GoKawiilIf you’d like to spend 6 or 12 weeks programming with kind, curious people, apply to RC!
When we began rewriting the RC application earlier this year, I was very much inspired by one of the best question sets I’ve come across: the Oxford All Souls Examination papers. They give a choice of one or two questions from a few lists of many fascinating rabbit-hole-openers, which range from abstract philosophical problems (“What is life?”) to open-ended thought experiments (“Should anonymous posting online be forbidden?”) to more practical future-oriented questions (“Is style the last refuge against AI?”).
Changing our application was a little scary, because it didn’t feel terrifically broken. We’ve read many thousands of applications from people wanting to attend RC over the years, and have admitted many thousands of wonderful Recursers off of them. Doing application review is one of my favorite parts of working here: we do it as a group for about an hour each week, and we are often so charmed by the answers to some of our questions that we share them or save them (Emily has a running list of her favorite CracklePops, and we’ve collected close to a hundred of our favorite fascinating facts).
This wasn’t due to our application being exceptionally good (though I’d argue that question about the most fascinating thing you’ve learned recently is a great question for almost any situation; try it the next time you meet someone new!). The applications we get are interesting because our applicants tend to be very curious and self-directed people whose thought processes, projects, and plans we find exciting and inspiring, and the application highlighted those qualities.
But we thought our application could do a much better job of inspiring people, giving them a sense of what RC is like, and giving us better signals that more directly connect to how Recursers succeed at RC. So we’ve redesigned our application and its questions, and we thought it might be interesting to share why we made some of the changes we did with others who might be working on their own hiring or admissions processes.
Better questions
We’ve added a new set of questions, from which you’ll choose two to answer. We hope these are fun to ponder; they’re akin to things you might think and talk about at RC. We asked our alums to help come up with these, as they tend to have better ideas than us about these kinds of things! You can be succinct here; you don’t need to write a long essay for them.
Tell the story of the weirdest bug you’ve ever fixed.
Do you think code is more like math, or more like literature?
What’s the ugliest code you’ve ever written? What do you like about it?
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