachum, Holberton School co-founder Julien Barbier

This initiative follows our recent announcement for a new Holberton School campus in New Haven, where the cost of living is only a third of the one in Silicon Valley. We are proud to partner with Kelvin who, as ESPN coined it, is a big man with a big heart.

Kelvin’s donation is among a series that has helped so many students achieve their goal. Previous ones include CloudNow, Scality, Google and Accenture.

Candidates can apply to the scholarship once they are admitted at Holberton School, start your application now!

 

Priyanka Chopra Joining Holberton School Board of Trustees

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

In case you haven’t already seen, check out the NY Times! Actor, producer and social activist, Priyanka Chopra, has joined our Board of Trustees and invested in the school – to take an active role in attracting women to software engineering.

“No path to success is linear, but it’s staggering that women make up half the workforce and have held fewer than 25 percent of jobs in tech for the past two decades,” says Chopra. “At the Holberton School inclusion and diversity are more than just buzzwords, it is prioritized and infused in their DNA, and I’m looking forward to joining the Board of Trustees to help further their mission and close the gap.”

Priyanka joins our amazing collective of Trustees which includes Grammy winner, NE-YO, Jocelyn DeGance Graham, CEO at CloudNOW, Stephane Kasriel, CEO at Upwork, and Solomon Hykes, co-founder at Docker.

Priyanka will work with us on making sure that our mission of providing high-quality education for the many is fulfilled. She will focus on accessibility, and more specifically inspiring more women into a tech career. In the US, only 20% of software engineering positions are filled by women.

As software and artificial intelligence are becoming, by the second, a bigger part of how our world works, it is essential to have gender parity in the teams that are building the product and systems that are impacting our society and life at large.

We at Holberton have been training the next generation of software engineers, and many are women already working in the field: from hunting asteroids at NASA, contributing to the future of self-driving cars at Tesla and building technology that will power artificial intelligence at Nvidia.

Priyanka has been an outspoken advocate, and role model, for women for many years and we are thrilled to align our values and actions to solve the diversity gap in the Tech industry.

Welcome Priyanka!

Welcoming Nadine Krause as Holberton School New Haven Director

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

As many of you know, at the beginning of this month we announced our new campus in New Haven, Connecticut. But what you didn’t know is that we have hired our campus Director, Nadine Krause.

Nadine held human resources roles gaining extensive experience in talent and leadership development, team and diversity and inclusion. She embraces the mission of Holberton School, providing high-quality education for the many, where the often-times forgotten soft-skills, are in the center of our education.

Nadine will assume responsibility for all of the operations and the success of the New Haven campus. She will also focus on building a strong community and corporate partnerships to ensure that our students have access to meaningful internship opportunities, mentors and industry experts. In return, the local employers will have access to the diverse, motivated and well-rounded skill-set of our graduates.

So, join me in welcoming Nadine to the Holberton family!

Holberton School is opening in New Haven, CT!

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Our world is entering the fourth industrial revolution, led by software, automation and artificial intelligence. Companies, to survive, have to run at the pace of technology and leverage these tools, or risk becoming the next Blockbuster or Kodak. They need a workforce that is skilled and able to constantly retrain and retool.

Our post-secondary education, that was really developed during the last industrial revolution, is falling behind on equipping today’s students with the skills they need to thrive. Some institutions have managed to adapt – but only for the elite. Only a fraction of Americans can access this Ivy League club.

Tech companies, and really any company that is going through a digital transformation, is suffering from the lack of a trained and diverse workforce needed to take over 500,000 open positions. That’s what Julien and I decided to tackle by founding Holberton in 2015 – provide high-quality education to the many.

We took inspiration from progressive education, a movement that emphasizes learning by doing, problem-solving, critical thinking. A movement that leads students to develop their social skills and become lifelong learners. We wanted to make sure that the Holberton opportunity was accessible to anyone motivated to become a software engineer. We designed a free and blind admissions process selecting on grit, and made the school free until students find a job.

We welcomed our first cohort of 30 students in January 2016 and since moved to a new building that can accommodate up to 1,000 students every year. We have alumni working in Silicon Valley’s top companies including Tesla, Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook. Today, we are making the Holberton School opportunity accessible to even more Americans by opening our second campus in New Haven, Connecticut.

Connecticut has always been known for innovation. Leading in insurance, and a major actor for aircraft & parts manufacturing and ship & boat building. Technology-related jobs grew by an estimated 1,060 jobs in 2017 and contributed $16.2 billion to the state’s economy. In this context, Holberton will both help local companies to successfully navigate the digital transformation they are going through by providing the talent they need and also attract businesses to join the area, as the war for highly-skilled talent rages nationally.

New Haven’s low cost of living is also a big advantage. While the Silicon Valley is providing countless advantages, the cost of living can sometimes prohibit potential students from attending the program.

We have been working hard for months along with David Salinas and his team at District to make this happen, and we expecting to welcome our first cohort of students in January of 2019. Thanks to Comcast, CT Next, District Innovation & Venture Center, Indra and Raj Nooyi, Seedlings Foundation, State of Connecticut, and The Community Foundation for their support. Enrollment have started, apply here!

Docker + Holberton Hackathon = A Whale Of A Time

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

Holberton School students recently participated in a 24-hour Docker Hackathon! While there were various cool hacks, there were a few that stood out; placing these teams as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. Let’s take a look at the hacks that won these budding software engineers tickets to the most coveted container community event in tech – DockerCon!

 

Third Place

Isaiah Becker-Mayer, Spencer Taylor, and Nick Teixeira: We wanted to make a container image that would act as a data science lab that you could work out of. It’s really hard for people who work with data to recreate the same circumstances that produce a given result.  Different operating systems and computer specs make this really difficult. Using the container you’re able to save a snapshot (Docker Image) of your current lab with the same operating system and specs,  and send it to your colleagues so they can reproduce the results.

 

Second Place

David Yoon, Sue Kalia, Yunju Chen: Docklio! (the name comes from Docker + Twilio) If you already have your Docker environment set up, how about deploying your app with a single push of the button? That’s what we want to achieve with Docklio — to make system admin’s lives easier. Docklio allows users to control their Docker containers by sending text messages and Docklio will send back a message to confirm the container status.

 

First Place

Katya Kalache, Kim Wong, Spencer Cheng, Stuart Kuredjian: Our goal was to learn more about how Docker can enable a scalable distributed system on both virtual and physical machines. We decided to run a image recognition model using three Raspberry Pis and set up a three node swarm cluster using Docker. One node was set up as a swarm manager which executes and distributes commands to the two worker nodes. We also explored the OpenFaaS framework, developed by Docker Captain Alex Ellis, a scalable framework for building server-less functions with Docker swarm.

Thank You’s

These hackers have skills and will soon be in search of their first software engineering gigs! Thanks to folks like our mentors and volunteer hackathon judges, these students are able to fine tune their skills with the advice of industry professionals! Shoutout to Mason Fish and Andrew Hsu for volunteering their Saturday afternoons to help judge the hackathon presentations! The support these two gave to the hacking efforts will not soon be forgotten!

Student Spotlight: Max Johnson

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

Camden, New Jersey, if you’re not familiar, has at times been branded as ‘America’s most dangerous city.’ Max Johnson, if you’re not familiar, has at times been labeled Holberton School’s hardest working student. What does one have to do with another? Max grew up in Camden, NJ and in true poetic fashion, as his city experiences some positive changes, so does Max’s career trajectory.

In spite of the fact that Max had earned a degree in Criminal Justice and Psychology he struggled to find a related job in the field. He decided he was not going to let his tough surroundings dictate his future path and began looking into the prospect of breaking into the tech industry. Max was rejected by every program he applied to up until being admitted to Holberton School.

(L to R) Holberton School co-founder Sylvain Kalache, Max, Holberton School co-founder Julien Barbier

We are not our past. With this notion, Max set off to the west coast with a few thousand bucks, and the determination that he would come out the other side a full stack software engineer. However, the path to success was not paved with ease for Max. During his tenure at Holberton he experienced a few personal hurdles. These struggles coupled with the challenging curriculum eventually taught Max, arguably, his greatest lesson- it’s ok to ask for help. “My classmates had my back. They helped me, they supported me, they stayed with me after hours,” The peer learning structure and collaborative nature of Holberton School’s curriculum allowed for the network of helping hands that Max needed.

The confidence Max has gained due to his hard work at Holberton is evident. With his first high- paying job in tech secured, he felt compelled to share his journey with our most recent cohort of students. The overwhelming take away from Max’s talk was one of perseverance and that above all, hard work wins out. He shared with us the below Les Brown quote:

“If you want a thing bad enough to go out and fight for it,

to work day and night for it,

to give up your time, your peace and your sleep for it…

if all that you dream and scheme is about it,

and life seems useless and worthless without it…

if you gladly sweat for it and fret for it and plan for it

and lose all your terror of the opposition for it…

if you simply go after that thing you want

with all of your capacity, strength and sagacity,

faith, hope and confidence and stern pertinacity…

if neither cold, poverty, famine, nor gout,

sickness nor pain, of body and brain,

can keep you away from the thing that you want…

if dogged and grim you beseech and beset it,

with the belief in yourself, you will get it!”