How To Scale Your Impact: Empower a Generation to Study Computer Science

My Computer Science Story

In 2015, I was a senior at Woodinville High School, located in Western Washington. 2015 was the first year my school began offering AP Computer Science: a unique first period class taught by volunteers who were engineers working in the tech industry. The class was administered through the TEALS (Technology Education and Literacy in Schools) program, developed by Microsoft Philanthropies. TEALS goals on getting students exposure to computer science curriculum prior to college. 

The class offering piqued my interest, given I’d previously hacked together a couple apps and tinkered with designing a few websites... but taking the AP CS class gave me not only an academic foundation to seriously consider studying CS in college, but also a set of mentors I could always look up to. I loved that my mentors from TEALS were engineers at tech companies. I always looked forward to hearing them share stories of the projects they worked on, and I couldn’t wait to see myself in their shoes one day. It paved the path for me to major in Computer Science, and pursue a career in software engineering.

Giving Back and Breaking Geographic Barriers

This past year, as I began working full-time, I started thinking long and hard about the impact I wanted to have on the world around me. I realized quickly that TEALS is an organization that has had outsized impact on the trajectory of my life. Attending a high school in Washington State, in the backyard of a tremendous amount of tech talent, made a big difference in the options I felt were available to me. 

I longed to democratize access to the privileges I was lucky to have. This is why I was so drawn to the TEALS Rural Schools program. I am currently a remote volunteer Introductory Computer Science instructor at Beulah High School, located in North Dakota. My teaching team and I wake up at 6:25 AM PST (8:25 AM North Dakota time) before work almost every day, to call into the first period class and teach through the virtual software. 

I’ll admit - when I first started the Remote Rural Teaching program, I wasn’t sure how connected I could possibly feel to a class when I could only be present virtually. I was pleasantly surprised by how well-designed the virtual teaching software we use, NewRow, is in helping facilitate meaningful and productive interactions. By equipping the physical classroom in North Dakota with cameras and providing students with computers and headsets, I can both lecture to the full class, and meet with students both individually and in small groups via virtual breakout rooms. 

This makes the volunteer experience all the more fulfilling, because I often find myself incredibly invested in the success of the students I’ve had the pleasure of having in my class. I can really put myself in their shoes, having been a student in a TEALS CS class only 5 years ago. My hope every day is to pay it forward and bring exposure and spark interest in Computer Science for my students, in the same way my mentors did for me.

Bootstrapping the initial programs in rural schools is really essential, but it’s not enough -- I like that the TEALS program empowers us to train local teachers, based in these rural areas, to eventually be able to teach Computer Science classes themselves. This piece is really important. To truly have impact that will outlive us, and the finite time that we have to spend, we must ensure that the systems we help put in place can continue to exist even in our absence.

The Importance of Democratized CS Education

Source: TEALSK12 Website (https://www.tealsk12.org/)

Since the stone age, technology has been the primary lever for us to make our lives as a species more productive and efficient. Think about the biggest problems facing our world today: Healthcare? Jobs? Economy? Renewable energy? Whether it’s designing software for electric cars, or developing medical technology, software is ubiquitous, and it will be for the foreseeable future. This journey is barely 1% finished. Regardless of the industry or role, a strong foundation in critical thinking, creativity and analytics is essential. In the technology industry alone, there is a talent shortage of over a million people this year. The future holds a society where every job, to varying degrees, is a technology job. We need to equip future generations with the problem-solving toolkits to survive and thrive in this future.

In order to truly bring everyone along on the path to a more efficient and sustainable future, we need to give back to the systems that have helped us. By investing your time into sharing your knowledge and volunteering, you are enabling an entire class to be administered and impacting their likelihood to fill the massive talent shortage in the industry.

Supercharging Personal Growth

I’ve really come to appreciate what a challenging and universally useful skill teaching is. With this experience volunteering, I’ve found myself needing to develop my own skill set in order to be effective. 

The way I see it, ‘teaching’ is just the word we assign to the hugely complicated act of ‘communicating something that one person understands to another person that doesn’t yet understand it’. Teaching requires a great deal of self awareness, effective communication and empathy. 

One of the most challenging experiences I’ve faced so far is being aware of my own ‘expert bias’. I’ve had to be very intentional in stepping away from those biases while communicating some new concept. Even though it doesn’t always feel like it to me, after years of studying computer science academically, and working in the industry, there is so much that I’ve learned that just feels obvious to me. One of my college professors, Dan Grossman, put this phenomenon eloquently when he said, “You won’t remember learning anything in this class, but.. you’ll also never be able to remember a time when you didn’t know what you’ve learned in this class”. I found this to ring very true as I’ve had to explicitly switch out of the mindset of complex engineering meetings and meaty code reviews, and into my classes where I have to dial back to first principles and explain core Computer Science fundamentals. 

Teaching has helped me check my own biases, and be more precise when communicating about technical topics - a skill that has translated over into my everyday work. Of course, I am a long ways from being fully perfect at this, but I’ve certainly noticed myself improving since starting TEALS volunteering. I hope to carry these skills with me to all other facets of my life and career, and continue to hone them throughout the years to come.

Concluding Thoughts 

Every day, I come into work, and think to myself about how I can make myself, and everyone around me more efficient. A huge part of that efficiency comes from scaling impact and knowledge to others. To truly have impact beyond your team or organization, and in the greater setting of the world around you, you absolutely need to empower others, give access to opportunities and provide exposure. Ultimately, this is the most rewarding part of anything I do, and I’m really incredibly grateful for where it’s taken me. I’m committed to paying the opportunities I was given forward to as many people as I can, and would be thrilled to have others join me in this lofty lifelong goal of mine.

“Sounds great! Sign me up!”

If scaling your knowledge and impact to empower an entire generation of students to pursue computer science sounds appealing to you, you can apply to volunteer here: .