42

Intensive Basic Training is an immersive coding experience. It's the admissions process for 42 Silicon Valley. This 28-day intensive session is designed to push students, create a learning community, and develop basic coding skills. Every day, 7 days a week, students must complete coding challenges and exercises. They are released at 8:42am daily and are due at 11:42pm. There are no teachers, courses, or classes. Students don't attend lectures. Instead, you code. Our program is designed to reflect the real-world life of a software engineer: you have projects, you work individually and in teams, and your superiors don't necessarily know the answer to your question. Instead, you use the people around you and the resources available on the internet to figure out, test, and improve solutions. Many students say Basic Training was a great life experience. Other say they learned more in 1 week of Basic Training than they did in 4 years of college. The goal of Intensive Basic Training is to prepare you for 42, provide an opportunity to students to see if you like to code and thus a career as a software engineer, and to serve as the admissions process for the school. We like using C. It is not a bootcamp and do not expect to get a job at the end. This is just the beginning :) 42 Silicon Valley runs 4-8 Basic Training sessions per year. They are all free.

Students who are selected to enroll in the 42 program can complete the program requirements over a period of 3 to 5 years, at their own pace.

The 42 program is a self-paced program that ranges from 1-5 years for completion. Students at 42 Silicon Valley tend to spend 7-15 months at 42 before finding jobs or gaining internships and thus they tend to leave before finishing level 21. Students at the Paris campus tend to stay longer but don't live on campus. 42 trains you for the digital world. You need 21st-century skills and to be prepared for the workplace today, so we've brought the workplace inside a school. 42 has no teachers, courses, or classes, because the workplace doesn't have them. Instead, we use project-based and problem-based learning along with peer-correction (like code review) to foster a tight-knit learning environment. Students learn soft skills, creativity, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and how to work in teams. They have to give and receive correction, defend their code, and adhere to Norms. At 42 students control what they learn, when they learn, and how they learn. Our system is gamified through experience points, levels, and correction points. Our curriculum is skills or mastery-based, meaning you don't advance to the next level until you've displayed mastery of the skills for the level that you're on. Your software has to work and if it doesn't, you have to go back and fix it, because that's what you do in the real world. Admissions is based on merit: we don't ask for GPAs, test scores, degrees, essays, or references. You have to survive Intensive Basic Training which is a 28-day intensive coding challenge that takes place on campus. It's an intensive learning process with 12-15 hour days, but you don't need to have any priori coding experience to do well. 99% of students level 10 or above are employed or interning who want to have a job - some want to pursue more levels. We do not guarantee employment and we do not do job placement because 42 is about training for the real world, and in the real world, you need to learn the art of the job application process. However, 42 has strong relationships with employers and companies in the area and already has internship and hiring programs with companies specifically for 42 students. We do not provide visas and do not provide any assistance with visas. We count graduation as students who finish level 21 - only students are counted as alumni whenever they get employed or intern, so we have alumni before we have graduates.