Join Mentors in Tech for Year 5

Hello Again LinkedIn Friends!

It’s hard to believe Mentors in Tech (MinT) is starting our 5th year serving overlooked and underserved CS and IT students from small, less well known, affordable, and accessible colleges get their foot in the door in tech through structured industry mentorship and open source projects.

All thanks to mentors like you across the industry who pitched in 4 hours a month, our majority non-traditional students have had the opportunity to learn about the tech hiring process, practice interviews, and get into life changing internships and jobs. If you would like to become a mentor, please watch our mentor info session, and apply here to be a mentor for the 2024-25 school year.

We have been able to serve ~700 students from colleges like Bellevue, Cascadia, Centralia, Green River, Lake Washington Tech, North Seattle, Renton Tech, Skagit Valley, and partner program students from Cal State Long Beach, University of North Texas, and more.

This past school year, we were able to publish what we do at ACM SIGCSE, really fantastic to be able share our learning with the wider CS community. You can read our peer reviewed paper here.

For our students on the spectrum, we partnered with Andrew Begel at Carnegie Mellon to help them prepare to enter the tech industry through the PAS4AI program.

Open-Source Capstones and Conferences

We have grown our open-source capstone projects so our students can get real world software development experience with industry mentors with our partners CodeDay and Strada Education Foundation . Let us know on the mentor application if you or your organization is interested in running an open-source project with our students and faculty. It is super cool to see student contributions to Rust, React Media Pipe, NASA projects, and more.

We partnered with The Linux Foundation OSS Summit by sending ~60 of our students to their first ever IRL tech conference thanks to partnership with Jennifer Madriaga as well CascadiaJS and Carter Rabasa .

Meet the Employer Events

We continue to grow our relationship with employers thanks to our Community Manager Erica Thomas Chen and were able not just have our students meet with employers who want to hire our students like PNNL, Smartsheet, Google Data Centers, Microsoft, state and local agencies, but also place many students with those open opportunities. ?

Get in touch with Erica if you are interested in meeting our students, discover their unique strengths and backgrounds, and hire them.

Tech Roles Beyond SDE

Because we serve a wide range of students with unique backgrounds, strengths, and lived experiences, we are building materials to help them explore and prepare for roles beyond software engineering. For example, Product / Program / Project Manager, Testing, Site Reliability, Customer Success, Pre-Sales / Sales Engineer, and more that will help our students lean into what they do best.

Celebrating Student and Mentor Successes

There are so many students and mentor stories that we'd love to share, you can follow our page to get to know our students and mentors better. These are just a handful of posts celebrating our students' and mentors' work together.