I Got Into 42 Paris

I just found out I was accepted to 42 Paris.

42 is a tuition-free software engineering school in Paris founded by Xavier Niel. There are no teachers, no classes, no diplomas in the conventional sense. You learn by doing projects, graded by other students. To get in, you have to survive the Piscine.

The Piscine is a month-long selection competition. You move in, work on C programming exercises from morning to midnight, get evaluated daily by peers, and at the end the school picks who continues. It is not a test of prior knowledge. It is a test of how fast you learn under pressure with very little guidance.

I spent the month not knowing if I was doing well. There are no grades during the Piscine, no ranking, no feedback from the school. You submit your work, other students evaluate it, and you wait. The selection criteria are not published. You have no idea where you stand.

That uncertainty was the most useful part. I had to keep working without external validation, which is the condition under which most real work happens anyway.

What the month forced me to do:

• Read documentation instead of waiting for explanations
• Ask peers for code review instead of expecting a teacher to catch my mistakes
• Keep submitting even when I was not sure the solution was right
• Rebuild completely when a peer evaluation showed I had misunderstood the problem

Evaluation had two layers. Peers reviewed your code directly. But there was also the moulinette: an automated system that compiled and ran your code against test cases without telling you what the tests were. You submitted, it returned pass or fail, nothing more. You had to infer what you had missed from the output alone. That second layer was harder to game and harder to ignore.

There was a third system called Megatron. At some point during the Piscine you had to name which candidates you recommended for admission. The school used those nominations to rank candidates, probably something close to PageRank: being recommended by someone who is themselves highly recommended counts for more. You could not know your own score. You could only decide who you genuinely thought deserved a place.

I learned more C in that month than I had in any formal course. Not because the material was better, but because the stakes were real and the feedback was immediate. Every day you either passed the exercise or you did not. That is a different kind of learning than reading about something you might one day be tested on.

The acceptance email arrived this morning at 12:46 AM. I start in September.

I also made many friends. A month of working side by side until midnight, evaluating each other's code, and competing for the same spots turns strangers into people you actually know.