AI4ALL College Pathways is Charting a New Course for AI
As of this summer 2021, 150 college students from 4 universities have earned certificates of completion for AI4ALL College Pathways.
According to the 2021 AI Index Report, the AI workforce “remains predominantly male and lacking in diversity.” Black, Latina, and Native American women make up 17% of the US population, but in 2019, represented only 4% of computing majors. AI4ALL College Pathways is addressing AI’s representation crisis, bringing AI technical and career-readiness resources to college students historically excluded from computing fields, in locations without traditional AI hubs — challenging who can be a leader in AI.
“Finding like-minded individuals at your university (or a different university) is a wonderful thing, but finding ‘different’-minded individuals can further expose you to the complexities of the field and the intricacies of the world.”
— Michelle, 2021 College Pathways alum, Texas A&M University
Michelle, a sophomore at Texas A&M University, always had an interest in computing. She led summer robotics camps as a member of Spectrum 3847 — her high school robotics team in her home city of Houston, TX — and when Texas A&M University, nestled in the rural Texas town of College Station, offered her a generous financial aid package, she accepted, pursuing a degree in Electrical Systems Engineering. When the Women in Engineering program at her school emailed about a new program called College Pathways, she applied — seeing the program as an opportunity to apply her previous programming experience toward a new discipline. “I thought it’d be something cool to do with my summer.”
Hajira, a senior Information Science student concentrating in Project and Knowledge Management at the University of North Texas — located in the northernmost town in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex — is a computer science minor but, like Michelle, had never applied her coding skills toward artificial intelligence. Hajira, “always willing to learn,” approached the College Pathways program as an opportunity to “develop [her] skills.” By the end of the summer, both Hajira and Michelle had increased their technical confidence and expanded their communities of influence, learning from both industry mentors and peers, and developing portfolio projects based on subjects they cared about.
“I wasn’t expecting to code so much, but I’m glad I did.”
— Hajira, 2021 College Pathways alum, The University of North Texas
The 2020–2021 school year was challenging for college students, who were tasked with balancing an unprecedented pandemic and civil unrest in addition to their already strenuous course loads and extracurriculars. Even during the summer, Michelle’s project teammates had “math classes and other programs on top of [College Pathways].” To make College Pathways accessible to students unable to participate during the academic year, the AI4ALL team developed an 8-week summer immersion program, running the two College Pathways component programs, Discover AI and Apply AI, in tandem.
“The first three weeks were Discover AI. Each week we’d have lectures — more like discussion meetings — with the instructor that led our particular cohort,” Michelle says, recollecting her College Pathways experience at Texas A&M. Each instructor-led discussion was accompanied by a research assignment, encouraging students to dive independently into the real applications of what they were learning. “There was a week about the different biases that can appear in AI. Another week was about different types of algorithms. Then the last three weeks were Apply AI. And that’s where we started doing a lot more work with our teams, with our mentors, and working on the research project that we would present at the end of the program.”
“We had a weekly meeting with our mentor, virtually, sharing our screen and the GitHub link,” Hajira says of her Apply AI meetings with mentor Paul Chimenti, Data Science Manager at Nielsen, during which she and her project team asked questions and worked toward “fixing the code” that would inform their final project — modeling how the vaccination drive and the number of flights performed by airlines affected COVID-19 cases in the US in 2021. “The whole process, how we started with the project proposal at the beginning and how we finished it — it’s fascinating. We started with something, and on the way, we discovered other things. We changed our direction in the project because we found there were other ways we could be useful and benefit our main idea.” Michelle echoed Hajira’s sentiments, learning from her peers’ projects the breadth of issues AI can be used to address. Other project examples included predicting rates of heart attack, classifying the tone of news headlines, and determining key factors in measuring countries’ happiness.
“It was so interesting sitting in the final presentations because obviously there were other algorithms that we hadn’t touched on or that weren’t necessary for our program, so listening to the different resources that other teammates used was really interesting.”
— Michelle, 2021 College Pathways alum, Texas A&M University
This summer, Michelle and Hajira were among 40 students from 4 institutions to receive Discover AI & Apply AI Certificates of Completion — awarded to students who complete their AI portfolio project — demonstrating a strong grasp of data preparation, implementation & evaluation, and supporting students in becoming competitive candidates for AI internships. College Pathways ran this summer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M University, the University of North Texas, and New Mexico State University.
Upon completing College Pathways’ Apply AI program, students are invited to join Changemakers in AI, our free alumni community of nearly 1,000 students around the world who receive free lifelong career development, networking, and technical resources. For Hajira and Michelle, AI4ALL College Pathways has already had a life-changing impact. After completing Apply AI, Hajira, an honor student and leader of several honors organizations, is starting a master’s program in Information Systems in spring 2022 and wants to continue toward her Ph.D
“My goal is to be an artificial intelligence scientist, and do research about artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how we can help make human life easier.”
— Hajira, 2021 College Pathways alum, The University of North Texas
For Michelle, her College Pathways experience has familiarized her with concepts she may see going into her next opportunity. “This fall I signed up to do a research course — which is kind of like an internship — with a company. They gave us a playlist of different projects that their students were developing to help make small towns smarter. And a lot of those projects involved looking at data with machine learning algorithms and AI.” As we enter the 2021–2022 school year, AI4ALL College Pathways stands ready to meet students where they are, offering support and guidance to students like Hajira and Michelle as they continue along their AI pathway, and beyond.
In the fall of 2021, AI4ALL College Pathways is welcoming 4 new institutional and university partners, bringing the College Pathways partnership total to 8 institutions across the US — a steep increase from the 2 sites College Pathways partnered with at launch in 2020. College Pathways is also bringing on new team members, hiring 4 instructors to support the addition of the fall sites. College Pathways is designed to complement on-campus resources and AI/CS courses, supporting students who might not otherwise consider or feel welcome in AI. By 2025, AI4ALL College Pathways aims to be partnered with dozens of academic institutions, leading in the service of historically excluded student populations. AI4ALL is honored that our partners trust us to execute ethics-based, interdisciplinary programming on their campuses.
New Fall 2021 Partners:
- Atlanta University Center Consortium Data Science Initiative — a consortium of three Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); Clark-Atlanta University; Morehouse College; Spelman College
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Miami Dade College
- University of Texas, El Paso
New Fall 2021 Instructors:
- Hannah Lee; University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
- Jonathan Delgadillo Lorenzo; New Mexico State University
- Dr. Anderson Prewitt; Atlanta University Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County
- Dr. Charles Woods; University of North Texas, University of Texas at El Paso
