DISTRICT’s Coding School Ribbon Cut; Data Academy Coming Next

A local outpost of a Silicon Valley-founded coding school celebrated its official ribbon-cutting in Fair Haven, and is already two cohorts in to its tuition-free training of the state’s next generation of computer scientists.

The celebration took place Monday afternoon at the DISTRICT tech hub at 470 James St., where dozens of local and state politicians, business execs, and techies heralded the grand opening of the Holberton School New Haven. 

A nonprofit offshoot of a San Francisco-based software engineering academy, the local Holberton School began classes for its first group of roughly 25 students in January. The school began its second 25-student cohort in June.

Holberton School New Haven Director Nadine Krause said that the school doesn’t have traditional classes or teachers, but rather focuses on project-based peer learning that encourages a practical understanding of how to code.

“It essentially exists to make sure that we have enough qualified and diverse talent for the tech sector,” Krause said during the ribbon-cutting event.

The school doesn’t charge tuition. It instead requires students to pay 17 percent of their base income for three and a half years after they graduate and land a job to cover the cost of their education.

“We accept people based on their potential and their motivation alone,” she said. No computer science background required. Fifty-four percent of students in the first two cohorts are from the Greater New Haven Area, she said. Sixty-eight percent are students of color. And 20 percent are women.

David Salinas, the co-founder of DISTRICT who wooed Holberton to set up a campus in New Haven in September, stressed the importance of training local computer scientists and software engineers to fill the thousands of job openings Connecticut currently has in those fields.

“Infrastructure in a state is important for econ development,” he said. ​“Quality of life, cost of living is important for economic development. But talent by and large is what people r chasing today. They’re going down to different states, different cities, trying to find talent. We have a very smart and educated workforce here in Connecticut. We need to get them trained. We need to get them educated in the right stuff now. Software engineering is the right stuff. That’s the future. That’s how we will ​‘future proof’ the economy.”

One of those future computer engineers is Mohameth Seck, a 22-year-old West Haven native and child of Senegalese immigrants who first discovered his love for coding while a student at the University of Hartford.

“I always looked at engineers and scientists as the ones having all the fun,” he said Monday. ​“Sending rockets into space, exploring the sea.”

While studying in the capital city, he switched his major from electrical engineering to computer engineering, but felt unsatisfied with how little of his education was directed towards the practical application of coding in a potential workplace. California coding boot camps were too expensive for him to attend, he said, and New York City-based training programs were too long of a daily commute from West Haven.

Then his best friend sent him a New Haven Register notice about Holberton accepting applications, and he was stunned. A school like this should be in Boston or New York or Hartford, he said. ​“Instead, it was 10 or 15 minutes away from my house.” He applied and got accepted into the first cohort in January.

“I’ve always wanted to be an innovator, a creator, an inventor,” he said. ​“Before Holberton, I didn’t feel like I was getting any closer to being the engineer I wanted to be. Here, I feel like I already am.

Hiram Velez, a 31-year-old Waterbury native who commutes to Holberton every weekday from his home near Worcester, Mass., said he majored in biology in college, but couldn’t land any jobs in the field after graduation. He spent some time working as a software engineering doing ​“shell programming,” building off of others’ existing code. ​“I fell short in how to build my own work,” he said.

At Holberton, he feels like he’s learning how to do exactly that. Only two weeks into his studies as part of the second cohort, he said the intensive, hands-on, group-level instruction in C programming has left his head aching at points. But he feels like he understands computer science better than he did at any other level of his education.

“It’s the first time I feel that this level of stress has been worth it,” he said.

Adam Sedki, a 25-year-old Milford resident and member of the January cohort, said he used to attend Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) leaving to attend Holberton.

“I got bogged down in all the general classes,” he said. He knew he wanted to learn and work in the field of software engineering, hopefully in the realm of augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR). Holberton, he said, has allowed him to focus on developing the skills he needs to succeed in the field he knows he wants to be in.

Click above to watch the full press conference and ribbon cutting.

U Of Next

Just down the hall from Holberton’s class space in the DISTRCT, A.M. Bhatt and Paul Myott are building out their own education hub for 21st century skills with their company U of Next.

Bhatt, the son of Indian immigrants who grew up in Morris Cove and has spent decades working in corporate leadership development, said his new DISTRICT-based company is about to launch on July 9 a new Data Academy. Or, as he prefers to call it, a ​“decision-making academy.”

The three-week program, open to up to 20 students in their late teens and early 20s, will provide a foundational education in data literacy.

The need for data-savvy marketing and sales and human resources employees is paramount in an Internet age saturated in information, he said. Although workers and managers are constantly surrounded by data about their companies and their clients and the fields they work in, he said, few have a solid understanding of which data is useful, how to separate the chaff from the wheat, and then how to apply that data towards the success of their business.

Bhatt compared the common 21-century workplace problem to when someone feels a pain in his or her calf, and goes to the Internet to try to find out what’s causing that pain and how to address it. Most people have ​“zero understanding of how to curate, sort, organize, and assess” the validity and utility of the data they find themselves swimming in in such situations he said.

The academy that U of Next is launching, as a summer intensive in July and then as a 13-week program starting this fall, will educate students on how to do just that.

One key principle for navigating data? ​“Trust no information until you clearly understand its source and the schema it has gone through.”

The summer class costs $500 to attend, he said, and the 13-week program will be closer to $5,000.

All of the classes take place in person at U of Next’s DISTRICT offices, he said. There are no online training components.

“Training is transactional,” he said. ​“It doesn’t require a relationship. Education requires community.”