Update on progress in times of retrogression

8 min readApr 5, 2022

One highlight of the past few months has been our students trip to the gorgeous city of Amsterdam, during which they visited their peers at CODAM (42 Amsterdam).

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now”
- W.H. Murray (1951) “The Scottish Himalayan Expedition”

Table of Contents
- Donation Campaign for Ukrainian refugees and Russian Dissidents
- Relocation Office aka WolfsDen
- Operations
- Pedagogy Updates
- Students
- International Women’s Day
- Events
- SEA:ME
- Partnerships & Fellowships
- 42 Berlin
- 42 in Media

It seems that spring (‘the time of plans and projects’ as Leo Tolstoy once wrote) has finally arrived, but, sadly, the days of darkness are still not behind us. We are now living not only under the shadow of a global pandemic but also under that of a devastating war.

Donation Campaign for Ukrainian refugees and Russian Dissidents
Yes, the cruel and senseless war in Ukraine has shocked us all, but that shock should by no means paralyze us. On the contrary, in the wake of these overlapping crises, we rattle you and the whole 42 Wolfsburg & Berlin multistakeholder community to stay strong in promoting education as a core element of peace, stand together for radical inclusion, embrace our responsibility to co-create our free world and become active in welcoming refugees and dissidents.

Allow us to elaborate on the last point. We are raising funds in order to offer Ukrainian refugees as well as Russian dissidents scholarships & financial support to cover their living expenses while studying at 42 Wolfsburg. To support this initiative, please donate @ BetterPlace.

Relocation Office aka WolfsDen

To support our international community of students in relocating to Wolfsburg, we have established the WolfsDen Relocation Office. Starting with listing tips and tricks for their accommodation search and actual move to tackling questions arising during your first days in Wolfsburg.

In merely 6 weeks the WolfsDen supported 33 people in finding long-term accommodation and consulted 67 more by answering their questions on various topics.
In addition, WolfsDen has created an extensive database with guidelines on how to get accommodation, how to navigate Germany’s bureaucratic jungle, and how to find financing opportunities, to ensure a worry-free student life in Wolfsburg.
The Relocation Office informs as well on the latest important news like Covid Regulations, weather reports relevant for your travel to Wolfsburg and actively supports refugees by ensuring a safe stay, assistance with legal processes, translation, and coordination of volunteers and donations.

Operations

Ongoing changes in the governmental COVID restrictions enabled us to open 100% of our computer capacities for students. With that, more life came into the school 🎉
However, we continue to have the safety and well-being of students & staff a number 1 priority and have appropriate measures in place.
About 170 students have permanent access to the school

Pedagogy Updates

Jan, our cherished Pedagogy Lead, will be stepping down from his full-time commitment starting July, but will continue to work with us, supporting our new Pedagogy Lead, Guillaume Calvi.
In the interest of optimizing our Piscines, we made several crucial upgrades, adding some new projects on communication, peer-evaluation, goals & planning, tribe formation, and self-reflection.
We kicked off our Winter Piscine on January 30th with 169 Pisciners, out of whom we ended up selecting 73 to join us as students. 20.5% of those are coming from Gender Minority Groups.
On March 14th, we started our Spring Piscine with 115 Pisciners, including 8 Ukrainian refugees.

Celebrating the start of the Winter Piscine with a bang 🎉

Students

Currently, we have 233 students enrolled.
The next KickOff is scheduled for April 25th.
About 70 students are coming regularly onsite.
We decided to adopt the Advanced Curriculum structure from CODAM for the specialization.
5 Tracks will be offered on Web & Mobile Development, Operating Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Security, Graphics & Video Games.
1 specific WOB/BER Track is developed on SEA:ME (Software Engineering in Automotive & Mobility Ecosystems)
As the COVID regulations go down and regular students will have to come onsite soon, we are starting a Remote Study Trial 2.0 on June 1st to allow students that cannot come to Wolfsburg to continue their studies.
42 Sponsored Counseling started with a 3 month trial.

Furthermore, we have introduced our New Core Scholarship Program. Its purpose is to enable students to finish the core curriculum onsite in 12 months. We expect to be able to support approx. 10% of our students.

International Women’s Day

On March 8th, we celebrated the International Women’s Day with a series of special events, all hosted by female members of our community. Our events were attended by 238 guests, both virtually and physically. It was deeply moving for all of us to see everyone coming together for the paramount cause of empowering and inspiring women to join the world of tech.

In the evening we hosted a Women Only Online Introduction.
Other events included a Web-Scraper workshop led by Carys Williams, a FabLab live session with participants all over Europe watching as we printed t-shirts and laser cut tokens as a commemoration for the day.

We finished the day with an insightful talk by 42 Paris alumna Finola Cahill. You can watch a recording of her talk here.
Being happy with the outcome of these events, our team has decided to continue hosting women-only workshops and open days, while also supporting women who study at 42 through mentors and female 42 fellows.

Events

After a long dry spell, we finally are allowed to have on-site events again and celebrated with a mix of social events as well as knowledge sharing sessions from our Fellows:

20 January: Social Skills Knowledge Sharing by Mike Hoffmann on Intercultural Competencies in the Workplace
15 February: Cyrill Stachniss joined us for a Knowledge Sharing Session focused on New Frontiers in Robotics & AI.
25 February: Karneval at School!
17 March: Grill and Chill of 2022 with Bratwursts, burgers, chips, salad, cheese, and some beer ;)
On March 24th, our fellow Stephan Schalow joined us for Knowledge Sharing session, entitled ‘The First 100 Days in Your New IT Job’
We’re currently planning our first EU Holiday, which will include an entire week of camping in the Spanish sunshine at Platja d’Aro, 100km from Barcelona. We have a dedicated Discord Server here: https://discord.gg/5UbVGugEmr where you can join in!

SEA:ME

The new SEA:ME Medium Article describes the progress of developing our SEA:ME (Software Engineering Automotive & Mobility Ecosystems) specialization curriculum.
Thanks to Volkswagen Korea, an important partnership has been signed for a student exchange program between the Kookmin University in Korea and 42 Wolfsburg in the context of our SEA:ME curriculum. With this in place, we will be welcoming Automotive Engineering students and professors from Korea to study and further develop SEA:ME.
The first batch of KMU students will be joining us in July to run a pilot test program on SEA:ME Embedded Systems module projects.

Partnerships & Fellowships

From network to ecosystem — we are on track to become a platform for people-driven open innovation:

Expansion of the Fellow Network: Already 150+ contributors participate in the 42 Fellowship Program. Until the end of the year we plan to on-board 50+ new Fellows for WOB and initiate a new network for BER. Please refer candidates(software developers, IT manager, tech specialists) using this form.
Knowledge Sharing sessions: Activities by Fellows are now being led by our Student Ambassadors. Outstanding are initiatives with (e.g.) Porsche, VMware, and Microsoft. Currently, Fellows and Ambassadors plan 10+ Knowledge Sharing sessions during the next few months. Get your proposal in here.
Internships: The first 100+ students in WOB will graduate from the 42 Core Curriculum this year and now look for internships. Employers can submit vacancies here or schedule a call with Tobias for additional details on how to recruit at 42 Wolfsburg.
Save the date: The next Fellow Gathering will take place on June 2, 2022 in WOB. Request an invite here.

42 Berlin

Lights, camera, action! Berlin’s latest show is just starting. We are building a spaceship on the location of the old Geyer-Werke film factory in Neukölln at Harzerstr 42. From here, hitchhikers from all over the world will be able to travel through the digital universe.

Let’s not spoil too much and keep a few surprises for our grand opening on 1st December 2022. Our spaceship will have three decks and holds room for over 200 workstations.
The crew currently running the spaceship consists of: Dan Hadley — Pedagogy, Viola Sommer — Operations, Denis Özdemir — Technology, Lara Render — Special Projects, Jonas Hagedorn — Pedagogy, Christopher Hardt — IT Management, Max Senges — CEO, Headmaster
However, we are still missing a person to help us guide this spaceship. Do you know anybody in marketing who would be a good fit for this team? Please share this job description with your network. The position is absolutely crucial to recruiting the stars of the show: the students.
To cast the stars, we will run three Piscines this year. The first one will start on the 20th June. It’s a tight timeline but the script for the coming months is ready. The future will be written by the next generation of software engineers — 101010.