CloudNOW, the executive consortium for the leading women in cloud and converging technologies, provided scholarships to help Holberton students with their cost of living while attending the school. The scholarships are sponsored by Facebook, Google, and Intel.

“As a former CloudNOW recipient, I was able to attend Holberton full time without the added stress of trying to cover my basic needs,” said Kristen Loyd, former Holberton student. “I was able to fully commit myself to becoming the best software engineer I could be and the payoff was worth it! I am now working as a software engineer and I definitely don’t think this would have been possible without the help of the CloudNOW scholarship. Congrats to this year’s recipients!”

CloudNOW’s focus is to provide STEM scholarship funds to top talent, targeting women, minorities, and underrepresented individuals, 18 years and older, who are looking for accelerated STEM training allowing for immediate tech career opportunities. CloudNOW also provides support across the career lifecycle with networking, events, speaking opportunities, mentoring, and friendship. CloudNow has been partnering with Holberton for years and past recipients are working for Change.org, Pinterest, Twitch, IBM and more.

“From supporting themselves and their families to the cost of commuting or relocating closer to campus, many of our students face financial challenges related to the cost of living. Often times, this leads to students having to maintain some form of employment while enrolled, which can be an additional stressor and distraction from their studies,” said Nadine Krause, Director of Holberton School New Haven. “We are truly grateful that CloudNOW has recognized our students and their potential, providing them with the same opportunity to succeed as other scholarship recipients. Congratulations to all of our well-deserving students!”

Congratulations to the 12 students who were awarded this prestigious scholarship and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for each and every one of you!

Today we’re excited to announce that we are opening a campus in Montevideo, Uruguay! This new school will be located on Uruguay Zonamerica campus, a community of  350 companies, counting 10,000 professionals which are producing 1.8% of Uruguay’s GDP. The campus features 300,000 sqm of parks & green areas and is designed for an enjoyable work experience that improves the performance of people and businesses. 

Montevideo is the capital and largest city in Uruguay. It has been declared the city with the best quality of life in Latin America. Montevideo is one of the leading cities in the region, with a vision of using technology to improve its citizen’s quality of life.

“In Uruguay we need more than 2,000 qualified software developers to help us meet the demand of the industry,” said Martín Dovat, general manager of Zonamerica and member of the board of the Zonamerica Foundation. “Holberton’s innovative, Silicon Valley-grade education has already proven to be highly successful in Zonamerica Cali, Colombia. Partnering with Holberton is helping us supply the talent to meet the demand for highly trained engineers.”

The school will begin welcoming students in September and depending on how the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, Holberton School Uruguay may temporarily open as a remote program providing its education fully online. We are so excited to help with the continuing growth of Uruguay’s tech market and are looking forward to welcoming students this spring. The new Uruguay campus, led by Ines Jakubovski, is planning on opening its doors to its first cohort of students in September. Applications are open, learn more about the campus here!

With a meteorite close to reaching planet Earth, Jimmer Hernandez and Johan David Muñoz of the Bogotá campus had to solve four online challenges in order to save the world!

These two students were the first out of 1,000 teams around the world to “abandon the Room” in the The Great Mission, Globant Escape Game Challenge! Because they were named the winners, Jimmer and Johan will be sent to Globant’s Converge 2020 in New York City, where they will network with some of the world top tech employers and influencers!

“The Great Mission’ is this year’s version of Globant’s Escape Game initiative, designed to engage the brightest minds in a fun, challenging and creative scenario to test and refine their mathematical and problem-solving skills,” said Andrés Giolito, Country Manager of Globant Colombia. “The first team that abandoned the Room was team ELECTROS, from Holberton School Bogotá. They were selected among 1,000 couples that participated in this initiative.”

And this isn’t the first time that Holberton students have fought to combat meteorites! In 2016, Sravanthi Sinha was accepted into one of the most prestigious engineering internships in the world, NASA’s Frontier Development Lab with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The interns gathered from around the world from top universities such as U.C. Berkeley and Cambridge, teamed up to help NASA plan for a potential cosmic Armageddon, an asteroid strike on earth.

We are so excited for these two brilliant students for the work they put into this challenge. This win is further proof that the Holberton curriculum is paying off and that our students are able to think critically. They are able to think outside the box because they have been taught to learn.

“We were students of electronic engineering in our seventh semester at the national university of Colombia when we decided to join Holberton,” said Hernandez and Muñoz. “We found Holberton an excellent complement to our career because it allowed us to practice our engineering skills on a daily basis with high-level challenges and allowed us to learn soft skills interacting with professionals from all areas of knowledge. These helped us keep our minds sharp and fit for the challenges that we have been presented with throughout 2020, especially the Globant challenge, which we managed to win and now we can begin to know the world. Thanks to the prize.”

Congratulations to you two! We expect to see many more great things from both of you and can’t wait to see where the future leads you.

On February 4, 2020, we at Holberton received a modified decision from the California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), the parent organization of the California BPPE. The department determined that the application of the BPPE’s original emergency action over our San Francisco campus was not necessary and stated that we may continue to enroll students. The one exception is the Career Track program module for which the DCA is mandating that we cease operations. As Holberton has maintained throughout, we have worked with the California BPPE to obtain our license in good faith.

We developed Career Track in response to requests from our students who wanted to launch their careers and start earning money before graduating. Given how many students come to Holberton from disadvantaged backgrounds, we understood their desire to earn money before the end of our 18-month program. We had created this “Career Track” optional module to enable them, if desired, to graduate while learning on the job. While the Career Track module was submitted to the BPPE, the Bureau feels that the module has not been fully vetted through all necessary BPPE processes. Despite what we believe have been positive student outcomes from the Career Track module, we are now withdrawing Career Track from our program for the time being. We will be in touch with students currently enrolled or previously enrolled in Career Track to discuss next steps as we set out to serve their needs without this module.

We have always strived to create an education that serves our students, partners and community well. Just as we are committed to continuing to coordinate with the BPPE to ensure that we are complying with applicable California laws and regulations, we also remain fully committed to our mission to provide a world-class engineering education regardless of background or ability to pay.

We believe that transparency and trust are critical. We will continue to keep you updated as we learn more.

On Saturday, we at Holberton School reviewed a notification of concerns raised by the Sacramento-based California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) regarding our San Francisco campus. 

We created Holberton to take an innovative approach to engineering education. We believe that a world-class education should be accessible to everyone, regardless of educational background, gender, race or ability to pay. Forty-four million Americans are digging themselves out from nearly $1.6 trillion in student debt (as reported by CNBC). As the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote last year, 3.8 million California residents alone owe $134.3 billion in student loan debt. Holberton has sought to create a different kind of school that promotes (rather than impedes) social mobility.

This massive debt burdening California residents seeking greater professional opportunities through education has made the technical post-secondary education market ripe for disruption for quite some time. We understand from the news that other first wave innovators in engineering education, like Lambda School, have also been subject to BPPE enforcement activity. 

We respect and value the BPPE’s mission to protect students as consumers in California’s private postsecondary educational institutions. We have been working with the BPPE and responding to their questions throughout the licensing process over the last few years. We look forward to the opportunity to more fully explain our innovative program to them. We have historically had a collaborative relationship with regulators and are eager to fully cooperate with the BPPE so that we can allay their concerns and focus on our core mission of democratizing access to world-class engineering education.

Out of respect for the BPPE’s process, we are limiting our public comment on this matter as we focus on ensuring that Holberton is cooperating fully with the BPPE and continuing to serve the students who depend on us. We look forward to engaging in broader conversations around both innovation in education and financial inclusion.