Genesys Works’ Class of 2014 Margo Moritz/Genesys Works
When Luis Almendarez was a junior in high school, he wasn’t interested in technology—or much of anything else he encountered in the classroom. The way he remembers it, he went to class not because he was excited by what he might learn, but because it was expected of him. He was shy, he says, and unwilling to speak up.
Luis Almandarez. Margo Moritz/Genesys Works
He had come to California from Honduras as an undocumented immigrant. Under the DREAM Act, he earned the right to keep studying here in the U.S., and somewhere along the way, he developed vague notions of becoming a civil engineer. But as a student at Oakland High School in Northern California, he wasn’t all that motivated. “Where I came from,” he says, “a good education doesn’t matter very much.”
But then, in his junior year, he came face-to-face with a nonprofit organization called Genesys Works.
Genesys recruits high schoolers from groups underrepresented in the tech world, including low-income kids like Almendarez, and then it places them in paid internships with IT departments inside local companies. The hope is that exposure to both computers and corporate culture—with adult mentors providing guidance—will put these students on the path to a technology-related college career.
It worked with Luis Almendarez, who has become the first member of his family to go to college, enrolling at Diablo Valley Community College in Pleasant Hill, California, and though the Genesys program is still in the early stages, its founders believe they can reinvigorate the tech pipeline in at least small ways, bringing in not only more minorities but more women.
There’s certainly a need. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, women account for only 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics each account for less than 10 percent of all college graduates, and each collect fewer than 10 percent of degrees in CS majors. According to a 2014 White House report, while half of all people from high-income families have a bachelor’s degree by the age of 25, that’s true of just 1 in 10 people from low-income families.
Today, Genesys runs internship programs in myriad cities across the country, including Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In 2013, the nonprofit opened up an office in the heart of the North California tech world, placing students at companies such as StubHub, Livefyre, and Salesforce.com, and last summer, it graduated its first class in the area—including Luis Almendarez.
The program is by no means a universal cure for the tech-pipeline problem. Not everyone who attends the initial orientation ends up making it through the program. But the organization says that of about 1,500 students that have passed through its program, 96 percent of the kids go on to college after getting help with the college application and financial aid process, and 80 percent win a college degree.
For Bennett Brown, director of instruction at Project Lead The Way, an organization that’s developing a K-12 computer science program with an eye towards solving similar problems, Genesys is at least on the right track. “Connecting with mentors and role models is a key strategy,” he says, “and internships can be very effective in helping students launch a successful career.”
‘A Different Person’
In the Bay Area—across Oakland and San Francisco—Genesys works with 11 school partners. The schools help the organization identify candidates for the program, says Peter Katz, executive director of the Bay Area program, and then Genesys invites these candidates to apply. Almendarez says the group of candidates pulled together at his school seemed like a pretty random bunch. He remembers about five people applying to the internship at his school, and in the end, only he made it through the entire program.
In June 2013, Almendarez and the rest of his Genesys class began an eight-week training program, where they learned IT and back office support skills, like how to remove a motherboard and put it back in, how to log help desk tickets and track them, and how to troubleshoot software. But the class also learned “soft skills,” which includes things like how to dress for an interview, how to speak in front of an audience, and how to give and take feedback.
Almendarez sees these soft skills as the more indispensable aspect of the training. “You can take a course on how to fix a computer anytime,” Almendarez says. “But learning to be a motivated person, to have confidence and initiative, and to be a good public speaker—those are values that you can take with you for life, and that shape you into a different person.”
After the eight weeks of training, Almendarez and the rest of his group spent a year in their internships, each working about 1000 hours at one of the participating companies. These companies pay the organization for providing them with short-term workers, and the kids receive more than minimum wage for their time. But the companies needn’t pay them as much as they would other IT and back office support workers.
‘The Right People to Guide You’
Almendarez joined the program because he wanted to make money. But once he started his internship at Salesforce.com, he says, his perspective changed. He was surrounded by computer science majors—by adults with real responsibilities. “That got me interested in studying computer science,” Almendarez says. “My supervisors really cared about me learning.”
He’s now a freshman at Diablo, working towards a computer science degree, and he hopes to transfer to UC Berkeley. “I see myself graduating from college in four years. And given all the obstacles I had, it just goes to show that if I can do it, anybody can do it,” Almendarez says. “All it takes is to find the right people to guide you.”
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