Today, on October 14th, Hive Helsinki opens its campus to its first ever 142 coding students. The students have been selected to the school after intensive trial period, the Selection Piscine, which were organised in July and August. These students will also be the first students ever to get to experience the peer-to-peer pedagogy in the Nordics. We are excited to start our journey with our students in building a revolutionary coding school of tomorrow.
To learn more about Hivers' backgrounds and aspirations as they start their studies, we surveyed our new students around a number of topics. We were happy to discover that our student body is made up of a diverse set of students, both in terms of background as well as skillsets and aspirations. This diversity, we believe, is a great asset to Hivers and our peer-to-peer based learning model.
Now, we are happy to finally share some of those answers with you about the first Hivers ever!
Hive’s first students in a nutshell
Altogether 142 students are starting their studies in October. 18% of them identify as women, 79% as men and 3% doesn’t identify with either (non-binary or genderqueer).
Their ages range from 17 to 56, most coming from the 25-30 age group. You can see a more detailed breakdown of their ages down below.
Age groups
- Under 18: under 5%
- 18-24: 32%
- 25-30: 43%
- 31-40: 21%
- 41+: under 5%
1⁄4 of Hivers were born outside of Finland and 29% speak at least two languages at home. 51% speak at least one other language than Finnish at home (or don’t speak Finnish at home at all).
Altogether Hiver represent 20 different countries, like Sweden, Russia, United Kingdom, Brazil, Vietnam and United States.
55% of Hivers have had a profession prior to Hive.From arts to healthcare, IT to social work, construction to research science and agriculture to finance, it’s hard to think of an industry or skillset that isn’t there. 57% of Hivers didn't have any previous experience with coding before applying to Hive.
What we thought was especially impressive, was the number of Hivers that are interested in creating their own company at some point in the future - 79%.
What sort of issues would Hivers like to solve with code?
"I want to be able to have the knowledge to create games and graphics from scratch and use the fullest extent of existing game engines."
"Bringing more transparency to elections in democratic countries around the world by providing tools for voters to more clearly see the values and promises of candidates."
"Problems related to sustainability, social issues and equality. Also, applying coding to both learning environments and to health (especially mental health) is of interest to me."
"I see the potential with AR at construction sites as well as applications that help in production."
"AI developing, autonomous vehicle problems and problems involving lack of intuitive UI."