We just wrapped up our annual virtual internship program, providing 300 CS students with industry mentors to take on real-world projects that were both challenging and career-focused.

Half of internships were canceled this year due to COVID-19, and we were ecstatic to give students hands-on experience that tested the limit of their skills and broadened their professional network!

How Did We Do It?

100 professional mentors pitched projects that address real-world problems and utilized programming tools used in the technical workplace. Students were able to choose projects and mentors across 8 verticals from webdev to AI.

Once paired, mentors hosted bi-weekly group meetings as well as had several one-on-one meetings with mentees. On top of this, they shared their expertise and industry knowledge, troubleshoot problems, and kept the projects on track for completion!

We also hosted nearly 50 tech talks, expert Q&A lunches, watch parties, and career talks to enhance student learning and provide additional guidance such as the most helpful industry tools, exploring different areas in their industry to take on new challenges, and how to be a more effective team leader. Topics included new graduate hiring, gaming, robotics, phishing, data science, design, software, cyber security, IT, and more. 

CodeDay Labs taught students how to use cutting-edge frameworks and technologies used in industry, how to pursue their career paths, how to navigate opportunities in college and universities, and what hiring managers look for. Theyve gained not only the technical knowledge, but also the skills to work on a team, collaborate, and deliver quality software.

By the Numbers

• 300 students completed the full mentored, intern-style experience that they can now put in their resume! 
• An additional 500 students were able to participate in tech talks, gain career advice, join coding help sessions, and/or recieved career advice from volunteers outside of CodeLabs. 

Accomplishing our Mission…

• 70% of participants were underrepresented in technology in some way!
  • 2/3 of participants were women
  • 1/3 of participants were Black, Latinx, or another ethnicity typically underrepresented in tech
• 65% of our advanced-track students were from a community college, trade school, or other local, non-PhD-granting school

We are very excited to be able to help so many who struggle in tech and provide them with more opportunities to become successful in this industry. We know that just promoting diversity isnt enough — we must uplift BIPOC and low-income students and provide the information and the tools that are not easily accessible.

Not only that, but we must also continue the push for a more accepting and welcoming tech industry as a whole, and be an advocate for social justice and equal opportunity employment!

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Lets See Some Project Highlights!

Advanced Track: Krino with Tim Cleave mentoring Amy, Smilte, and Zarrin

This team created a photography portfolio social platform for photographers to showcase their work and provide professional critique on other portfolios. This fully functioning website has interactivity with commenting and reactions, storage for photo uploads, and profile building. In a world full of photographers, this platform is incredibly thoughtful and a great way for artists to support each other!

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Advanced Track: Computer-Aided Drug Discovery with Yang Wei mentoring Mehraj, Hana, Shakeel 

This project is centered around finding vaccines to diseases like COVID, looking at small molecular chemical compounds and their interactions with Protein compounds! Tech like this is the future of understanding diseases and could save so many lives.

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Beginner Track: UNO game with Mingjie mentoring Anna, Anthony, and Akshat

This team worked hard to figure out the “behind-the-scenes” of a real-time web-based game, and almost completely replicated the complicated sequence of logic including game queuing and matching, turns and orders, as well as distributing and displaying cards to four players in sync! 

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Advanced Track: omegaUp with Carlos Cordova mentoring Nicole 

OmegaUp is an open source coding platform used by thousands of students in Latin America to learn code in Spanish! They have recently launched open programming courses and created this project for CodeLabs students to help create a metrics system that can help identify and analyze the students progress, particularly where students are getting stuck and where they need help to further improve the program learning material. 

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Whats Next?

With COVID-19 still causing problems and the complexities of what the new normal is, we are dedicated to maintaining a supportive network for all students.

We already have announced our next virtual CodeDay! For two weeks from August 17 – 28, and we need volunteers, mentors, workshop hosts, and judges. If you want to get involved, visit https://virtual.codeday.org/volunteer or contact us.

From all of us at CodeDay, thank you so much for your continued support! (And thank you, as always, to our global partners: Splunk, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and SAP.)