How to complete the intensive course of School 21 from Sber

Hello!

I suppose you recently learned about the existence of School 21 from Sber and are now studying all the reviews to decide whether to go to the intensive course or not. One writes that the intensive course is the best thing that has ever happened to him. Another curses the day he went to study and now hates Sber, will cut up all his bank cards and will never go to Sber again. You are already in a slight panic, since those few reviews leave more questions than answers.

What should we do?

I understand you very well! I found myself in approximately the same situation.

It would seem that several thousand people have already completed the intensive course, but there are very few reviews. I hope this post about School 21 will clarify a lot for you, and you will be able to make your choice.

Let me start by saying that I learned about School 21 by accident from an advertising integration. As a rule, I skip all such integrations, but this time I watched the entire advertisement. The video said that education is free, that the school has no lectures, no teachers, no strict schedule. Curiosity played its role, and I began to look for more information.

The intensive course (sometimes also called the “pool”), which will last 26 days, is a selection stage before the main training. Based on its results, the School will decide whether or not to enroll you in the main course. Here I will talk exclusively about my experience of taking the intensive course, without touching on the topic of training in the main course. I have no experience in IT, but I have been independently studying the direction of data analysis for a couple of years. Having learned that there is no campus in my city, I thought that there is no point in looking further. After all, you still need to allocate 26 days to take the intensive course (only in person!). And this means that you will have to leave your family for almost a month, who are not used to me being away from home for more than 3 days.

However, the campus was in a city located literally 2 hours away. And the nearest intensive course was on dates that were very acceptable for me. But I doubted again, since the training was supposed to be in the C language, which I had never programmed in my life. And the very first lessons in the C language on Stepik made me think very hard about the advisability of further study.

You haven’t submitted your documents yet, but already at this stage you have a lot of doubts and questions.

And, the most important question is “why should I go to the intensive course?”

In the first days, when communicating with other participants of the intensive, the most popular question was “why did you go to the intensive?” At first glance, there is no difference between these two questions. However, you answer the first question yourself, and you answer the second one to someone else, and the wording of your answer may already be different. And in different wordings, you can find some contradiction and involuntarily ask yourself why it happened this way? Or your interlocutor can ask you a simple question that you did not even think about, and your thought no longer seems so ideal to you.

So, before you decide, formulate for yourself the answer to the question: why do you need to go to the intensive course?

Personally, I formulated it for myself like this. I will go to the intensive course because I…

1. I would never have learned the C language myself. As a second language, I was thinking of learning R or Java, but I didn't even think about C. And why not! In general, if you want to work in IT, then knowledge of 2 or more programming languages ​​gives you +100 to the attractiveness of your resume and +1000 to your knowledge base.

2. I would never work only in the terminal using the command line. The graphical interface was invented a few decades ago. Come on, what command line? As a side note, after the intensive course I now use the terminal and command line at home almost regularly.

3. I want to learn how to work with Git. This skill will not be useless at all if you want to develop in IT. I knew about the coolness of Git even earlier, but after the intensive, if you had previous programming experience, you simply do not understand how you could work without Git before.

4. I want to meet like-minded people, get something from them and share my experience.

5. I want to test my endurance. The intensive lasts 26 days, without days off! And there are exams every Friday.

6. I want to see how I will work in a team. During the intensive course, you will have three group projects. All groups are formed randomly. Each group has its own team leader. Perhaps, it will be you. Yes, yes!

If you haven't applied for admission yet, then you haven't taken the screening tests yet. They are generally not difficult. One is for memory, the second is for logic. But don't think that you will pass these tests in any case. It is a big misconception that they are designed only to filter out bots. Be sure to set aside an hour for the tests so that no one distracts you, be cheerful and calm! After successfully passing the tests, you will have an online meeting where they will tell you everything and answer all your questions in detail. All you have to do is send the originals of the necessary documents directly to the school. And that's it! You will receive the treasured letter that they are waiting for you on the first day of the intensive course.

Congratulations! Your training has already begun.

Yes, it started right now! No need to wait for the day of the intensive course to start, crossing out the days on the calendar. Here I will reveal a great secret a little and say that School 21 is being very disingenuous when it says that you can start studying without any knowledge. Formally, this is true and in my stream there were people who, by the feeling, do not use a computer very often in everyday life. For example, I explained to one peer (intensive course participant) the key combination ctrl+c ctrl+v, because the person had previously only done copy-paste using the right mouse button. But it was obvious how difficult it was for these people to study the material. After the first week of the intensive course, it became noticeable that the number of its participants decreased.

In general, we can safely say that the lower your level of knowledge, the higher the threshold for entering the pace of the intensive learning process!

I highly recommend that you take a short course on programming in C, a course on Git, and a course on Bash before the intensive course begins. By the way, this will be written in the memo from the school itself. This will significantly lower the threshold for entering the process. I'll say more – you will be ready to pass the first exam before you even start taking the intensive course!

Already in the first week of the intensive course you will need to write a program using the recursion algorithm. Perhaps you have heard this word for the first time in your life. There is nothing complicated in the algorithm, it is written in three lines. Rather, the strange word “recursion” causes anxiety.

The main thing is to understand that this is also how to implement it yourself. By the first Friday of the intensive, you should understand how conditional operators, cycles, and especially nested cycles work. Many problems from the intensive are solved using nested cycles, and solving group projects without using them is probably impossible.

There will be many such moments. Be prepared for the fact that every day you will discover something new for yourself. And this new thing needs to be understood, learned and applied in the process of passing the intensive. And so all 26 days.

Well, are you ready? Then let's move on.

Are you now wondering what kind of education we can talk about if no one will teach? As I wrote above, there are no lectures or teachers at school. However, this is not entirely true.

The main principle of teaching at School 21 is the peer-to-peer method, whereby everyone learns from everyone else. At first glance, it is both clear and unclear at the same time.

The intensive program is scheduled for all 26 days. On the first day there is one topic, on the second another, and so on. The complexity of the topics and tasks on it increases every day. You can see what topic will be on a particular day, but the tasks themselves will open directly on the day according to the schedule. You are given 36 hours to solve the tasks of each day, 60 hours for the group project. You are given only the conditions of the task and the requirements for the final result. And that's it…

What should I do? Where should I press? What do they want from me anyway?

These are roughly the thoughts you will have on your first day. And again, panic and the first thoughts that it’s time to leave before it’s too late. But someone will notice that there are video instructions on the portal and share this with everyone. Someone will notice that the repository files contain a problem statement written in Russian and share this with everyone. Someone even knows how to solve the problem, will gather those willing in front of a board with a marker and share their thoughts on it, and someone will share their approach to the solution in the process. In the end, there is Google, YouTube, ChatforgiveGospodiGpt and other resources. And in the end, the majority of the stream solves the problem. Are you having difficulty solving the problem? Go to your neighbor, ask. There is a chance that he has already solved a similar problem. Or another peer is having difficulty with something you have already done or know how to do. Go and give him a hint. This way, you will once again consolidate the material for yourself. Peer-to-peer works!

And this is the simplest example of peer-to-peer. I got the impression that if you give the conditional housewives, who use the computer only to watch TV series and search for a recipe for dinner, the task of writing code for a simple console game and lock them in a cluster with computers with Internet access, with rooms for sleeping, with a walking area, with a gym with a shower, providing them with food, water, tea and other goodies, then in a month they will write the code and will be able to explain every line of it.

In my stream, a lot of peers organized their own lectures, so there were a lot of lectures. It even got to the point that at the same time there were two lectures in different rooms. And these were not necessarily lectures on the topic of the intensive. So peers gave lectures on 3D modeling, information security, team building, online sales, the basics of music, board games, etc. What wasn’t there! The school does not limit you in any way and how you will develop and realize yourself during the intensive days. Moreover, this is even encouraged by assigning tribe points.

Oh, by the way, a tribe tournament. On the first day, the entire stream will be randomly divided into three groups, called tribes (from the English tribe – tribe), with an equal number of people. Each tribe member will earn points, which will go to his personal score and to the overall tribe score. The tribe that has more points at the end of the intensive will win. The best representatives of each tribe will receive merch. You can earn points by checking peer assignments, as well as any activity that at least 5 people come to. The latter is just an incentive for peers to organize events for an unlimited number of people. With the tribe tournament, the school does not allow peers to sit on a level place just solving problems. If you are well versed in a topic, wanted to convey it to the masses, but have always been afraid to speak in front of an audience, feel free to organize a lecture!

Now a little about checking tasks by other peers. Before the intensive, based on the few reviews, I had the impression that tasks would be checked automatically, like in Leetcode, and you would contact peers if the solution did not pass the system's internal tests. And with joint efforts, you would find some solution. However, everything turned out differently.

After you have completed the project tasks and uploaded them to the Git repository, after the deadline, you have the opportunity to sign up for a peer review. To sign up for a review, another peer must open a review slot. You cannot sign up for a specific peer, you only see slots. If several peers have open reviews at this time, you are randomly assigned to one of them. The reviewing peer also does not know in advance who has signed up for it. You will only find out about each other 15 minutes before the review starts. In total, you will need to check with three peers, after which the automatic Verter system will do its review and give the result. The system is very insidious and sometimes unpredictable, it drove some people crazy.

Verter you will literally hate!

To encourage peers to perform reviews, there is a system of earning and spending peer review points or PRP. What is it? Initially, each peer is given 5 PRP, which it can spend to review its projects. A review with one peer costs 1 PRP. You have 1 PRP written off, the peer reviewing you gets your 1 PRP. Since it is necessary to perform 3 reviews, then in order to submit the entire project, you will spend a total of 3 PRP. If you do not review other peers' tasks yourself, then at some point you will not have PRP to review your own projects. Therefore, whether you like it or not, you will have to review other peers' projects.

However, such an economy has its drawbacks, which many of my cohort had to face. Firstly, there were people who only checked other peers, but did not submit their projects for checking, respectively, depriving other peers of the opportunity to earn PRP. As a result, a large number of PRPs were simply out of circulation and even partially burned out, since one peer could earn a maximum of 15 PRPs. Secondly, there is an unfair distribution of PRPs when checking a group project. A group project goes through 2 stages of checking: first by a peer, then by a student from the main stream of training. To pass a check by a peer, each member of the group spends 1 PRP, a total of 3 PRPs are received from the group. But the checking peer receives only 1 PRP, which means that 2 PRPs are simply burned out. Thus, after all the checks of the project, only 2 PRPs are burned out from one group from the microeconomic system. And there are several dozen groups.

Every day the tasks became more complicated, the number of peers submitting for verification decreased, and the number of those wishing to verify, on the contrary, increased. In the third week of the intensive, there was literally an economic crisis in the stream! Some peers went from table to table asking if there was anything to verify, since they themselves did not have PRP to verify their own projects. As a result, there was a “strike”! Spontaneous, but very kind and cheerful. The issue was resolved, but dissatisfaction with the imperfect economy was constantly expressed.

There is also nothing complicated or scary about checking projects. The checker has a checklist, which he uses to check the completion of the task, and a five-point evaluation system. If something is unclear, the peer being checked will gladly (well, almost always) tell and show. During such checks, you communicate with other peers, look at their solutions, take some ideas and techniques for yourself. You show and explain something yourself. In general, it is an interesting process, if you do not approach it formally.

For intensive coding, you need to use C. Not C#, not C++. Specifically C. Since I had previously programmed in Python, programming in C was a pain and a suffering at first. That's no exaggeration! The feeling is about the same as if you had been driving a BMW with an automatic transmission and all the conveniences like ABS, climate control, and other driver's joys all your life, and then you are put behind the wheel of a Lada with a broken manual transmission, a broken suspension, and which doesn't even start the first time. Every time you try to get from point A to point B, you will remember with tears how good it was for you in your BMW.

This is one of the main features of the C language. You involuntarily begin to understand how it works and how to make it work better. When you drive a BMW, you don't care what's going on under the hood. It just drives and drives. But with a Lada, you have to take everything apart, repair it yourself, and study the operating principles. So, in addition to the syntax of the language, you learn how the code interacts with the computer hardware, and you learn to manage memory, preventing memory leaks.

If you didn't give up and still completed all 26 days of the intensive, then you can congratulate yourself! You are a hottie! You will understand this yourself after leaving the last exam. The moment when the intensive officially ends. And it doesn't matter what your successes were, how many projects you have marked in green. What matters is that you have completed this path. Even if at the end of the intensive the school decides not to take you on as a basis, you will still gain a huge experience of soft skills.

But the main secret of the school, namely the selection criteria for basic education, will remain a secret. The school will never reveal the selection criteria to an ordinary student. Rumor has it that there are more than a hundred of them. There are a lot of rumors and all sorts of theories on this topic, reaching the point of absurdity. You can even arrange hit parades of the most incredible assumptions about what criteria are used. The most ridiculous version for me was the conspiracy theory that hidden cameras and microphones are placed on campus that record conversations of peers. And then these conversations are analyzed by the administration when making a decision. Therefore, always praise the administration and the school when communicating with each other!) A joke, of course, but who knows.

Looking at the results of the selection from my stream, there are even more questions about the selection criteria. One of the objective indicators is the progress of learning, which is expressed as a percentage. Initially, all peers are at level zero (lvl 0), progress grows with academic performance. Most remain at level zero, with an average progress of 50-60%, only a few reach the first level (lvl 1). And if one peer has more percentage than another, this does not mean that the first has more chances. Exactly the same logic applies to the number of successfully completed projects. Academic performance is certainly taken into account, but the dependence is not straightforward. Even reaching lvl 1 is not a guarantee that you will be accepted to the foundation. Therefore, you do not need to be equal to others and strive to catch up with them. This will only harm your mental health. The only person you should compare yourself with is yourself!

But I have identified for myself some criteria that, in my opinion, significantly influence the final decision.

Firstly, the same peer-to-peer. You will be told constantly that this is one of the fundamental principles of the school. Literally, this phrase will be very often pronounced at any convenient opportunity. Well, listen to it and act! Actively check the projects of other peers, hand in your projects yourself, even if you have done only one task. Organize lectures, meetings, sabantuys. Don't sit still! I am absolutely sure that even if you pass all exams with 100% result, but at the same time do not hand in your projects for checking, you will have minimal chances of getting into the base. For the most part, negative reviews about the school are written by people who did not understand how they, such smart people, were denied further education. The peer-to-peer principle also operates on the base. If you neglect it, then why will the school need you?

Secondly, campus attendance. Pay attention to this indicator in your profile. Your average time spent on campus should be at least 5 hours a day. It's very simple math. As I wrote above, each of your projects should undergo 3 peer checks. By default, at least half an hour is allocated for one check in the system, which means 1.5 hours a day will be spent checking your projects. Also, at least half an hour is given for each check of other peers' projects. This means that checking three peers will take 1.5 hours. At least 3 hours a day is already spent on checks, and you still need to write your projects, study, listen to lectures, and so on. Therefore, if you work and plan to come to campus in the evening for a few hours, this may not be the best option. Better take a vacation. By the way, you can't sleep on campus.

Thirdly, the position in the tribe tournament. The first five peers according to the results of the tribe tournament have the highest chances of getting into the main team. If according to the results of 1.5 – 2 weeks you see that in your tribe you are in the second half of the list according to the rating, take immediate measures! What measures – read above.

In conclusion, I will say that it was a very interesting and positive experience. I was skeptical before the start, but on the last day it was very sad to say goodbye to school and a lot of new acquaintances. If you have ever gone to a summer camp, you understand these feelings when you are sad on the day of arrival and on the day of departure. And it was very nice for me to experience these feelings again after many years since childhood.

We really all became very close friends, both with each other and with the volunteers and the school administration. Now we meet periodically and actively maintain relationships.

Believe me, no matter how introverted you are, you will definitely find a kindred spirit or even a whole pleasant company for you. The composition of the intensive is very diverse in all respects. There are no restrictions on age (except for the minimum age of 18), social status, knowledge, and so on. A peer can be a student, a director of a large company, a successful business coach, a mother of many children, a retired colonel, a mechanic at a plant. The list is endless. For the duration of the intensive, you become one big team solving a common problem. And how friendly and united your team will be is up to you to decide.

After all, you too can be a feast!

Good luck!