r/Tetr_College

This is probably the most nagging question about Tetr. I understand why someone who wants to start a company would be interested in it. But what if you eventually want to work at a consulting firm, tech company, startup, investment fund or something similar?

Does spending four years building businesses make you more employable for those kinds of careers? Or does having such an unconventional degree make things harder?

I've lurked on threads about Tetr five or six times now and the pattern is always the same. Someone asks whether it's legit, and it gets answered by people who've read the website, or by people with strong feelings about the founder, and almost never by anyone actually in the building. Figured I'd just write this long post.

I'm in the first undergraduate cohort. Started 2024, so two years in with two to go. This isn't neutral, obviously, I chose to be here and I'd choose it again. But I'll try to be specific enough that you can disagree with me usefully.

Here’s some info about my program: Four year undergrad, BSc (Hons), and the degree is awarded through a UK university partner rather than by Tetr itself. You relocate every term. Mine so far: India, Dubai, Ghana, Singapore / Malaysia, the US(upcoming). Argentina and Europe still ahead. Each term is about 3-4 months of being somewhere and then you pack again.

The academic structure is that every term is built around actually running a business in that country, and the coursework hangs off that rather than the other way round. Dubai was e-commerce. Ghana was social enterprise and fundraising. That's the part people either find compelling or find gimmicky and I understand both reactions.

Cohort is around 110 people, somewhere between 45 and 50 nationalities. I've had proper arguments about how business works with a Vietnamese guy who did VC analyst work at 17, a Brazilian who ran a clothing label before he arrived, and a Nigerian whose family has run an import business for three generations. They disagree with each other constantly. It's the most useful thing here and it isn't on any syllabus.

What good is:

The thing I didn't anticipate is what happens to your sense of what's possible when you watch a market work differently four times in a row. Payment behaviour in Ghana is not payment behaviour in Dubai. Trust gets established differently. Credit means a different thing. You cannot read your way into that. I've been humbled multiple times realizing that the way something works at home is not the way it works.

Second is proximity. Founders come through, and because the cohort is small you're not one of 400 in a hall, you're one of nine in a room asking someone why their margins collapsed in year two.

Third, and this is the least glamorous one, I now have a functioning relationship with failure. I've had things not work in public, in front of people I respect, repeatedly. It stopped being catastrophic somewhere in year one. I don't know how else you'd acquire that.

Not everything is good lololol:

The hardest part is, you do not unpack. Two years in, my life fits in a suitcase and a half, and that stopped being romantic around month two. I don't have a dentist. I've built a gym habit and lost it three times. Friendships outside the cohort reset every nine weeks, which means my only durable relationships are with the 109 other people doing this technically  😭

I know you all ask for graduates, No, there are no graduates. My cohort is the first and we finish in 2028.

Also if u ask me, would i do it again?

Yes. With the caveat that I'm two years into a four year bet, and anyone claiming certainty at this stage in either direction is making it up. What I can tell you is that I've built things that made actual money, been wrong in public a lot, and I can now operate in places that would have flattened me at 18.

Ask me whatever. I'll take the awkward ones. I won't speak for the institution, because I don't work for it.