Before the Piscine

This is where it all begins: The Piscine.

What's the Piscine?

42 Silicon Valley works like this: Before becoming a student, you must go through a one month long 'Bootcamp' of sorts called the Piscine. It's an application tryout to see if you have what they're looking for to be accepted as a student. While it's currently unknown 100% exactly what they want in a student, there are some traits that people who are accepted all have.

The Piscine, or 'swimming pool' in French, is all about hands-on programming. It's a small glimpse of how most learning and activities will be done at 42 but highly accelerated. The style of learning relies on self-teaching and peer-to-peer teaching. There are no teachers, courses, or classes: it's all self-paced. This is extremely different than what almost everyone has experienced before.

To give an example of an average day in the Piscine: Wake up, look at the exercises that are assigned for that day, then attempt them. If you don't know how to do something, you have to get out of your comfort zone. Ask the person on your left, your right. Neither of them knows? Time to start googling for more information. Share, collaborate, and improve, that's the 42 experience. Like its namesake swimming pool, being thrown in without knowing how to swim (code), you'll struggle and feel uncomfortable. That's a good thing because getting outside your comfort zone, understanding how to fail, and striving to get past those failures and move on is a very important part of life that helps with character development.

That's a lot of iMacs...

Piscine material

Some people have said that 'you can't prepare for the Piscine'. I don't quite agree with that, especially since the Piscine curriculum is freely available on the internet if you know where to look. So you'll know exactly what to expect, even with the updated material. There are 4 main things you can prepare for which are what the Piscine will ask of you to learn anyways. They are:

• Command-line interface. Unix commands.
• Text editor. Vim or Emacs.
• Git. Version control.
• C. Main programming language.

The next steps

How you prepare for the Piscine is up to you. You can go in blind, you can prep a little or you can just start learning now to ease the burden later on. I've compiled a list of learning material as a starter, you don't have to follow it, you can use any material you want. These are just what I've found to be somewhat useful or have heard are okay resources. Whatever you choose, no amount of preparation can prepare for the amount of work required while at the Piscine. Even if you know most or everything covered, you still have to put in the work!

The founder, Xavier Niel at 42 Paris.