That’s true
Ruben Ogbonna:
There are some students who are better suited or have an interest in further exploring their curiosity in the software engineering space, and our capstone is like our in-house apprenticeship. It could be on deployment, infrastructure, it could be product design. But at the end of that three-month capstone project, our students are dealing with… have a project that demonstrates their ability to deal with concepts that would only be asked of someone in the field to contend with once they get their first promotion, technologies that typically only software engineer [inaudible ] or early mid-level engineers get exposure to.
That is true
Ruben Ogbonna:
So we’ve had students who have built their own load balancers, or students who built their own component libraries. And so what we find is that when our students are able to take those projects into the interview process, they’re able to speak the language of their interviewer and demonstrate a level of experience that often isn’t seen with fresh college grads or bootcamp grads.
Todd Zipper:
So I know you’re breaking the model, revising the model in a lot of different ways, https://personal-loans-lender.com/payday-loans-mi/ maybe reforming the model is a better term. Also, in the admissions process. I don’t think you accept ask for SATs or ACT scores or GPAs, but yet these individuals have to be at the highest level of performance to get these jobs which you’re talking about here. How do you think about the admissions process? What do you do? I’m sure it’s rigorous, I’d love to understand that a little bit better.
That is true
Ruben Ogbonna:
Yeah. 100%. I’m I’m going to take the long way around to that answer, because you said something that was really thoughtful, that they have to be at the highest level of performance in order to compete for these jobs. I think what we see in terms of growth, from day zero to the end of our program, is greater than what exists at the traditional college, but even more so, than the most selective in elite colleges. Our country’s top colleges do a great job of accepting students who have the resources and academic background that would lead you to believe that they’re going to be very successful, no matter what intervention you apply between ages 18 and 22.
That is true
Ruben Ogbonna:
For us, we’re unapologetic about our core belief, which is that great teaching really, really matters. Excellent pedagogy matters, it makes a difference. It made all the difference in the world when they were 14, 15, and 16. But for some reason, when they turn 18 and they go off to college, we have a society… as a society, that has accepted that it’s okay for them to sit in a room with 200 other 18-year-olds and listen to one person reading from a legal pad. And then we wonder why don’t make the type of academic gains necessary to be competitive for incredible jobs.
That is true
Ruben Ogbonna:
We push our students, we push the hell out of our students, and we push our instructors, so they know how to push our students and support them at the same time. And so most Marcy Lab School students come in having little to no coding experience at all. And then by the time they graduate, they’re competing in the interview process with students who went to schools like Cornell and Dartmouth and Yale and UVA and Rutgers, cetera. Someone might hear that and say, “Well, that’s impossible. You’re selling me something.”
