I’m a big fan of Recurse Center (formerly known as Hacker School**), a free educational retreat for programmers. RC’s commitment to Computer Science education and diversity therein is nothing short of impressive, and they officially announced today an exciting new experimental program.
“RC Start” will provide beginning programmers with free one-on-one mentorships with an RC Retreat alum.
Recurse Center has made the headlines a few times in the past. I’ve talking with them about their grants for women in 2012 (the Etsy Hacker School Grants) and again in 2014 for expanding the grants to all Computer Science minorities (women, African Americans, non-white Hispanics, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders).
What Recurse Center is trying to accomplish with this new program is a little different, though. The retreat usually attracts people already committed to programming, whereas RC Start will aim to provide resources for beginners. You’ll presumably have already worked through your fair share of coding tutorials and books and whatnot, but you may wonder “what now?” or “why is none of this working?!”
The mentorships will consist of three 45-minute one-on-one sessions, either online or in person, and what gets covered is entirely up to you. You can ask questions, seek advice, request code reviews, and/or set goals for your future.
RC Start is a limited-time offer, for now. The Recurse Center is setting up this program as an experiment and will judge in a couple of months whether to pursue it in the future based on demand and feedback. So if you’re interested, apply now!
**If you’re curious about the name change from Hacker School to Recurse Center, it’s a pretty interesting story in itself. The summary is that it turns out people have somewhat of a negative connotation attached to Hacker, and Hacker School wasn’t really a school in the traditional (with curriculums and such). Recurse Center it is, then!