Words are Hard

Words are easier once you recognize that the official title of a person, product or organization actually communicates very little to people outside of the organization.

Working in communications, I've seen many instances of groups using acronyms and catchy titles to brand (or rebrand) themselves. For example:

- After much deliberation, a health care center decided to call its members "HARP," which stood for Health Advocacy Resource Personnel, to emphasize that they were focusing on preventative care.

- A law enforcement unit changing a job title from Community Outreach Officer to Street Worker in an effort to show that they were concentrating on gangs in high-crime neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, no one outside of health care ever found out what "HARP" meant. And former gang members didn't build relationships with the police because some of them were called Street Workers.

My point is this: changing a title can entice someone to learn more about your organization and its members, but the title itself cannot - and will not - communicate all the nuances of a position. That's the responsibility of a messaging campaign.

I like that Hacker School has distilled the nuances of its members' roles into a blog post. The next step should be to develop focused messages that paint a picture of these students / hackers / developers / HackerSchoolers and what makes them unique.

OP here. Both of these words do a good job of describing what someone does at Hacker School. I think the reason we've shied away from them is because they can sometimes come off as a bit pretentious. Given how young we are as an organization, we want to make sure to be humble.

I don't know if you know Jake from Insight Data Science, but he calls his students fellows and his program a fellowship: http://insightdatascience.com/

Per the point you were making in your essay, though, he does this because most of his students are post-docs and (1) they understand what a "fellowship" is and (2) do not necessarily want to be a "student" again. To a postdoc, especially, student implies having to pay for it.

The other folks upthread are sort of missing the point, honestly, because when it comes to a word like "student," it touches on issues of identity and association. When someone (e.g., a friend) asks your students, "What are you doing?" they're going to respond with, "Oh, I'm an X at Hacker School."

You want X to be something the students feel comfortable saying to friends, families, and co-workers. Whether "fellow" is too pretentious or not depends on who your students are and who they'll be saying "I'm an X" to.

Hey, hackers of hackerschool, can you help me out? I'm trying to populate opinions about the school here: http://schools.techendo.co/schools/hacker-school

It will help out others to decide where to attend and offer some advice from an insider's perspective on these types of schools.

Yeah, but work meant ascholia in Greek, which is the opposite of schole, and at an Apprenticeship you are possibly lectured at your leisure, but you are also working, so the term scholar fails in this regard.