OSE Apprenticeship 2025 Application
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The OSE Apprenticeship is an in-depth experience that will change your life. Please make sure that you know what to expect. It is a 4 year immersion experience, at our campus in the Kansas City area, starting July 15, 2025. First, see the TED Talk to learn about our vision:
And the immersion program that we are starting to get there:
In the 4 year OSE Apprenticeship - you have an opportunity to learn to design and build just about anything. $72k starting after graduation, and $95k starting for completing the Enterprise Track. Work-study and financial aid available - designed so you finish our education program without debt. Primary Audience: 18-22 yo’s interested in an adventure of rebuilding the world - others welcome as well. Apply today - with a 5 minute Video of Interest.
You should expect an experience similar to college, with a work-study component on 2 days, and 3 full days of class - each week. The class involves approximately 9 credit hours in college terms. Class time may involve hands-on learning in our learning lab, the Rapid Learning Facility. You can read more about the nature of our curriculum - which we call the 1000 Hour Curriculum.
There are 3 tracks. The program allows you to - effectively - set your own pay by determining your goals and choosing a curriculum to match.
The Civilization Designer track involves the 2 days of work-study and 3 days of class - where you take 9 to 12 credit hours of college-level work . Tuition: $15,070 per year. The Builder track starts you at $72k per year after you complete our integrated builder apprenticeship in 4 years. The builder track has the most build time - 4 days of work building Seed Eco-Homes, and one day of curriculum. Tuition: $5023 per year. The Enterprise track starts you off at $95k after you learn to run crews. The Enterprise track involves 2 days of work study and 12 to 15 credit hours - adding leadership focus into the mix for an extra 3-6 credit hours depending on your ambition. Tuition: $20,090 per year.
The program starts on July 15, 2025, and runs for 10 months each year. The first year program goes through June 1, 2026, with a 2 week winter holiday break. The subsequent years begin on September 1 - and include a 2 week winter break and a 3 month summer break. Students can choose to work or take on special projects the breaks for extra pay. Weekends are off. Each year, we also have the option to spend 2 weeks doing service learning, such as building low income housing or traveling for humanitarian work. During each week, students are also required to spend 2 hours of volunteer time in whatever campus infrastructure projects are required. Students contribute to helping future generations of cohorts to learn more rapidly as part of their class projects, by building upon our existing rapid learning infrastructure to improve and extend its scope. The pedagogical method applies is that one learns best when one has to teach someone else. We all collaborate with one another with the goal of mutual teaching and learning. We are heavy on the lifelong learning aspect, and believe that doing and teaching is the best way to learn. Therefore, students can expect to present their work and teach others on a regular basis, in informal ways and more structured presentations. Many of the projects will involve teamwork, whether on design, documentation, or builds. The cost of the program is based on the average tech school tuition of $15,070 per year. Each semester, our main track offers 9 credit hours of class time - and 3 credit hours of lab time in the Rapid Learning Facility - or about $628/credit hour). The cost structure is based on a per credit rate - accounting for the cost difference in the main, Builder, and Enterprise tracks. This is just tuition, and does not include costs such as food and accommodations. At the 6 month mark, once students learn sufficient skills, and get engaged in planning and design - we plan on opening the option for students to move on site to reduce their housing bill, building their own microhouse village and ‘experimental civilization’ to apply all the learnings from school. The microhouse village will be located at the Alpha Experimental pad, which will be the location of all initial prototype builds as they move through stages of product development. The progress of Alpha will depend on the motivation and skill acquisition rate of Apprentices. Alpha pad is an incentive to effective learning based on real problems - such as building out housing infrastructure or other improvements - using highly modular, design-for-disassembly techniques where we build things but with lifesize ‘legos.’. Via the attention we give to integrated learning pedagogy, we expect our students to attain exceptional levels of competence, responsibility, and thus pay, with pay on a par with average BA degrees from college. For anyone who rises in responsibility to leadership roles, such as construction management - we expect a level of pay comparable to first year pay out of an ivy league school. This is our best forecast based on the economics of construction that we have observed with the Seed Eco-Home thus far.
The full application process involves:
- Video of Inerest
- Written application
- Remote interview
- Build exercise
- On-site interview: a day of collaboration and a chance to meet other applicants when you visit us on site for your in-person interview.
Our on-site interview involves traveling to our site in Missouri for one day of activity, where we evaluate how we all fit with and collaborate with one another - as the 24 person swarm. We are looking for supercooperators who can work well in a team environment, and we test this right in the application process. See more about Candidate Criteria.