Volunteering and Mentorship in Tech: Why it Matters
Volunteering to take on culture initiatives and non-technical opportunities at tech companies is sometimes daunting, challenging, and occasionally quite time-consuming. Why, then, is it so important that we get involved in our company’s culture and outreach activities?
Perhaps we do it for the feelings they evoke and the pride it makes us feel in our company. Maybe it’s for more utilitarian purposes like increasing mentorship hours or increasing our name recognition. It could even be a strategy for career growth in areas unrelated to your primary role. Whatever the motivation, there are substantial benefits to leaving our laptops and getting involved in opportunities for creating the culture of the companies where we work.
Internship Program at BigCommerce
One such opportunity at BigCommerce is the internship with Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. This is a yearly program through the school that BigCommerce participates in to provide real-world professional experiences to junior students. This internship prepares them for their futures, but it also taught me what it really means to be part of a defining piece of company culture and how that benefits everyone, including me.
Ann Richards School
The Ann Richards School was “founded to give young women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds the skills and confidence necessary to pursue college educations and careers,” according to their mission statement. Ann Richards School is a college-focused STEM school with 3 tracks — Biomedical, Engineering, and Media Technology — and boasts both 100% graduation and college acceptance rates. In addition to college readiness, Ann Richards School also focuses heavily on career preparedness and emphasizes careers and fields where women are under-represented. Juniors spend a week interning at companies for real world professional experience after interviewing and choosing their favorites. These interviews are highly professional: they bring impressive resumes, wear business attire, and practice their interview etiquette. Most (if not all) of them would outperform many adults. Of the fifteen students interviewing with BigCommerce, five were selected for two separate projects.
The Internship
The internship this year included the engineering track we’ve done in the past along with a new media track, with projects consisting of a simple front-end site for engineering and a marketing/promotional video for media. While the general program idea was great, planning the internship came with its own set of trials, including anticipating how much time should be allotted for learning sessions while allowing enough time for project completion. Some things just aren’t knowable ahead of time though, so baking alternatives into the plan was a must (like a yoga session led by one of our yogi developers, @katewalters). All in all, with the help of several coworkers, things went according to plan and their projects came out splendidly. In addition to the expected outcomes, there were quite a few unexpected ones:
- Most of them will be the first generation in their families to attend college, and they were given invaluable advice on choosing majors and navigating the difficulties of early adulthood
- They learned that the majority of developers in our office did not attend college for anything tech-related — one intern noted that this was the most important (and shocking) thing she took away from her week with us
- The confidence they gained through the week was visible and so rewarding to witness
These revelations made me realize why the internships are so valuable to the school and the students — it’s far more than a simple job shadowing experience, and they take away information that will make the transition into adulthood so much easier. I would have benefited greatly from the knowledge shared had I gotten it at their age, and I plan to share much of it with my own daughter.
Employee Takeaways
The interns learned a lot from their time here, but those of us who were hosting them feel that we’ve learned just as much and benefited from interacting with them over the course of the week. One coworker had this to say:
“Taking a step back and re-thinking about how I think about design — and how to communicate that to a fresh, young audience of high school interns — put me in more of a challenge than I realized it would. How do I summarize something that has been such a shifting, evolving, sometimes scattered learning process and years in the making, which is so common in the technology field, into a templatized learning format? I tried to teach them that empathy and learning how people use things they already have is the best way to design for the new things they need.” — Jenn Lindeman, Designer
Another coworker said:
“I would gladly accept the opportunity to participate in this internship again, both to help a new generation of engineers, and to bring me perspective of what I have learned to get where I am today.” — Thomas Ekstrand, Engineer
This experience not only made us better engineers, it made us more empathetic and better prepared to help those who are new to the tech field, too. Personally, I’m more aware of gaps in my technical knowledge now, have a better understanding of what mentorship and leadership feel like in a professional setting, and realize I’m relatively good at teaching and greatly enjoy doing it.
How Mentoring Impacts Company Culture
Getting involved in creating culture is much more accessible than it may seem. When company culture is created organically from the bottom-up instead of top-down, the ability to take ownership of it is highly motivating and it feels natural (we’ve all been at companies where culture is dictated to you rather than created by you). You don’t have to be an extrovert to affect culture, nor must you be highly experienced in your job (I happen to be neither), you just have to care about or be interested in something and be willing put a little bit of work into it. Things like that start simple –- a food or clothing collection, a team outing to volunteer for a few hours, bringing baked goods for one another, making queso for each other on Fridays –- and before you know it there’s buy-in from all over the company.
The biggest career benefit I’ve found is that, while culture is not directly related to technical proficiency and thus not related to raises etc., your name will become far more recognizable with the leadership at your company and that helps a lot when the time for promotions comes around. Besides, the feeling of closeness that comes from cooperating with coworkers to make your job more fun and meaningful makes working together much more enjoyable.
