Remember those last summers of high school? Maybe you’d get a job or spend weeks as a camp counselor, maybe do summer school or just hang out.
Not so for the 21 New Castle County high schoolers selected for a seven-week, paid internship program that combined work, learning, leadership skills and making friends. The Yes, We Tech! program — a collaboration by Tech Council of Delaware, Code Differently and the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League — comes to an end this week, as its rising juniors and seniors get ready to go back to school.
Interns received free transportation, meals and attire. That meant matching chambray button-down shirts for the days they went to work at a local company or organization, and navy polo shirts for the days the students met at the Community Education Building in Wilmington for lessons on soft skills and talks by business and technology leaders. Participating companies included WSFS, Buccini-Pollin Group and the law firm Richards, Layton and Finger.
Every week featured two days with the group and three days interning. At the end, they received an IC3 certification for digital literacy and a soft skills certification from Conover.
“We have students who are on the nonprofit track, fintech track, legal track, the real estate track, the energy track,” Tech Council Executive Director Zakiyyah Ali told Technical.ly. “The students were able to put to use the skills that they learned in the classroom, both digital proficiency and verbal skills, in an actual workplace setting working alongside adults, and doing projects and assignments to really give them some career experience and exposure.”
Students came from as far as Middletown, some using the provided DART bus pass to get there — a new learning experience in itself.
This reporter met three 2023 Yes We Tech! students, all rising seniors, as they entered this last week of the experience.
Kori Sampson, Middletown High School, Engineering Pathway
- Internship: Delmarva Power
Kori Sampson. (Courtesy photo)
Sampson applied for the program in the hopes that it would help her decide on which career path she wanted to pursue. She knew she was interested in STEM, but hasn’t settled on a specific field.
“It’s been eye opening,” Sampson said. “I’ve learned so much about how the major that you go into at school doesn’t necessarily mean that’s exactly what you’re going to do for your career. Also that there are more levels to a company than what you see. Delmarva is a power company, but there’s a security department, there’s the financial department, there’s so much more to it.”
Sampson plans to attend college and is now planning to go into cybersecurity.
Aditya Kshirsagar, MOT Charter School, Computer Science Pathway
- Internship: Tech Council of Delaware
Aditya Kshirsagar. (Courtesy photo)
Kshirsagar found the environment and conversations with his Yes, We Tech! peers to be more insightful than what he’s used to in the classroom. Call it a “sneak peek” at a professional workplace.
“One of the factors in this internship was that there’s so many people of different backgrounds, races, different orientations,” he said. “And it was so cool meeting different people from different parts of Delaware, because otherwise I would have probably never interacted with any of them.”
Kshirsagar also plans to go to college to pursue a career in cybersecurity.
Alanna Denault, Newark Charter School, Computer Science Pathway
Alanna Denault. (Courtesy photo)
Denault found the teamwork aspect, including with internship mentors and instructors, a change of pace from the high school classroom, and she enjoyed the hands-on nature of the program.
“I really liked data science, and we got to work with a bunch of different data sets in Excel,” Denault said. “We got to look through the process of registered agent filings. As it goes through the process, they have different stages. And looking at all that data, we get to use Excel to create different charts and tables. I was really nerdy, geeky about that. I thought that was cool.”
Denault also met CSC employees who were earning degrees while working for the company, with the company paying their tuition, a road to career growth that is sometimes overlooked. In the future, she is considering a career in machine learning and data science.
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The program wasn’t all work focused. An outing to Delaware State University that included a video game arcade truck and exploring the food court was as much of a fun break as it was a taste of campus life.
The most valuable part of the program? All three agreed that it was networking, both with business and tech leaders in Delaware, and with 20 other students from different schools they wouldn’t have become friends with otherwise.
