OSE Apprenticeship 2025 Application
Doc
See - [1]
Text
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.
For the on-site interview, we request that you show up for a full day of collaboration with other applicants - as this will provide a lot of insight on your likelihood of success, where you will meet other applicants, find out more about how we work together, and learn what to expect from your studies and from our facilities. The day will be a full day (8 hrs) of collaborative build experience, where we hit the ground running as you start learning about how we work as large teams to achieve extraordinary results through unbridled, supportive collaboration. We will spend a productive and educational time. We have set 2 dates for these on-site ‘interviews’ - Sat, June 7, 2025, and Sat. June 28, 2025.
The build exercise and travel to our site involves costs of materials and travel. We can refund your full material costs (about ~$60 for 5 pieces of 2x6 lumber and a sheet of OSB and screws or nails) when you arrive on site, and OSE can cost share your travel or shipping costs at 50%.
Now for the 5 steps - start with an intro video:
STEP 1 - Produce a ~5 minute Video of Interest (VOI)- record a video of yourself and publish on a video sharing site. In your video, please identify yourself and answer 4 questions after you Introduce yourself - your name, and location (city or state or both): Describe in your own words - the most interesting aspect of our program that resonates with you or is attractive to you. Tell us what you think makes you a good fit for our first cohort of 24 team members who are focusing on mastering techniques for large scale collaborative design and builds. What are you most proud of yourself for having achieved in your life so far? How long do you think it will take you to gain functional proficiency in 20 different trades-related skills to achieve a full build of a Seed Eco-Home in 5 days with the rest of your cohort? Please provide us with insight about how you draw your conclusions, or if you have no idea, what information is missing for you to make an informed decision? To submit your video, please use our form.
STEP 2 - Written Application (about 1 hour to submit). We will direct you how to do this once we receive your VOI.
STEP 3 - Interview - ½ hour remote video interview. This is about thinking on your feet, no prep required. We may schedule a followup interview if there are outstanding questions.
STEP 4 - Build Test. We hit the ground running by giving you an opportunity to start building practical things right in your application. You will build a sample 4x9 foot wall module (we will provide blueprints after your written application step) - the same framing as we use in our house - consisting of five 2x6 pieces of lumber and a sheet of OSB and document your process. We are doing this to document your build effectiveness, quality of the result, your ability to observe and document build details/take video/and collect build data, ability to follow detailed instructions, and ability to identify and source the correct materials. You can use simple hand tools (hammer and saw) or power tools depending on your preference. You will video your build as a time lapse that you will submit for our review. This video in itself provides baseline data points on one’s learning process, and is characteristic of data collection that we perform on a regular basis.
STEP 5 - On-Site Interview - aka swarm build - you will bring your newly built panel with you so that we actually use your panel in the collaborative build, with you participating in a 24 person crew. We are assuming that candidates have their own transportation to and from our site by car of flight. If you fly out to our site you can ship the panel to our site, but if we mutually agree that the cost is too high, then we can agree to have you take a flight to our site without your module. OSE will cover half of any travel expenses, and will refund the full cost of your module once you bring it on site. In this site interview - we are including problem-solving on the topic of logistics - a common issue that we encounter in design-builds. We will evaluate your ability to negotiate problem-solving regarding practical execution details involved in a swarm build. Once on site - we will all participate in a day of work on constructing a small part of the actual facility that we may be using in the program. We practice what we preach - by engaging you directly in meaningful builds right from the start. So that the more quickly you learn, the faster you become productive and you will rise in responsibility and pay grade in our work. We offer competency-based pay where you develop and measure your proficiency on a regular basis - with a philosophy of ‘set your own pay’ by making collaborative decisions with us - to set learning goals, proficiency objectives, responsibility level - and thus the corresponding pay. This helps us gain insight into methods for build automation and performance tracking as we study peak performance. You will be involved directly in this experimental approach, where everyone including instructors are not only imbibing knowhow, but also contributing to its creation.
That’s it. Based on your ability to communicate, document, collaborate, build and swarm with other team members - we will determine your potential fit. It is an intensive process, but our whole program will be intensive and this will be your first taste. We are investing heavily in your learning infrastructure, and we expect you to give it your full effort so we can all contribute to new paradigms of how civilization works - while expanding our own index of possibility in the process.
