Holberton School

Holberton School offers two-year, full-stack software engineering training in San Francisco, CA; New Haven, CT; Bogota, Medellin, and Cali, Colombia; and Tunis, Tunisia.
Holberton has no formal teachers or courses. Holberton’s education is instead delivered through a project-based learning curriculum, where instead of passively learning through lecture and repetition, students learn hands-on through increasingly difficult coding projects.
Students at Holberton also practice peer learning, where they learn to cooperatively work through and support each other through their learning process. With this project-based and peer learning curriculum, Holberton students unleash their creativity and naturally learn how to work as a team to solve practical challenges. Holberton’s curriculum, which helps students become experienced and capable full-stack engineers, also requires no previous programming experience.
The Holberton aims to prepare students not only for a job but for a career in software engineering. The in-person program provides a backdrop for a collaborative working experience, and highlights technical and professional skills like problem-solving and working in teams.
Holberton School’s program starts with a nine month Foundations program that helps students build the base of their education or career. After Foundations, students may specialize with a specialization like AR/VR or machine learning, or may pursue the Career Track, where they are given resume help, interview prep, seminars, and similar training to help them secure their first software engineering job. Holberton students have been hired by companies like Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, Nvidia, Pinterest, Cisco, and IBM.
Holberton education start with the Foundations program:
– A 9-month On-Site Intensive, which covers Python, Object Oriented Programming, databases, Front-end development, Javascript, HTML/CSS, JQuery, as well as System-engineering, DevOps and more.
After Foundations, Holberton offers the following specializations:
– Machine learning, which covers the fundamentals of neural networks, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, Tensorflow and Keras frameworks, language and visual processing, SQL and NOSQL databases and how to scrape and label datasets while avoiding human biases.
– AR/VR, which helps students learn C# fundamentals and algorithms, Unity, asset management, behavior scripting, textures and material usage, AR/VR friendly UI development, animation, audio, and multiplatform publishing. This curriculum was developed in partnership with Unity, the leading AR/VR development platform.
-Full-Stack Web Development, available in January 2020, will help web-oriented students deep dive into the most used technologies in web development. Students will be trained in ReactJS, VueJS, AngularJS, SASS, responsive design, accessibility, Rails, Go, NodeJS, NoSQL, MySQL advanced, Elasticsearch, Redis, OAuth, and more.
– Low Level & Algorithms, which will build upon the training in the Foundations program, will help students dive even deeper into C, as well as Linux kernel (signal, thread, file stream, IPC, ELF, etc.), advanced trees, graph, pathfinding, cryptography, block mining, blockchain, and more.
– Career Track, which is for students who want to pursue a more aggressive approach to securing their first job in their new career. Students will be trained in resume preparation, interview techniques, networking techniques, salary negotiation, and similar business-critical skills that will help students find their first job opportunities.
Holberton School is fully “community-driven”. This means:
Holberton students can take advantage of presentations, talks, keynotes and fireside chats with mentors and industry leaders on topics from infosec to chaos engineering and in soft skills like management of imposter syndrome and networking techniques.
Holberton operates on a deferred tuition model with income-based repayment that is time capped, repayment amount capped, and also has an income floor on where no payments are made until a minimum income is met.
Holberton’s application process was built from scratch to help find the ideal candidates for our learning style. Holberton’s automated and blind application process removes unconscious bias and identifies motivated, passionate, intuitive, creative learners. You do not need to have prior technical or programming experience to apply; instead, Holberton wants to see what you can learn throughout the process. The application also serves as a great introduction to project-based learning – a key foundation in Holberton’s program. At the end of Holberton’s application process, students will code and deploy a website with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, coded in emacs, to an apache web server.