#131 - Jeremy Rossmann

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Jeremy Rossmann. Jeremy is the co-founder of Make School. Make School is a college for computer science, headquartered in San Francisco. Make School students don't pay until they have a job after graduation. They are part of YC's Winter 2012 batch. You can find Jeremy on Twitter at JeremyRossmann.
All right, here we go.
Okay, Jeremy Rossmann, welcome to the podcast.

**Jeremy Rossmann** (0:29)
Glad to be here.

**Craig Cannon** (0:30)
You are one of the co-founders of Make School. So for those who don't know, what is Make School?

**Jeremy Rossmann** (0:34)
Make School is a new college in San Francisco.
We offer a bachelor's degree program in applied computer science. It's a college in the ways you'd expect a college to be a college. There's dorms and a campus and full-time faculty. We're located near Union Square. What's really special about it is that students don't have to pay tuition unless they get a job. The curriculum is entirely project-based and our faculty come from industry backgrounds, a lot of partnerships with the companies that our students want to work at.
They can get a bachelor's degree in an accelerated time frame. You can actually graduate with a four-year bachelor's in two years if you take our intensive track.

**Craig Cannon** (1:07)
How does that intensive track differ from the normal four-year program? Because when I went to NYU, I was pretty much working all the time on school stuff.
How do you guys get it done in two years?

**Jeremy Rossmann** (1:18)
When you look at how colleges typically structure their academic calendar and even a given week, what happens is a lot of students are basically going to lecture here and there, going to lab here and there with a lot of dead time in between that's self-directed.
We want to be preparing our students for a transition into the workplace, and we've realized that the best way to do that is actually to structure their week like a work week. So students are typically expected to come in at 9.3 in the morning, have what looks a lot like a morning stand up with their individual coach, which will be their coach for the rest of the program, and then spend the day working on their projects, attending certain classes and labs. And when you add up doing the credit math that universities do, when you add up the time that students spend all day, every day in that 40-hour school work week, plus the time they spend outside on homework, which for us is all projects, there's no traditional problem sets and that kind of thing, you're able to award students enough credits that if they take the course load that we recommend and they come in and they're spending 40 hours a week in the school and working outside on their projects, they can get enough credits to get a bachelor's in two years.

**Craig Cannon** (2:17)
And so how are your students trying to differentiate themselves from people coming out of traditional CS programs?

**Jeremy Rossmann** (2:22)
So we are all project-based and we equip our students with these portfolios that basically speak for themselves. So from the very first weeks at Make School, even in your CS theory class, which almost sounds like an oxymoron, but our CS theory classes are project-based and applied, you're gonna be building and launching small projects and then larger products.
And by the time you make your way to being in front of a recruiter, they can see a tremendous amount of evidence of your coding ability, the skills and technologies you're familiar with, your theoretical background, your practical background, because that all is visible in the portfolio that you've built.

**Craig Cannon** (2:57)
So we recorded an episode with Austin from Lambda School.
And in listening to a couple podcasts with you doing research for this episode, you started talking about parents. And it's something I had never really thought about with Austin. And I think perhaps the people who are attracted to Lambda School versus Make School are later in their career maybe thinking about switching up. What is it like for you dealing with the parents of 18 year olds?

**Jeremy Rossmann** (3:24)
At this point, I've come to love it. I'm usually the point person in the team for parents. And it is important to note that our student audience is majority students who would otherwise be in college or who are college age. So when people, you know, we just had a prospective student weekend last weekend, 100 students coming in from all over the country, parents coming in from all over the country. And the questions are, you know, it's Make School versus Georgia Tech, Make School versus Stanford, Make School versus, you know, a community college or a state school, not Make School versus a boot camp. Because our student audience is really looking for, you know, they're going to a college is the question of which college, or they're looking to transfer to a better college.