Mentoring Experiences

Next Chapter Project

As a mentor for the Next Chapter Project, I work closely with formerly incarcerated individuals during a 12-week boot camp, helping them develop the skills, confidence, and support necessary to transition into meaningful, skilled careers in the tech industry. This work contributes to diversity by providing opportunities for people who have been marginalized by the criminal justice system, fostering inclusion for those whose potential is often overlooked.

Two recent presentations I gave in 2022 I’d consider contributions to diversity initiatives at RIT / in higher education are:

National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE)

I gave a 45 minute presentation to NSBE whose mission is “to increase the number of culturally responsible black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community.”  There was a regional conference at RIT, and I hosted a session on developing and hosting a personal portfolio website.

The first half of the presentation is about self promotion, and featured statistics about if a personal website would help people to get a job.  The second half we actually build a website that will be online and viewable by the entire world in about a half hour using all free cloud based software you can access in any web browser.

RIT’s Women In Computing (WIC)

I also gave a talk to RIT’s Women in Technology program in 2022. The presentation was nearly identical to the one I gave above to the NSBE. The big difference was that most of the attendees at the WiC presentation programming experience (as most attendees are GCCIS students) so we could tackle a few more technical details in such a short time frame.