McTaba for University Students: The Part-Time Path

You are two or three years into your degree. Maybe you are studying Computer Science, maybe Business, maybe something else entirely. And you are starting to realize something unsettling: the degree alone might not be enough.

If you are in a CS programme, you have probably written some Java, maybe some Python. You understand data structures in theory. But can you build a web application? Can you deploy it? Can you integrate M-Pesa? Most university CS courses in Kenya do not teach these things. The curriculum covers theoretical foundations, which are genuinely important, but leaves a gap between "I understand algorithms" and "I can build and ship a product."

If you are not in a CS programme, the situation is simpler. Your degree gives you domain knowledge in your field but no technical building skills. And every field, from finance to healthcare to agriculture, increasingly needs people who can build digital tools or at least understand how they are built.

The job market reflects this gap. Walk into any tech hiring event in Nairobi. The first question is never "what did you score in your data structures unit?" It is "show me something you have built."

McTaba's part-time track runs on weekday evenings (typically 6pm to 9pm, 3-4 evenings per week) and Saturdays. Here is how that fits a typical university schedule.

Morning and afternoon: Attend your university lectures, labs, and tutorials as normal. Nothing changes in your academic schedule.

Evenings (6pm-9pm): McTaba sessions, 3-4 evenings per week. Most university students are done with classes by 4pm or 5pm, which gives you a buffer. Use that hour to eat, rest, and switch mental gears.

Saturdays: Full McTaba sessions. You lose your Saturday leisure time for 6 months. This is the honest cost.

Sundays and remaining weekday evenings: Self-study, project work, and your university assignments.

Is this busy? Yes. Very busy. Six months of your university life will be significantly more packed than normal. You will have less time for socialising, less time for binge-watching series, less time for doing nothing.

But here is the trade: when your classmates graduate with just a degree and start tarmacking, you graduate with a degree AND a portfolio of 8 live applications. You walk into interviews with something to show. That difference matters.

A warning about exam periods: University exam weeks will collide with the marathon schedule at some point during the 6 months. Talk to your McTaba mentor early about this. Most students manage both, but it requires planning. You cannot cram for a university exam AND debug a USSD application in the same evening without something breaking.

Most people assume McTaba is for Computer Science students who want extra practical training. That is one slice. But some of the most successful marathoners have been university students studying completely unrelated fields.

Business students who learn to code can build their own tools instead of hiring developers for every small project. A Bachelor of Commerce student who can also build a web app with M-Pesa payments integrated is more valuable to a Kenyan company than a BCom graduate who needs to outsource everything technical.

Engineering students (electrical, mechanical, civil) combine their technical thinking with software skills. IoT, automation, and smart systems all require code. An engineering student who can program is ready for the future of their field.

Health sciences students build digital health tools, patient management systems, and health data dashboards. Kenya's health tech sector is growing, and it needs people who understand both health and software.

Arts and humanities students bring perspectives that pure CS graduates often lack: user empathy, communication skills, design thinking. A journalism student who can also build a news aggregator or a data visualization tool has a unique skill set.

The point is simple. Software is a tool that amplifies every other field. Adding coding skills to any degree makes that degree more practical and more valuable.

A university degree alone gives you: a credential, theoretical knowledge, and access to corporate hiring pipelines that require degrees.

McTaba alone gives you: practical skills, a portfolio of deployed apps, and access to the startup and mid-size tech company job market.

Both together give you everything. You satisfy the HR checkbox for "Bachelor's degree required" AND you demonstrate real building ability in the interview. Most candidates have one or the other. Very few have both. That makes you competitive in ways that are hard to replicate.

Consider a real scenario. A Nairobi fintech is hiring junior developers. They receive 200 applications. They filter for "has a degree" and reduce the pile to 120. They filter for "has deployed projects in their portfolio" and the pile drops to maybe 15. They filter for "has M-Pesa integration experience" and they are down to 3. If you did McTaba during university, you are in that final group of 3.

This is not a hypothetical. It is what the Kenyan tech hiring market actually looks like. Degrees get you through the first filter. Portfolios get you through the second. African Stack skills get you through the third.

Running university and McTaba simultaneously is doable, but only if you are organized. Here are strategies that have worked for past marathoners who were also university students.

Front-load university work. Do your assignments and readings as early as possible. If a university assignment is due Friday, finish it by Wednesday. This gives you Thursday and Friday evening free for McTaba projects without the stress of competing deadlines.

Tell your university friends what you are doing. Not to brag. To explain why you are less available for 6 months. Friends who understand your schedule will stop guilt-tripping you for missing events. Some might even want to join.

Use university downtime for McTaba self-study. That two-hour gap between your 9am and 1pm lectures? Use it to review yesterday's McTaba session notes or work on a project. Library time at university becomes coding time.

Communicate early with your McTaba mentor about exam periods. Mentors have worked with university students before. They can adjust project deadlines slightly or suggest how to manage the overlap. But they need to know in advance, not the night before your exam.

Accept that your social life will shrink. For 6 months, you will miss parties, skip movie nights, and say no to road trips. This is temporary. The portfolio you build is permanent.

Sleep. This sounds obvious, but it is the first thing students sacrifice when schedules get tight. Cutting sleep below 6 hours consistently will destroy your ability to learn, both at university and at McTaba. Protect your sleep.

Not every semester is equally good for adding the marathon on top of university. Here are the best and worst times.

Best: Second or third year. By this point, you are used to university life and can predict your workload. You are not yet in your final year where the dissertation or attachment takes over.

Good: Between semesters. If you can start the marathon during a university break, the first few weeks overlap with your free time. You build momentum before classes resume, and the early concepts (HTML, CSS, basic JavaScript) are less demanding than the later modules.

Risky: Final year, second semester. You have your project, your exams, and possibly an internship or attachment. Adding McTaba on top of this is ambitious. Not impossible, but you need an honest assessment of your capacity.

Not recommended: First year, first semester. You are still adjusting to university life, new city, new social dynamics, and new academic expectations. Adding an intensive coding programme on top of that adjustment period is a recipe for burning out on both.

If you are not sure about timing, start with the Tech Foundations course (KES 2,999) during any semester. It takes a weekend. If you handle that easily alongside university, the full marathon is probably feasible.