About RC

What we do

The Recurse Center is the retreat where curious programmers recharge and grow. It's an opportunity to dedicate your time to programming in a focused, supportive, and energizing environment. It's a chance to build and learn new things, to meet and work with kindred spirits, and to accelerate or change the trajectory of your career and life.

The retreat is free and self-directed; it's for you if you're ready to work at the edge of your abilities, develop your volitional muscles, and learn generously.

Most importantly, it's for you if you want to program. It's for you if you want to program useful, silly, hard, surprising, or beautiful things.

We are based in New York City. You can do your retreat entirely in person at our Brooklyn hub, entirely online, or any combination thereof. Most participants spend at least some of their time at our hub, and about half of participants are at our hub full-time.

You attend RC as part of a group of people, called a batch. Batches start every six weeks, and you can attend RC for either six or 12 weeks.

RC is for people of all ages and nearly all experience levels. While you need to know how to program to attend, we’ve had Recursers attend with as little as six months of programming experience. There is no upper bound for experience; some past participants have had many decades of professional programming experience.

Our goal is for RC to be an environment where you can push yourself and do great work. RC is self-directed and built to give you as much control over your education as possible, so you can do more than you think is possible. We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat. While here, you’ll pick the projects you work on, the people you work with, and you’ll create or opt into the structure you need to do your best work.

The most important thing you’ll do at RC is push yourself as a programmer. You will pick projects at the edge of your understanding, and work on them either alone or with others. You will reflect on your goals and progress, go down rabbit holes, and learn things that you did not expect to learn. You will also struggle, get distracted, lose your way, and sometimes wonder if you’re making any progress at all. Doing good work is not easy. Our goal is to create an environment that supports you in staying engaged when the going gets hard.

To help you have a transformative experience, we have three self-directives. The self-directives are tools for learning and working independently.

To help create a productive environment, we have four lightweight social rules. The social rules name and identify behaviors that make for a worse learning environment and act as a release valve so that frustrations don't build up over time.

Being in an environment as self-directed as RC can be a challenge, but your fellow Recursers are here to help. The RC community is full of smart, friendly people who can talk through your goals with you, help you pick projects and structure your time, answer your questions, give you code review, and support you emotionally. Recursers all have different backgrounds and experience levels, but everyone at RC is here to become better programmers and to help each other in doing so.

All the software you’ll write at RC will be free and open source. A large part of the educational value of RC comes from your interactions with your batchmates and alumni, and writing code that can be read, used, and improved by others in the community is an important part of that.

Our Brooklyn hub

Joining RC gives you 24/7 access to our space at 397 Bridge St in Brooklyn. The faculty is available at the hub Monday through Friday.

Most Recursers choose to spend at least some of their retreat in person, with many opting to spend 100% of their retreat here. Serendipitous interactions are more likely when you can see what people are working on or overhear conversations that interest you. It’s often easier to collaborate in person, and you might find that you become energized or are able to focus better just by being around others who are doing the same, especially away from the distractions of home.

The hub is designed to support both deep, focused work (on our quiet floor) and serendipitous encounters and close collaboration (on our loud, social floor). You can pair, host study groups, work on hardware projects, make art with computers, and share lunch and coffee chats with your fellow Recursers, to name just a few common activities.

The hub has:

• Two floors to work and hang out on, with lots of tables and couch seating
• Side rooms where you can give a talk or host a seminar, or work in small groups
• Pairing stations where you can set up to pair in person or online with other Recursers
• A vintage electronics lab, which includes a NeXTstation Turbo Color (with a copy of the WorldWideWeb.app!), an Olivetti, an Apple IIe, a Mac Color Classic, and many other vintage machines
• A pen plotter, a 3D printer, and a hardware room full of hand tools, wires, soldering irons, Raspberry Pis, and more, as well as board games galore
• A 1 Gbps symmetric dedicated fiber connection circuit and a backup cable connection
• A library containing several hundreds of programming books and books written by Recursers
• A kitchen with a microwave, toaster oven, coffee maker, fridges, and espresso machine
• A private space for pumping or nursing with a fridge, and changing tables in our restrooms
• Cubbies to store your things at the hub while you're in batch
• An ever-growing assortment of hardware hacks, from programmable LEDs to a Folk Computer installation

(For more, see hub details.)

Our philosophy

Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners. — John Holt

We believe that education is “the product of the activity of the learner,” and that people learn most effectively when they are in control of and have responsibility for their own education. That’s why RC is self-directed, not coercive. It is also why we value intrinsic motivation over external motivation. Our approach is dramatically different than that of the modern school system, which tells people what, when, how, and where they must learn.

Self-direction does not imply isolation or a lack of structure. Rather, it implies that collaboration should be voluntary and structure shouldn’t be externally imposed. Nearly all of us benefit from supportive peers, collaborators, and domain experts. And nearly all of us would find learning hard or impossible without any kind of structure. But there is no one approach that works optimally for everyone, and the methods and systems we use to learn must be ones that fit our own goals, preferences, and learning styles. RC gives you the freedom to choose those that work best for you.

RC’s philosophy is heavily influenced by unschooling, the educational movement founded by John Holt in the 1970s. Unschooling starts with the belief that people are naturally curious, and that school drains us of our curiosity. We don’t need grades or tests to motivate us to learn how to walk or talk, and as toddlers we are endlessly curious and excited to explore the world. The process of schooling — that is, compulsory education dictated by teachers and backed by fear of punishment or embarrassment — demotivates us and keeps us from developing our capacity to set our own paths. RC provides a space that supports rather than hinders curiosity and self-direction.

Never graduate

RC doesn’t end when your batch ends. We have an active and engaged alumni community of over 2,600 smart, enthusiastic, and helpful programmers all over the world. Virtual RC is open to alums, so you'll have the opportunity to meet lots of curious programmers from past batches while you do your batch. You can also stay involved from anywhere in the world on our vibrant online forums.

No matter how long it’s been since your batch, if you’re looking for a new job RC provides a full suite of career services including job placement, negotiating advice, job search planning, and interview prep.

All of our social events are now happening online. They include game nights, music sharing nights, happy hours, and more. We used to host regular social events for Recursers in New York, and alumni all over the world host their own programming sessions, potlucks, hikes, game nights, and other get-togethers. Every summer we host Never Graduate Week, our yearly alumni reunion, where you can spend a week working at the edge of your programming abilities, meeting alumni from other batches, and reliving your glory days at RC. We look forward to one day being able to host social events and Never Graduate Week in person again.

If one week a year isn’t enough, you can even apply to do another batch of RC. We love welcoming alumni back and getting to see how they’ve grown and changed since their last batch.

Most importantly, the friendships you make at RC will last far into the future.

History

RC was founded in 2011 and was named Hacker School until March 2015. To learn more, check out 10 Years of RC and our User's Manual for a brief history.