Upper Hand. Sherrell Dorsey
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I made my transition to college, my managers and team took me out for a fancy lunch and gave me gift cards, cashier's checks, and a Zune (Microsoft's answer to iPods) as my summer internship came to a close.
That early experience, in addition to my training at TAF, helped me pass the “whiteboard interview” I needed to land the three‐part interview process for every internship I got at Microsoft—sweaty, nervous, and wearing braids into my interview experience with three different managers, where they asked me to take apart the computer, put it back together, point out any of the software bugs, and share my thoughts on how I might go about designing a game, writing the code on the whiteboard to demonstrate my logic skills.
I was one of just a handful of interns getting access to the opportunity. While many of the students hailed from local private schools, it was a motley crew of TAF folks, and students of color, who stayed connected. Many of them went on to join Microsoft's college internship programs and land successful post‐college jobs at places like Google, Netflix, Expedia, and others. A few even started and currently run their own successful technology companies.
That early internship experience gave me an advantage I didn't realize would set the trajectory for my professional life and understanding of the future of work until much later. It put me on a path toward more scholarships, like the one I received from a group of Black engineers through the Blacks at Microsoft (BAM) program. A resume with a first few years of experience at a top‐tier tech company gave me a considerable boost that made landing other internship opportunities in undergrad much more seamless.
I recognize how much of a privilege it was to be born and grow up in a booming technology‐centered city, and that my mom's willingness to take a chance on a training program teaching a technical curriculum she didn't understand was a tremendous move. The risk of entering the unknown opened doors for me and those of my peers, many first‐generation American and first‐generation college students, who also benefited from the guidance, direction, and platform these early experiences provided.
Internships continue to be onramps to social networks, job opportunities, and other connected forms of upward economic mobility. Paid training experiences at companies that set clear objectives for students and the time they spend within the company have the most impact on students. They also help to level the playing field, particularly for youth of color from less advantageous backgrounds, as summer employment can be monumental for families supported by the extra household income.
Sectors that traditionally offer paid internships, particularly in college, include business, computer science, financial services, and engineering industries. Social service industries usually do not offer paid experiences but might provide college credit arrangements.
Case Study: From Brooklyn to the Boardroom
I met Jessica Santana in New York City several years ago through a mutual friend.
Jessica grew up in East New York, which has historically been distinguished as a lower‐income neighborhood in Brooklyn. Jessica was raised with her three older siblings and mom and dad in the Louis Heaton Pink House Projects. The family lived off a combined $18,000 per year for their family of six. The neighborhood may have been a far cry from any person's definition of where you might find an innovator, but the rent was cheap, hovering just under $300 per month.
The first in her family to go to college and pursue a higher education, Jessica had leveraged the Higher Education Opportunity program to attend Syracuse University in Upstate New York, where she studied accounting. The program covered much of her tuition, in addition to her room and board. She had to take out a small loan only to cover vocational activities like studying abroad in Hong Kong for a semester.
For a young Puerto Rican girl from East New York whose family never had the opportunity to dream as big as she did, she was the definition of the American Dream.
To keep a bit of money in her pocket during college, Jessica taught herself web design, and created a lucrative side hustle creating websites for local nonprofits in Syracuse.
An accounting internship she'd landed at Deloitte had led to an offer, but by the time she was preparing to graduate, she'd convinced Deloitte to let her work in the technology transfer office instead of on the accounting team. After about a year of helping financial services companies like banks and insurance firms keep their technology systems up to date, she transitioned to Accenture after her friend and fellow Brooklynite, Evin Robinson, took a job on a similar team. This time, she would be consulting government entities.
Despite the high salary she was earning, and the resources she was able to provide back to her family in East New York, being one of the only women of color on her team wasn't exactly smooth sailing. As she and her peers traded stories about microaggressions at work, she wanted to do something about helping people who looked like her and came from the environment that she came from realize similar opportunities for their own lives.
There was no doubt that she had made it. She had landed the six‐figure job and all of the benefits that came with making it out of the 'hood. She was the archetype for an urban, college‐educated yuppie living it up in the big city.
Jessica followed the rules, landed the fancy and stable job, became the pride of her family, and earned the respect. And then she left.
America On Tech was born in 2014 (initially called Brooklyn On Tech, then New York On Tech) when the side hustle Jessica and Evin worked on in the evenings and weekends, training students and getting them access to tech internships, began to catch fire.
They'd launched their first event inside a free tech company event space, selling tickets and receiving donations for their cause, raising $10,000 to serve the 20 high school students they'd managed to recruit for their new program.
The press attention provided a host of grant opportunities. The inroads of support, money, and interested students became overwhelming. The following year Jessica stepped down from her six‐figure salary to tend to the needs of students who were reaching out from across New York, New Jersey, and even Kansas to attend the training program that would put them on track for paid internships and, hopefully, job offers.
She did this without a plan, but with a purpose. Jessica was building a new life that ran counter to everything her family had taught her: go by the book, go to college, get married, have children, make life better for your children.
Having landed in New York from Puerto Rico a few decades prior, Jessica's family knew how to navigate survival. They weren't keen to watch her experience struggle after all her hard work to make it out of the projects and show folks in her neighborhood what was possible.
But Jessica knew that by pursuing and building America On Tech, she was designing a mission that would promise to leave no one behind.
Today, America On Tech has graduated over 4,000 students from its programs over the past eight years, through both their own training and partnerships with other student‐focused organizations.
Students are recruited from public schools around the country hailing from districts where as many as 75 percent of the school population receives free or reduced lunch and nearly 97 percent of students identify as Black or Latinx.
At AOT, students learn technology skills like web development, and are paired with top companies like NBCUniversal, Deutsche Bank, Microsoft, Postmates, and several startups, where they complete six‐week internships.
Nearly 85 percent of AOT's graduating students attend a computer science or computer information program at a two‐year or four‐year college. Offered both in person and online, programs like America On Tech are defining new routes of access for high school students to get their shot at building the networks and necessary skills to launch their careers in tech.
Learn more about their online programs at AmericaOnTech.org.
Monica on Seward Park
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