Ahsan already had a software engineering degree when he came to 42 Wolfsburg. What he didn't have was a way into German tech. He found one at the tuition-free coding school: the 42 Piscine, a lot of learning from his peers, and a company project presented on campus that led to a software engineering internship at the fashion retailer New Yorker in Braunschweig. The internship became a permanent job as a junior software developer.
a degree that opened no doors.
Ahsan studied software engineering at UET Taxila in Pakistan. The bachelor's gave him a solid grounding in the theory.
Then he moved to Germany, and the theory had to wait. While he looked for a way into work, he lived in asylum accommodation. A degree from abroad doesn't always open doors in Germany, and his didn't.
why a graduate did the 42 piscine.
An Instagram advert for 42 Wolfsburg caught his eye. What hooked him was the model: no teachers, no lectures, no tuition fees, and everything learned by building it.
He already had a degree, which would have been a perfectly good reason to scroll past. He signed up for the 42 Piscine anyway. It's the intensive selection period every 42 student goes through before the core curriculum, made of projects, exams and evaluations, and solved with the people around you.
no lecturers, plenty of peers.
Ahsan started out as an introverted student. 42 doesn't leave much room for that. There's no lecturer to ask, so you ask the person next to you. Every finished project is checked by other students in a peer evaluation, where you explain your code out loud and defend it.
His example is get_next_line, an early project where you write a C function that reads a file one line at a time. It sounds simple until you try it. Working through it with other students was where the communication, the teamwork and the problem solving came in.
By the end, the quiet student had become someone who solves hard problems with other people rather than on his own.
from a campus project to new yorker.
The way into a job came through the campus. A company project presented at 42 Wolfsburg led to a software engineering internship at New Yorker, the fashion retailer headquartered in Braunschweig.
There he worked on enterprise systems, a long way in scale from a student project. His mentor, Thomas Werner, explained how the company's structures fit together with the metaphor of a city. He also introduced Ahsan to ArchiMate, a modelling language for mapping how an organisation's business, applications and technology connect.
The internship went well enough to turn into a permanent job, and Ahsan joined New Yorker as a junior software developer.
degree plus 42.
Ahsan's route makes a good case that a degree and 42 aren't either-or. The degree gave him the theory. 42 gave him the practice, and the skill that ties the two together: learning how to learn.
If you have a degree that isn't opening doors, or no degree at all, the 42 Piscine is where Ahsan started. He isn't the only one who found us through an advert, either. Pooneh's story starts the same way and ends at Delivery Hero.
Ahsan