Dev/Mission’s 2017 Summer Pilot Program: Halfway Point…
dev/Mission’s 1st Pilot Summer Program launched 5 weeks ago in partnership with Mission Housing Development Corporation inside Valencia Gardens. The 10 weeks intensive technology program currently has 18 young adults ages 16–24 enrolled in the program. Most of the young adults come from undeserved communities, 50% come from outside San Francisco (Richmond, San Leandro, Palo Alto, South San Francisco, Oakland and Daly City) and about 90% of the students are Hispanic descendant. The average income level for their families is between $30,000 and $40,000.
The program offers IT essential training in hardware/tech support/CompTIA, Intro to Programming (HTML, CSS and Javascript) and Critical Career Skills. Our schedule is three days a week for 4 hours a day and on Fridays we dedicate that day for corporate site visits. Most of the program participants did not know what to expect in the program; but they were mostly interested in technology skills. When the participants enrolled into the dev/Mission program, they were required to fill out a Career Assessment Survey to find out about their personalities, skills, and qualifications; it was also to see whether the participants are a good fit for the intensive 10 week curriculum and what the participants needed to improve on. The Career Assessment Survey was able to provide us backgrounds of the participants and the skill-sets they have before entering the program. Overall, a majority of the participants showed their interests in the technology field, and dev/Mission was the only available technology program for them to get to know more about this industry as there is no other programs like dev/Mission in their undeserved communities where they live.
During the past 5 intensive weeks, the participants have been able to put together components of a computer independently, learn how to create an elevator pitch; a full blown skill chart; work in teams and have attended couple of meetups to network with other technologists. On the Intro to Programming Curriculum they have learned the fundamentals of HTML, CSS and Javascript, and they all have build their own website.
We have visited three tech companies in the past five weeks: Jones IT, Microsoft and Google (SF HQ). We are looking forward to the remaining corporate site visits: Pinterest, Dropbox, Uber and ABCNews Channel 7.
These field trips to different tech companies are beneficial to many students. The students will be able to learn from these unique tech companies’ environments and interview current employees about their experiences and paths. The dev/Mission program often invites guest speakers from different technology corporations to speak to the students about their experiences and share some advice with them. Many students have found the speaker’s experiences interesting and motivating.
“At dev/mission not only do we build a strong community but develop life long skills that will benefit us in the future” — Eliza Mendoza, dev/Mission Student
The next 5 weeks are going to be exciting as these undeserved young adults are beginning to identify which career pathway they would like to follow: post secondary education or employment pathways. dev/Mission will be there to support their career pathway for years to come!

