Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston Launches Summer Hackers Scholarship For Aspiring Women Coders

By Amit Chowdhry ● Mar 22, 2019

Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston announced a new Summer Hackers Scholarship, which is seeking to train the next generation of women coders. The selected 40 women applicants are going to receive a scholarship that covers tuition for the 15-week course and a $9,000 living stipend.

To qualify for the program, you have to be a new woman applicant, over 18 years old, living in the U.S., and able to attend all classes between May 28-September 3. These dates coincide with most summer break sessions for college students. The deadline to apply is March 29.

This is not the first time that a coding school addressed the gender balance in technology. In 2017, Bloc.io launched the Close the Gap scholarship. And Alchemy Code Lab set up a similar scholarship program in June 2018, according to ElearningInside News.

Lambda School is going to be covering the tuition for the students. And the combined living expense allowance and tuition scholarship are worth $21,000. Generally, Lambda students do not have to pay upfront. But they back their tuition after finding gainful employment. But any women accepted to the Summer Hackers Scholarship Program do not have to pay it back.


Jessica Livingston / Photo Credit – Y Combinator

“Lambda School is an extremely intense online programming class. It’s a serious commitment, but if you make this commitment, you will know how to program by the end of the course, even if you start with zero previous experience,” wrote Livingston in a blog post. “And though my ultimate goal is to increase the number of female startup founders, this offer is not limited to women who plan to start startups. It’s open to any woman in the US who wants to learn how to program.”

The program is structured as follows:

Week 1 to Week 5: Web foundations like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, UI Principles

Week 6 to Week 10: Web application development like React, Redux, React Router, HTTP/Ajax, and Functional Programming Techniques.

Week 11 to Week 15: Backend development like Node,js, Express, SQL, SQLite,  PostgresSQL, Authentication, OAuth, and Herok