Product College Admissions Next Steps

Welcome and congratulations on making it to this phase of your application process to the Product College at Make School. You might have already noticed that we don't ask for SAT's or even your GPA in our application process. Why is that? Well, we are more interested in other characteristics besides purely academic ability. What we are looking for are:

1. Technical Experience in mobile, web, and general software development
2. Grit - Passion, Preserverance, and Hard Work
3. Teachability
4. A Positive, Collaborative Attitude
5. Responsiblity & Organizational Skills

The best sign of success for students who have joined the Product College in the past has been their hard work and dedication to solving problems and building things even before they entered the Product College. So both to prepare you for day one of the Product College and to give you a bit of a challenge, we'd like you to build an original product as part of your application.

How to Build the Product

Here are three ways we suggest that you follow to build a product and complete your application to the Product College:

1. Prepare for and attend the Summer Academy. At the SA, work hard, accelerate, be in the top of the program and ship at least one original app to the app store (we recommend this option, financial aid is available).
2. Learn to build iOS apps on your own through the Make School Online Academy. Complete various tutorials and ship at least one original app to the app store.
3. Complete and ship an original software product on any framework or language. The product code must be available on a GitHub.com repo. The product is judged on the following merits:

• Following web and mobile standards and conventions
• Code craftsmanship (indentation, variable naming, etc)
• The product's user experience

The product you build does not need to be very complex (actually an app that does one thing really cleanly and well is 10x better than an app with "a lot of features" but that doesn't work very well). Successful products in the past have included:

• An app that helps friends share music or listen to music together
• A todo app that tracks important tasks and urgent ones
• A website that recommended restaurants based on songs
• A sports timer
• An app that identified if something was recyclable or compostable

If you are having trouble coming up with an idea for a product, look for problems, frictions, or themes around you in your life or the lives of people around you.

You certainly may use any and all third party libraries, modules, and API's. If you are looking for a nice API to use check out rapidapi.com.

Preference is given to fully shipped products written in Swift, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python.

How to Submit Your Product

In order to submit your project using this form

1. Your Email
2. A link to your live product
3. A link to the GitHub.com repository of the product's code

How to get help

We want you to succeed in your project so please find help in the following ways:

1. Google your question. Remember to use keywords like the libraries, frameworks, and languages you are using.
2. Search your question on stackoverflow.com
3. Use youtube.com - Youtube has an incredible abundance of end-to-end video tutorials that you can take at your own pace. Some channels we like are Let's Build That App, LearnCode.academy, Mitchell Hudson (PC Instructor's) Many Playlists, Simple ExpressJS Tutorial by PC Instructor