Nick Linck on the Future of Education (Episode 2)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction

Jesse: Welcome to Journeys with Jesse. Today I have the pleasure of talking to Nick Linck. Nick double majored in computer science and data science with a minor in physics from the University of Michigan where he fell in love with building ai. After college, he took his passion to IBM working for three years on AI research. Now he's creating a new college called The Residency that leverages AI, peer learning and community to help students build their dream careers. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick: Thanks, Jesse. I'm happy to be here today.

[00:00:56] Nick's journey

Jesse: Let's start with your personal journey. After leaving IBM you traveled the world as a web3 researcher, what's a fun travel memory from that time?

Nick: Lots of fun travel memories, honestly.

I'd say the summer of 2021 was probably the highlight. I was traveling around Europe, started in Croatia, did this thing called yacht week and met up with some friends in other countries. Specifically I met up with some friends in the south of France. 

There we ended up on a yacht, which was like very impressive. It was actually Eric Schmidt's yacht, the ex-CEO of Google. We had a night of going out on the town in Saint-Tropez and then ended up back at the yacht and partying with Eric Schmidt himself. So that whole night had a lot of definitely very memorable events that happened.

Jesse: Wow, that's cool. Did you speak to him? 

Nick: Yeah, got to ask him little tidbits here and there. I did not quit my job at IBM by that point, so was still working at IBM and I think I asked him a little bit of questions about starting off in your career and how to know what you wanna focus on, but not too many memorable tidbits there, honestly.

Jesse: You've shared on Twitter that you grew up in a Catholic environment in the Midwest of the United States being gay. How did being an insider yet outsider in your own community affect your desires at your time?

Nick: Yeah, it was definitely hard growing up because it was, was a side of me that I felt like I couldn't share with anybody. It was frowned upon to be gay and if you were gay, you would be going to hell. And there's no one in my community who I knew who was gay. It felt very much like something I couldn't share with anyone.

I think that generally motivated me to wanna be the best at whatever I was doing. It made me want people to like me. So I think I became somewhat more of a people pleaser because of that, maybe I was slightly more competitive because of that, where I wanted to be the best. Yeah, I think there were some benefits to it because it was probably a forcing function for me to wanna do ambitious things for the world. Yeah, that's probably the overall takeaway from it.

Jesse: Do you think your desire to become an entrepreneur fitted into this, or did it start later? 

Nick: It's hard to say if they're exactly a causation from one to the other. The entrepreneurship was in me for a while. I remember sitting at the dining room table with my dad once . I was probably like 10 years old. I was like, everyone wants to become a billionaire. Right? Just cuz like why would you not want to become a billionaire? That would be so much fun. And my dad was like, oh, I never wanted to be one. It's not a thing for everybody. I was like, okay. Interesting . And at that point, I don't if gayness was on my mind and thinking about that.

So I think there's probably some mimetic desires happening before then where it was like seeing aspirational figures in life. Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein were always two idols of mine. They like went down in the history books and created something novel for the world was the enticing part about that.

 For me, I just wanted to do something big and maybe be recognized for that.

[00:04:25] Current state of education

Jesse: You wanted to study computer science so you have got the skills to become an entrepreneur. What were your pain points in college? 

Nick: Before entering college was the biggest pain point. And that was deciding on a major. I really wanted to do business cuz yeah, I wanted to start a company. I also really wanted to be a doctor. Alzheimer runs in my family. So I wanted to create a cure for Alzheimer's. I thought that would be really awesome to do.

I also learned about being an architect and what that might look like as a job. For me that was really enticing. Like building physical world was super cool. I also love psychology, so I wanted to study the human brain. A lot of interests . So picking one major was a really, problematic point for me cause I'm like, this is what I'm gonna be doing the rest of my life.

And how can I just decide on one of these things? I ended up making the decision with computer science and I'm very happy with that because computer science was a great skill to learn it's harder to learn on your own. So I'd say that's one pain point.

The inability to explore many career options and feeling the need to select just one career path and then actually getting into school. I'd say there's a lot of stress around passing exams and taking tests. The learning process could have been more enjoyable. If the learning process was more enjoyable, I would've ended up learning more.

Another pain point upon reflection is that a lot of the information I learned is not very useful. So one of the reasons I got into computer science was, oh, I want to build a website or mobile app one day so that I could build a tech company . In all my four years of doing computer science, I never learned how to build a website or learned front-end development, even or learn mobile app development.

 To me that was very frustrating. This is the one reason I wanted to get into this major I went through four years of it and didn't learn anything about web development or mobile app development. I learned a lot about operating systems and how to compile code effectively and how the hardware of computers work, which is interesting.

 It's not very useful for what I wanted to do. The practicality of skills learned was also a big pain point.

Jesse: I can imagine that's very frustrating if you wanna create stuff, wanna learn by doing, and then you, don't touch real world problems. The costs of college degrees, at least in the US they are rising and colleges are still employing inefficient teaching methods that is lectures and they are encouraging a zero sum culture. What do colleges get right about education? In other words, what's not rotten?

Nick: Good question. Yeah, I think that is a very important thing to think about because a lot of people are just writing off colleges entirely. But I loved going to college because of the community, and so I think the community is really the best thing that they have going through.

They bring so many smart people to one location, and especially a lot of young people to one location, and this happens at a point in their lives where they're turning 18, moving away from home, living as an independent adult for one of the first times. When people are at this transition point in life, that's very powerful because they're a lot more open to new experiences, new people, and really changing their mind and setting a foundation for what their future will look like.

So I think what college does well is bringing these people to one location, giving them the security of housing, food for four years of time where they don't really need to stress about the existential risks of life and whether or not they're gonna be able to survive another day. And that's not to say for everyone has that luxury.

So people have to pay their way through colleges and that could be very taxing and stressful. Let's say for a decent amount of people, this is a time for them to really . Explore and figure out how they wanna be as an adult and to meet lifelong connections. I've had a lot of good friends in college and lucky to still be friends with them.

 Bringing those people who maybe have like-minded interests together and who will form connections for lifetime, college does a really good job at that.

[00:08:53] Skillsets to thrive in an AI-future

Jesse: The general idea would be that it's a low stake environment for exploring, but then there's the current system that focuses on all the testing on standardized curricula and grades. That very much narrows the paths of college. The student outcomes they are converging on a very narrow set. Especially in an AI accelerated future, there's a different skill set required. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Nick: Yeah, definitely think AI's changing the game for skillsets overall.

 The skillsets that would be most important are people coming up with ideas of things they wanna see in the world and the discernment for what is good. Both of these are very subjective. But currently there are a set of people who do have this ability to ideate and to determine what is beautiful in a sense.

People with these skill sets will continue to thrive in an AI world. Because if you have an idea of something you wanna be brought to the world, then you can use AI to do that quickly and effectively. A lot of people have ideas, most people wanna bring something into the world.

One thing I'd like to ask about people is if you could start a company or do anything right now, what would you do? A lot of people wanna build like a restaurant or a bar. Everyone has like a unique take that they would have on it. To me that's really exciting cuz everyone has the potential to build novel creations.

It's just been hard for them to do so. When AI is fully realized and is integrated with so much of society, then people will have more time to execute on their ideas and actually bring them to light. The ideation of creativity skillset will become even more valuable in the future. Everyone has it. It's just a matter of exercising it more often and following through on bringing it to life, which will just become easier with ai. 

 The other skillset a discernment for beauty, I like to call it. It's very important as well because ai will be able to generate a lot. It'll give you a brand and a logo for your website if you want it or your company. You could just take the first thing it gives you, or you could be very critical and be like, ah, no, that's, the font's not quite right. Or the color scheme's a little bit off. Or like, oh, I don't want a ninja, I want like a yeah, whatever else. 

 The people who have a little bit more discernment for what looks good and what doesn't look good will end up creating more interesting products because they'll be able to not just take the first thing AI gives it, but maybe iterate on that and come up with something even better.

Jesse: Yeah, I totally agree with you on that one. Right now people that might be naturally curious about creative pursuits they think there's not much room in this world for that. It doesn't make much money, or there's not really a path where I can practice this skill. So they just stick to these narrowly laid out paths. Maybe in 10, 20 years or whenever AI is gonna be capable of replacing these tasks, they will see, okay, it's time to shift. If you start now already and follow a more creative path, you will be prepared. 

Nick: Totally agree. Excited for the artist to have a Renaissance again.

[00:12:20] The Residency

Jesse: Yeah. When I introduced you earlier I shared that you're building a new college, The Residency. It leverages ai, peer learning and community to help students build their dream careers. Can you give us your elevator pitch of The Residency?

Nick: Yeah, definitely. Right now, college, at least in the US is very broken. There's not that much room for exploration. Lectures are a very inefficient way to learn new materials, and colleges really aren't teaching practical skills that are useful for getting people into careers.

So with The Residency, we really want to create a student led version of college, we think that's possible now because AI is dramatically changing the landscape of education. Individuals can now learn from a personal tutor, which has proven to be the best way to learn new topics. AI will only become more advanced where it's actually customizing its tutoring to the individual based on what they learned, what their interests are, and what goals they have.

So with The Residency we're designing the college experience for what it looks like when we actually have ai. One aspect is students doing project-based learning where they're actually building projects that they're excited about.

And the other aspect that leverages AI is peer learning. We believe that everyone will have a personal AI tutor. In that future we think human connection will still be important and valued. The way we incorporate humans into that process is through peers. Peers come together to learn a topic and they might use AI or Coursera or mentors that we have in order to learn the topic effectively. At the end of the sessions that they do this learning in, they'll end up teaching each other what they have learned. Teaching has been proven to be a better way to learn knowledge. They'll apply the insights that they have learned to their projects or projects they have set for themselves.

At a high level, we're getting rid of lectures and moving towards peer learning and project-based learning. Another high level differentiation between us and traditional university is that we're not charging tuition, we're investing into students.

 That's really important for us to align our incentives with our students' outcomes. That's a big reason colleges have failed currently they don't really have much of an incentive to do a good job for their students.

 The main differentiator is one, the business model, getting rid of tuition investing, and then two, change the educational component and making it much more bottom up oriented.

[00:14:56] The background story

Jesse: We will dig a little bit deeper into the peer learning and the financial structure, but let's just circle a little bit back. What's the background story of The R esidency? When did you decide, okay, now I'm gonna build this new college? And how did you go from that?

Nick: I quit my job to start a company and during that phase when I was starting the company I ended up working on five different startups at the same time. Some that other people had started, some that I was starting and my logic was I can get a team around each of these projects and then they can all thrive independently and I can have my hand in all of them.

 This kind of goes back to my interests coming into college, I had a lot and wanted to do all of them, but had to pick one. While trying to start five things at once, I realized that I needed to have a focus to start because I wasn't making meaningful progress on all the startups.

 The Residency was the most exciting thing to start because that was a way that I could have my hands involved in many projects. Generally my high level ambition in life is to get new ideas into the world faster, especially new ideas that do good for the world. So with the residency I have like hundreds of business ideas.

 I could give this list to the individuals who come into The Residency, if they're interested in any of them, then they can execute on them and bring them into the world. That was kind of the initial spark of like, oh yeah, this would be an exciting thing to work on cuz then I could kind of work on many startups at once by having my hand in each of them.

 As I started to think about it more it made sense to change the college experience. There are so many problems that lead to negative consequences for humans in society. The biggest being people end up in careers that they're not satisfied with, and when you're spending eight hours a day doing something they're not satisfied with, that really does influence someone's personality and their level of happiness.

 Another overarching goal for me is to make the world a happier place. If we can change the college education system to one that allows for more exploration and more curiosity driven learning, people will end up in a much more satisfying career that they're happy and fulfilled with.

This just felt like the most important problem to be working on and wanted to fully dive into that.

[00:17:17] Typical week

Jesse: Amazing. I love that story. Can you walk us through a typical week of a Resident at the Residency?

Nick: Yeah, definitely. The biggest chunks of time that people will be spending on are building their startup and interacting with the community. Let's go on a typical day to start. Monday through Friday, what this might look like. We'll have the peer learning sessions for two hours a day, three days a week.

The Resident wakes up in the morning. Does their morning routine, whatever that may look like for them. Then we have a co-working space. They'll walk 10 minutes to the WeWork that we have available for them, and there they'll do their peer learning session in the morning if it's on the day of the peer learning session.

The co-working space is the central hub for everyone to interact and meet at. Then there'll be lunch depending on the day, they'll either be catered or they'll go out to eat for lunch or pack their own. After lunch we expect that mostly to be project building. The students are building whatever their project is, which we're targeting founders to start so mostly be their startups that they're working on. 

Later in the day, they might be active in a community. Maybe they're in like a yoga studio or a dance club or blockchain club. They'll interact with that group probably before dinnertime. Then we'll have scheduled dinners throughout the week.

 Like lunch, this could take different forms. Each week we'll have a full cohort dinner where all 20 people come together and share a meal. We also encourage the residents to host dinners. So each resident is living in an apartment with four people and they're all on the same apartment complex. We hope that some apartments will host other apartments. 

 There's interesting models you can do for dinner. There's like a idea of a single threaded conversation at dinner. So everyone comes in with the same topic and only one person is talking at a time. It's all about this given topic that you establish beforehand.

 There's a lot of variations on ways to do dinners interestingly that will lead to interesting conversations or interesting shared experiences that will help bond the community further. 

 At night there'll be kind of free time for people to either build their projects, learn more, or just hang out.

 So it's kinda like the typical day and then like a few other additional aspects that will happen once a week. Every week there'll be a cohort bonding activity. Maybe it's a hike maybe it's a movie. Lots of options there. There'll also be a coaching meeting. Every Resident will meet with a coach for 30 minutes a week. The coach is really there to go over the goals that the Resident has set from themselves and help them problem solve any things that they're going through.

The coach also almost serves as a therapist for the individuals, so it's someone for them to talk through, whatever's on their mind. Also weekly, there's a house huddle, which is the peers holding each other accountable for the goals that they set for themselves and talking through anything that's going on specifically if they have any house drama that they need to clear up, this is a time for them to go over that. 

Also on like weekly cadences, we're partnered with a lot of Berkeley student clubs. The first year's happening in Berkeley, California. So we're partnered with Berkeley Student Clubs and a lot of entrepreneurship organizations in Silicon Valley. These people are always regularly having events. It'll be different events people can attend throughout the weeks.

We have mentors as well . Mentors will take the form of fireside chats on a weekly basis, while we'll have kind of a more impressive senior mentor come in for people to be inspired by.

 We also have a list of mentors who are recent founders and current PhD students. And these individuals have signed up for office hours. Residents can go to their office hours and get one-on-one time, essentially with the more recent operators and researchers.

Jesse: That sounds like a full week.

Nick: Yeah, lots of stuff in there.

[00:21:27] Peer learning & AI tutors

Jesse: Let's talk a bit more peer learning sessions. I think the first cohort is aimed at 20 people. If there's someone that wants to learn a skill that no one else in the group wants to learn. How does the peer learning gonna work out?

Nick: Yeah. So far most people have had a topic that others have want to learn. Like we've been asking applicants what topics they wanna learn. There is a lot of overlap. I'm optimistic that we'll be able to match people accordingly cuz people have many skills that they wanna learn.

A potential if we are not able to do that is to have an online community where you can learn with a peer remotely. And then there's one also other alternative where you're matched up with a peer who also is learning a topic no one else wanted to learn. There you're still meeting every week and teaching each other what you've learned. But it's just not the same topic. The benefit there being, you still have the peer accountability and the methodology of teaching someone.

Jesse: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. You are also employing ai, especially like personal AI tutors. Can you describe what's the day-to-day interaction? How are people gonna learn with ai? 

Nick: Yeah, there's a lot of long-term features for this. In the most immediate case, it's just interacting with ChatGPT while you're in a peer learning session. So that's one instantiation. Another instantiation is having AI be your coach and there AI is texting you in the morning. What are your goals for the day? How are you feeling today? You're responding accordingly and it's helping you essentially frame your mindset and be clear minded about what you're going to do that day, and aware of how you're feeling.

Jesse: Great, now I've got it very visual how it's gonna work in the immediate term. 

[00:23:14] Choosing a direction

Jesse: One problem that you also encountered is that you first wanna figure out in which direction you want to go, what to work on, and then what you need to learn in order to get there. So I think many people, they struggle with choosing a direction. How is The Residency gonna help with the struggle to choose a direction?

Nick: A big benefit of The Residency is that you're not locked in for four years to make a decision. Whatever you decide, you're not locked into it. That makes it easier to decide because now it's not such a big commitment. You can just say, if you're interested in this topic, go for it.

Try it out for a month. If you find that you don't want to do it anymore, you can switch to another topic. If you do wanna continue doing it, continue doing it. By lowering the risk of switching to a new focus area we make it easier for people to decide on what they wanna do.

Jesse: What do you think about people keeping on switching and having issues to commit to one area? Because there's tons of interesting areas, but at one point it makes sense to commit and gain mastery in this area in order to be able to create value.

Nick: Yeah, I totally agree. I think each individual will be very different. So some will quickly find what they wanna go deep into. Some may never find that. For them to be satisfied, they need to be exploring and finding new topics. 

There's an argument that you don't necessarily need to get deep in any topic to be valuable to the world.

There's some people that say, if you know three topics pretty well, the intersection of these three topics is where a lot of novelty comes from. And there's a whole book called Range where it talks about how having a diverse set of knowledge is useful to coming up with creative solutions. If someone is exploring a while and does learn a lot of new topics, they still benefit from that and now have a more wide pool of knowledge to draw upon when they're coming up with new solutions for ideas.

Jesse: Yeah, that's a very good argument for continuing to explore. Some people they prefer to explore and then combine these interests at some point and create value. 

[00:25:36] Encouraging positive-sum games

Jesse: In colleges, it's like a pyramid where you are trying to gain the same accolades and grades on your way up of graduating class. This creates a mimetic rivalry and a destructive cycle. Some people I bet they benefit from the competition, but generally I think it's more destructive. How do you think living, working and learning, essentially, like spending all your time together at The Residency, how do you prevent a destructive cycle and encourage a productive cycle?

Nick: Yeah. Destructive versus productive is hard to define. How do you see a destructive cycle and a productive cycle?

Jesse: I would say a destructive cycle it's people competing with each other. These dynamics stop being about achieving something great and they get into more like I don't care if I win. I don't care what I create. The only thing that's I important to me is to destroy or beat the other one. They are like zero sum games versus productive cycles they are positive sum games.

Nick: Yeah, totally agree with that. Collaboration is at the heart of what we're doing. There is an argument for competition that it does help motivate people. Some people have been like, how are you gonna incorporate competition into this so that people are driven to success. I question how much competition is necessary.

Peter Thiel famously talks about how competition is for losers. I tend to agree that if we can work in positive sum games, then we'll get the best results. So yeah, just to preface that, like some people think competition is good. I haven't fully determined if it is fully destructive in all circumstances.

So don't wanna rule competition out entirely, but in terms of collaboration and how we want to help people think in more positive sum terms one aspect that we're doing is that every resident shares equity in their company with the rest of the cohort. So essentially everyone would give up like a half percent.

That would go towards a pool which all residents share. That way people are actually incentivized to wanna help each other. Hopefully we don't need that financial incentive, but it is a nice added bonus to help ensure that people are collaborating. Additionally, just in the context setting of The Residency, at orientation, we will emphasize like, Hey, this is your family. Work with them to help each other. When you think in terms of positive sum, you'll all win. Karma is real. Have a lot of those mantras to kind of instill people that like, Hey, let's collaborate, work with people. 

 As The Residency ourselves, we're giving equity in The Residency to our first cohort to share, say like, Hey, we want you to be involved with this. Let's collaborate on making this an awesome experience. So yeah, I really hope to just make that as part of the culture, that it's good to collaborate and people should work together.

Jesse: Especially since it's an open-ended outcome, you are not like competing for the same grades, it should be more natural to get into a positive mimesis or like productive cycle than to get into a destructive one. 

[00:28:52] Student outcome

Jesse: What's a realistic and what's the ideal outcome after the time at The Residency?

Nick: Do I start with the idealistic or realistic first? Let's go with the ideal outcome. I think in the ideal scenario, people are very clear on what they want to do with their future. They're just going through executing that and they've developed really healthy habits that keep them productive and happy.

One of the problems that we think with college is that people are depressed, anxious, and lonely, that's not an ideal. We want people to get into a routine that they're happy with and that feels good to them. Yeah, if people are clear on what they wanna be doing in the future and have the tools to get there and are just executing on that, enjoying their lives in a healthy, sustainable manner, that is the ideal.

Since we are investing into students, we hope that it is financially valuable, what they're and I think generally as long as someone is doing something that's passionate and is helping other people in the world value will come from that. 

 Ideally, in this first round, since we're targeting founders, they go on and raise a series A or the next round of fundraising for them, and now the equity that we have in their company about goes up in value and then eventually they exit and we can put this money back into the program to fund the next generation of founders. 

 In a realistic scenario, in the first year that we're operating, we're just doing three month cohorts. I hope that in the three months realistically people have explored a few topics that they've found interesting. They've gained more knowledge on those, determined if they wanna learn more, learn less about that.

They've built their startup idea further and have realized that, oh, it's not something they want to continue further. Or they have realized that it is something they wanna continue further. So they have at least gotten a little bit further along their path of what they wanna do with their lives.

[00:30:57] Financing debt-free education

Jesse: So one of the goals is debt free education. How do you finance your operations? You're gonna take a share of equity. Can you tell us a bit more about the nitty gritty of the finances?

Nick: Yeah, so where's the money coming from is First Step, and that is from LPs. So limited partners who would typically invest in a venture capital fund would invest in us because we are structured as a venture capital fund. We operate just like a regular venture capital fund.

 It essentially costs us $20,000 to put someone through the three month cohort, and in exchange for that, we're getting 2% equity in their company. As that 2% equity hopefully goes up in value and there's a liquidation event. So like the individual sells the company or they IPO, then we can cash out that 2% and yeah, reinvest that into the future funds.

Jesse: The three months time period, it's maybe not long enough for everyone in the cohort to incorporate and start a company. Some, they have just explored something. What's the deal for them? Like, do they forego future earnings or do the other people that started a company carry them through?

Nick: In the first year, it's just equity in startups. So if they don't build a startup, that's okay. We don't need everyone to. In order to be profitable, we need 3.8% of founders to start a successful company, successful, determined by the average accelerated startup and what their valuation is.

So yeah, we don't need everyone to start a successful company, and if they don't, that's okay. Hopefully they've learned something. Hopefully they've provided value to the other startups, just being a friend or someone to bounce ideas off of. 

But in the long term future, the plan is to do income share agreements so that even if they are not founder, and they're working at a traditional company, we still can support them and get money from them.

[00:33:03] Starting a company

Jesse: What's your support network for starting a company and what's the process? Do you help them with incorporation? Do you have partners? Or is it like mentors, coaches that help with that?

Nick: Yeah, all the above. We've gone through the incorporation process. We can help them with legal things to get up and running. We have a network of mentors who can help them with specific topics of advice. If they're in biotech, we've got a biotech founder, if they're in SaaS enterprise tools we've got a lot for that. 

Yeah, also partnerships with organizations to give us credits to essentially help the founders with getting the tooling necessary to build their startups like Amazon Web Services. Giving them cloud compute credits and brags, giving them money in their bank account to start actually.

 Yeah, and then coaching as well to think through problems they might overcome. But a big thing for us is that education in general should be very personalized. So we don't wanna have too many top down lectures per se, where we're teaching everyone like, okay, this is how you incorporate because some people might already know how to incorporate.

It's very much an on demand learning experience. Then we have a lot of resources for them to look up, if you need to find a company or incorporate, here's how you do it. 

[00:34:21] Vision for college

Jesse: Let's talk about your vision of The Residency. Where do you see The Residency in the next five, 10, or 20 years?

Nick: I hope The Residency is the foundation for what new college experiences look like. . Ideally, this form of education, which is much more bottom up and student led, is the default on every major college campus in the world. I think people will be able to explore much more and find careers that they're passionate about, which will lead to more innovation in the world and just happier individuals overall.

So the more this philsophy of learning can spread to the world the better, how that might look. In one instantiation, we partner with universities around the world and get them to adopt our program. We have a strategy on how we're gonna go about doing that with what stakeholders we target in the universities and how we start with a yearlong program and then slowly move into a four year program.

 That's the idea. Like we can be supporting everyone through this model where it's debt free essentially. People are getting an awesome learning experience in developing lifelong relationships. Regardless of where you're in the world and your socioeconomic background, you can get this high quality of an education. 

[00:35:40] Apprentice

Jesse: Cool. Let's transition to Apprentice. At The Residency' s Design-a-thon, I proposed Apprentice. In a nutshell, it's like a network connecting young talents to experienced mentors and resources to pursue learning journeys, either independent or within an organization. Where do you see the risks and benefits in the Apprentice approach?

Nick: First, I will say. Love the idea. I actually have a pitch deck and maybe I bought some domains for the name Prentice . It is essentially connecting individuals with remote teams so that they could learn in a remote setting. And there's some advantages about not requiring the remote team to have to do much in order to onboard the apprentice because, yeah, as you talk about risks and benefits, I think the biggest challenge to getting this to work well is to convince the team lead or like the person you're gonna be working for, to wanna work with you.

Because like internships, for instance, are hard for companies to do because it's like, okay, I'm gonna bring someone on for three months and now it takes a lot of time away from me to actually doing my work, and maybe this person doesn't even join. So I think the biggest challenge there is getting mentors to actually wanna onboard someone into their organization and have the time dedicated to helping them succeed. 

Biggest benefits though, definitely for the individual who's doing the apprenticeship, they gain so much knowledge from working with someone who's in the field, and I think that's the best way to really learn if that's a field you wanna go into. It's the fastest way to learn what the current state of the art is.

Definitely very much support the idea.

[00:37:34] Outro

Jesse: Cool. I'm watching the time. Let's wrap this one up. 

Thank you very much Nick for coming on. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. 

 Many listeners, they're young and ambitious folks and they might be interested in The Residency. Do you have a message for them or any final things you want to share?

Nick: Yeah, definitely check out our Twitter and our website. So if you're on Twitter, we are @_TheResidency. And if you're not on Twitter, you can go to livetheresidency.com. We have our application up right now. We're accepting applicants. We do rolling admissions. So the sooner you get your application in, the better.

But if you get it in by mid-May, you should be good to be considered. Generally speaking, like we're not gonna be able to accept everyone into The Residency and if you don't get accepted, still keep building. There's so many opportunities out there in the world. If you follow your passions and stick with it, I think sticking with it is the hardest thing to do.

But if you stick with whatever your passions are, you'll get a lot of knowledge in particular fields and find yourself a lot of cool opportunities and build in public too. It's a good way to get other people to find out about you.

Jesse: Cool. Nick, thank you so much.

Nick: Thank you, Jesse. It's great chatting with you today.

Jesse: Thank you for listening to my conversation with Nick Linck. If you're interested in the future of education, check out The Residency. I've linked their Twitter and website in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app.