Supermodel Karlie Kloss — former Victoria’s Secret Angel, future NYU student, the rare cultural figure to have a haircut named after her — is partnering with the Flatiron School to provide scholarships for 20 girls to attend a two-week coding class this summer. The “Kode with Karlie” scholarships will cover full tuition for Flatiron Pre-College Academy’s Introduction to Software Engineering course.
Kloss is sponsoring the scholarships, which cost $2,000 per student, and will also be on the panel of judges selecting the winners; applications consist of a few short written questions and a video. You can scope out the publicly posted submissions on YouTube under the #KodeWithKarlie hashtag. There is no academic transcript or prior coding experience required.
Rebekah Rombom, vice president of business development, heads up Flatiron’s partnerships with external organizations. (Previous partners include Spotify, which sponsored a scholarship for adult women last year that included a paid internship at Spotify for one of the scholarship recipients.) Kloss approached Flatiron about the scholarship, Rombom said, after taking a couple classes at the school last summer. “She was really, incredibly inspired about just code in general: code as a medium for self-expression and creativity. The whole practice of coding and learning how to create something with technology really resonated with her and she wanted to share it with other women.”
“Karlie, in particular, has an audience of girls and women who might not otherwise consider code as an option, which is why I think it’s so powerful to be partnering with her and put the message in front of girls: this is accessible to you,” said Rombom. “And whatever you’re interested in, knowing technology and pairing it with the passion you already have will make you more powerful.”
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Flatiron School was founded just over two years ago with the intention of providing high-end vocational training for adults who wanted to learn to code, often because they wanted to change careers. The adult programs are brief, but intensive: three months of classes, five days a week, nine hours a day. Only 40 or so students are accepted per class — an acceptance rate hovers around six to ten percent — and they purport to have a 99 percent job placement rate of tech-job-seeking graduates (excluding, for instance, the students who are sent to Flatiron by the companies at which they’re already employed).
Fired up by the success of these adult programs, the staff at Flatiron started to have “conversations about the absence of this industry-standard education in both college and the high school level,” said Victoria Friedman, a pre-college program instructor. The go-to option, AP computer science, is “a much more theoretical class.” The high school program, which was founded a year ago, shares a curriculum with adults but edited and delivered at hyper-speed. The summer courses are two weeks long with a schedule that mirrors the school day: Monday to Friday, from 9:00 to 3:00.
Karlie has an audience of girls and women who might not otherwise consider code as an option.
“It’s been a huge value for us to get students from diverse backgrounds interested in tech,” said Friedman, who enrolled in Flatiron School two years ago in the hopes coding skills would supplement her B.A. in English Literature and help her land a job at an online magazine. (Friedman went on to work as a developer at TIME Inc. for a year, at MyRecipes.com, before returning to Flatiron as an instructor.) “Being a woman in this industry myself, it’s definitely important to me for girls to [get involved in coding.] It’s not seen as something girls do a lot.”
When Friedman arrived at Flatiron, “I was amazed at how it broke every stereotype that I ever imagined,” she said. With Karlie on board, “it’s got to be incredibly surprising and amazing for these girls to see someone they admire, who they see as an entrepreneur, as sort of a role model, doing something that’s really unexpected.”
“People have a misconception that coding is very math-y and science-y, and that’s not the case,” said Rombom. “It’s much more like writing or any other creative expression. We think it’s important to encourage underrepresented groups, including girls, who might not think this is for them to explore what this actually is.”
Programming in particular “is incredibly social,” Friedman said. “A huge part of that is getting girls involved and interested is letting them see, [coding] is becoming the new literacy. It’s so important for them to learn this for whatever they’re interested in. The NFL hires developers. Chanel hires developers. For anything they’re interested in, these technologies are important.”
The NFL hires developers. Chanel hires developers. For anything they’re interested in, these technologies are important.
The main program is Introduction to Software Engineering, and students are also taught Ruby, which is used to build web applications. “We start to get into very web-specific technologies: how does the internet work?” Friedman said. For the second week, students pick a project and build it in a group “to allow students to see technology as a tool to enhance the things they’re already passionate about,” said Friedman. “We don’t dictate what they build.”
Last summer, one student — a soccer player on the New York State Olympic Development Team — built an application “that texted herself the scores of the World Cup games at the end of every day,” said Friedman. Projects range from fashion to finance to sports to social. Both adult and high school programs are split 50/50, or thereabouts, male/female. About 25 percent of students are on scholarships, not including the yet-to-be-chosen Kode with Karlie kids.
“Think about what’s preventing more women from evening the numbers in the professional software development field,” said Rombom. “We want to encourage people to pursue this kind of education who might not otherwise think about it. The traditional paths are not yielding an even number of men and women in the field. How else can we open that up and have people think about this in other ways?”