Future Programmer
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Research
As of 2019, the combined percentage of people of color in the tech industry was less than 16 percent. Despite the growing interest in CS worldwide, few people of color are entering the field and fewer still are being hired. A 2015 Taulbee Survey conducted by the Computing Research Association reported that only 4.6 percent of CS bachelor degrees awarded that year belonged to African Americans, and this was still greater than the one percent African American population within the workforce of large companies like Google and Facebook in 2017. However, this phenomenon is not only isolated to large tech companies. TechCrunch, an American online publisher focusing on the tech industry, reported in 2019 that only half of the students of color who earn CS are hired by tech employers. These issues are caused by a variety of factors varying from implicit bias to the digital divide.
Coding Skills
Project
The goal of my project was to try to inspire more students in my community to get into the tech industry. To accomplish this I chose to teach myself Python and make three simple games. The idea behind this is that one of the reasons people of color don’t enter the tech industry is because of a lack of representation. My hope is to act as an example of how a person of color can teach themselves how to code and thus prove to others that they also have the ability to learn how to code
Connection
I’ve always had an interest in STEM, and in the past years, that interest has become more focused on computers and coding. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to study computer science. After I made this decision I was elated to find out that computer scientists and programmers made really good money. Since computers are becoming more common and coding information is readily available, I came to see computer science as a way for a lot of people in my community to improve their economic standing.
