CTP 10 Cohorts with Edgardo Molina

Iyeshia Redrick: Hey Edgardo, can you tell us a little about yourself?

Edgardo Molina: I’m the lead instructor for CUNY Tech Prep, and I've been the lead instructor since the start of the program in 2015. The program is very near and dear to my heart. A little bit of background about myself. I was born and raised in Queens, New York, and went to The City College of New York for my bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I also received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center. CUNY has given me, my family, and many of my friends a lot of opportunities, so being able to give back to the CUNY community through the CUNY Tech Prep program has always been super important to me and makes the work we do very fun. It is very rewarding to help CUNY students land an internship or new grad role and get their careers started as software engineers.

Iyeshia Redrick: Yes! All right! You’ve been with CTP since the beginning, which is awesome. What made you apply to work at CTP? How did that start?

Edgardo Molina: I was actually referred to the role by one of my startup mentors, and there's a bit of a story here. When I went into the PhD program, I did so because I love research, but I also really enjoy teaching. My thought process at the time was that once I graduated I would go work, gain a lot of industry experience, and then I would come back to teaching at the end of my career. That was the plan, and my career has not panned out that way at all. During grad school, I had the opportunity to work with various companies and organizations on applied research, and I also had the opportunity to pursue startups with fellow researchers. During that time, I also took on side gigs building web applications to support myself. When I finished grad school, I had an active startup company, and I also consulted with companies on full-stack web applications. A year later, my startup started to wind down, and one of my mentors told me that a CUNY professor was searching for someone to lead the new CUNY Tech Prep program. He connected me with Dr. Ted Brown, who it turns out I already knew from grad school, so he shared his vision for the program with me, and it really resonated with me. From there, I developed the pilot curriculum for the first cohort, and since then, the vision has grown and become reality as our CTP team has grown. To finally answer your question, what made me apply to CTP, is that I viewed the program as a startup, our team has had a chance to build the program from the ground up, and I realized I didn't have to wait until the end of my career to teach. I enjoy learning, gaining experience, and sharing that knowledge in real time, and that's especially necessary in computer science and software engineering, which are changing at such a fast pace.

Iyeshia Redrick: Wow, okay, that's so cool. Your whole story was pretty exciting from the beginning, but what was the most exciting or favorite part of CTP within the last ten cohorts?

Edgardo Molina: Yeah, it's not a single moment but rather something that now happens regularly. It's seeing our alumni come back, volunteer, and teach new cohorts as TA's or instructors. This started happening around the end of Cohort 2 and the start of Cohort 3. Our alumni are bringing with them their industry experience, many are senior engineers now and have worked at various companies around New York City and the industry. Today our alumni have helped us outreach to the CUNY community and software engineering industry to continue growing our pool of volunteers and supporters. This has been the most rewarding and motivating part of CTP because it's responsible for making our program better.

Iyeshia Redrick: So now we have the most exciting or the favorite moment that keeps happening. What would you say is the biggest challenge when working?

Edgardo Molina: We've faced a lot of challenges over the years, and we've been able to address them, but the challenges just keep changing as the program has grown and as technology and the world keeps changing. One of the biggest challenges we face is scaling up the program. It is a big challenge when you go from our initial cohort, that was about 34 students split across two sections; those are small sections. Then, growing to over 170 students per cohort today takes a lot of coordination, organization, and support from staff to deliver the same quality and the same attention at a larger scale. That's something that we're still mindful of, especially when it comes to the technical training, making sure we can meet with students just as much as we did in earlier cohorts. Another big challenge was going remote. When we were a fully in-person program, we had many out-of-the-classroom opportunities to meet with fellows. When we went fully remote in 2020, things were different. It's all virtual and much harder to have an impromptu chat or office hours meeting. It's in these meetings where we can connect with our fellows and not only help with their technical issues but also understand their professional aspirations and the challenges that they might be facing personally. So, just adapting to the change in how the program is delivered is a big challenge we all keep working on.

Iyeshia Redrick: My next question is, what has been your biggest lesson learned while working at CTP?

Edgardo Molina: The biggest lesson learned is that teaching fellows to change their mindset is really important, in particular teaching fellows to embrace failure. I think a lot of times, the way school is structured is we have exams, and we have to get the best grade and pass everything, but in the real world, when you're building products, you're often building something new for the first time. There's a lot of experimentation and mistakes you make along the way, and sometimes, the best products come from those failures. You were trying to achieve X and failed to achieve X, but in the process, you discovered something else: Y. We see that when fellows apply this mindset, they succeed. I've applied this to my own work with CTP. Sometimes, we've done pilots and experiments that have failed, and we're like, yeah, let's not do that again, but we always have takeaway lessons that make future plans better. And I'm sure you've seen that, but you won't know if an idea is good or bad unless you try it and go forward.

Iyeshia Redrick: What have been your biggest accomplishments since you started?

Edgardo Molina: I always go back to the alumni piece, the fact that alumni are so excited to come back and give their knowledge back, but also, as we celebrate going into our 10th cohort, that means we now have alumni who've been in Industry nine years, eight years, right, and have a lot of experience that they're open to sharing. We have our first board member who was a former fellow, so that's a big accomplishment. It speaks to what the program is; it's a platform for all the CUNY students from different colleges to meet, learn together, and push their boundaries. Not only the technologies that they learn but also their professional skills. Another big accomplishment is that the fact that we're grant-funded and our grants have allowed us to continue to grow is a testament to what we're doing. I'm very proud of what the team has accomplished. I always encourage our fellows to use their CTP projects for startup competitions, and over the years, we've had a few actually do that and even pursue building their own companies. That has been so great to see.?

Iyeshia Redrick: Yes, that’s great to see and hear! Given the current job market in tech, what advice would you give our fellows about the job market?

Edgardo Molina: We've been talking about this in class a lot, and I think number one is to remember that the job market is always tough. Even in good times, there's always a group that will struggle, so it's never easy. The second thing to keep in mind is that the job market is cyclical. We sometimes have good times when there are a lot of jobs. We have bad times where there are a lot of layoffs. In the long span of our careers, we'll see that there will be ups and downs, but again, try to adopt that mindset of not getting too negative. It's not only about you and your skills; if anything, because our current fellows are trying to job search and land their first role in a down market, it will make them stronger going forward in their careers. They've seen it when it's bad, right, so these are lessons that they're learning that others who maybe landed their job during a better job market might have to encounter later on. My advice is don't get down about the situation. It's not personal. It's always hard to job seek and to keep at it, and we've seen that does work.

Iyeshia Redrick: I agree that it's like this with every industry where someone will take the heat.

Edgardo Molina: Yeah, I share with students what I've seen in my own career. When I went into college as an undergrad, the .com bubble had just burst. It was a really bad time for tech and tech jobs, and many people were advising me to not study computer science. While I was in college and as I graduated, things got better, and then a few years later, the 2008 housing crisis happened. There were a lot of layoffs in different industries. Then, a few years later, there was a slow recession, and things got really good, especially in tech, with lots of jobs and high salaries. A few more years go by, and COVID-19 happens, and there were very fast swings in the downward and upward movement of the job market. So, these things happen, and the longer your career, the more you'll see it cycle. It's good to pay attention because you never know where the market will be the next time you'll be job seeking, but the skill sets you're learning now will still apply.?

Iyeshia Redrick: Right! I like that! Now, why does CTP matter?

Edgardo Molina:? For NYC and the broader tech industry CTP matters because CUNY trains so many of the software engineers and data scientists that our industry needs. We bring them all together through workshops and events. For the CUNY community, CTP matters because it's a place where we have students from the 11 different colleges come together. The community aspect is a big part of it; since the CUNY system has primarily commuter colleges, finding your community is much harder or impossible, unless you're part of a club, but then it's still within your college only. So I think for the computer science/computing community at CUNY, CTP is a place where you can get together, come up with an idea, build a great project as a team, and network with the NYC software engineering community. I think that is important, and everything that is learned through this community and the resources that are shared are what help fellows become successful in their careers.

Iyeshia Redrick: What is your biggest hope for the next ten cohorts for CTP?

Edgardo Molina: My biggest hope is that CTP keeps growing and being supported in the way it is now by the entire CUNY and NYC community. We're only scratching a piece of the surface of what this computer science community is, and I think the more people we can engage with support, the better it's going to be in the long run.

More than anything, I want our community's best ideas to help shape the future CTP, not my ideas, not our team's ideas, but their ideas. 10 cohorts ago, I couldn't have imagined where we are today, but we knew the values we wanted to guide us to get here. We are still open, flexible, and agile in adapting to changes in the industry. And huge changes are happening in the industry right now. So, the values of CTP will still be needed as we shape the future of the program.