My 42Paris Piscine Summary

[Chloezhu010]

Intro

Finally, the 4 week piscine at 42 Paris is over. I can hardly imagine I can write so many functions + 2 weekend rush projects in 4 weeks, from the very basics of using shell, to recreate functions in C, and create my own header files. (https://github.com/Chloezhu010/42Paris/tree/main)

What's 42 and pisicine

In short, 42 is a coding school with no course, no professor, no class, and completely free. It's purely project based and students learn coding by solving the project problem set. 42 has campuses in 31 countries now, in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Australia. (https://42.fr/en/homepage/)
Piscine (the swimming pool) is an 1-month selection process to enter 42. Anyone with any background can sign up for the 42 piscine, and join the intensive 1-month learning from the very basics of C language. (https://42.fr/en/admissions/42-piscine/)

My 1-month experience at 42 paris

Really diverse pool of pisciners

I've seen people from 18 to over 60-year-old come to school and code with me. While at 42 Paris campus, mostly students are french, but there are also many students from other European countries, US, China, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Brazil, Bolivia, India etc.

There are people who have already coded before in other languages, eg. java, python, javascript etc., and people who have literally 0 coding background, people who just graduated from high school, and who already worked in the tech industry, who is a chef/ business analyst/ fiber technician etc., people who just have 2 little kids, and who already have grandchildren.

Among almost 500 pisciners, female pisciners sare around 25%(?) this time. There are also dedicated check-in and registration slots just for female participants.

Intensive coding routine

I ended up spending on average 8h per day coding, incl. weekends (there are group projects during weekends, which is way harder and complex than normal personal projects and takes a lot of time to solve). There are lots of pisciners who are more aggressive, spending 10h / 15h+ per day at school coding and sleeping in the school dorm.

Everyone can have their own pace of learning. Some comes early in the morning then leave in the evening, others come in the afternoon and code through midnight, it's all by your choice. Highly not recommend work while particpating the piscine. Apart from code, eat, and sleep, it's really difficult to allocate more energy to other things during the 4 weeks.

Learning from C language

The piscine start with a little bit of Shell, then straight to C. Most of the training/ learning during piscine is to recreate the functions of C, eg. putchar, putnbr, strlen, strcmp, strcat, atoi, strdup etc., and towards later stage some modules to combine simple functions together, eg. ft_strjoin, ft_split, ft_convert_base, ft_atoi_base. No IDE is allowed, just Vim. Vim, shell and man become my best friends lol
No AI tool is allowed during the piscine, which is to encourage us to go through the pain and struggle, learn from discussion with peers, and code one line by another ourselves.

The methodology of self learning, peer learning, and peer evaluation

I found more than half of the skill I learned during psicine is from peer learning and peer evaluation. To validate each personal project, everyone would need to earn points through checking, testing & debugging peers' coding project. A lot of the time, I find mistakes in my own code when testing others, or deepen my understanding of the code when debugging peers' mistakes, learn a new way of solving the problem, or spot some cool techniques during the evaluation.
Through peer evaluation, I also come to know a lot of people, their stories behind 42 and make friends and geniue connection beyond 42. Funny enough, my french is progressing a lot during the piscine. Every day, I feel I'm practicing 3 languages: read in English, speak in French, and code in C.

The final selection of the piscine

Each Friday, there is a 4h onsite no-wifi exam from 16h to 20h, and the final exam is 8h from 10h to 18h. I didn't manage to register the 1st, took the 2nd, had to skip the 3rd one, then took the final exam. It is my first time taking an 8h final exam ... Man it's exhausting but I did it.
The selection criteria is not totally transparent, but in general it's a mix of personal project level, exam grades progression, weekly peer voting, login time, participation in group project and comments from the tutor etc. Having high grades in personal projects and in each exam doesn't necessarily guarantee entrance to 42. People who just focus on personal enhancement and don't bother to help others or work on group projects would probably not be selected...

Outro

It's indeed a one-of-a-kind month. Feels like coding gradually turns into an everyday routine and the terminal becomes so familiar. 42 is almost what I'm looking for from a school/ an education system. It's completely free, open to everyone who are motivated and willing to learn, no matter of their background, nationality, gender, age, financial income etc. It's learning by doing, by helping others and collaborating together. Feel it can be a model for other alternative education in many areas.