College Code Camp — the first day
Orientation and Setting up Camp
Today was the start of Square’s 2nd annual College Code Camp, a five-day immersion program built by Square with the goal to inspire, educate, and empower the next generation of women in technology. And today I met some of the most intelligent, inspiring, dynamic women of my life.
The Campers (selected from a pool of over 300 applicants) are 21 women studying Computer Science, from sophomores to Masters students at 17 universities across the US and Canada. In addition to technical competency, these talented women are leaders in their schools and communities and have big dreams for the future.
The goal of Day 1 is to get participants offsite and getting to know each other. We want to break the ice and start building connections.
My favorite intro activity was Name Tag Swap, where Campers picked a random name tag out of a box, found and interviewed that person, and introduced her to the group. It’s easier to talk about someone other than yourself and it allowed them to warm up their voices before sharing with the larger crowd.
We then took everyone to an amazing Square merchant called Woodcut Maps. Each of the Campers provided an address or location that they are fond of, and we built handcrafted wood-inlay maps. Amazingly the maps also go nicely with the theme of Orientation (we committed to the camping theme this year ☺).
The women have already started a Facebook group and group text to stay in touch. I’d say we indeed broke the ice.
So much in store over the next four days!
On a personal note, I am also extremely excited to attend Code Camp myself. Much of my life’s work is committed to getting more women into tech and engineering. I realized my actions mean little without representing the change myself (you said it Ghandi!). I’ve committed to coding everyday for at least 30 minutes and have made it three weeks thus far! I plan on helping build the Code Camp website later this year, as well as a newsletter template—more to come on this.
Now off to bed for 5am cycling…thank god for coffee.
Follow Code Camp happenings on social media: @Square #CodeCamp
