In her first year with Code2College, Janvi successfully completed and graduated from our after-school program. She had nearly perfect attendance, impressed our volunteers and partners with her insightful questions and conscientious attitude. She was invited to interview for a paid, summer internship with one of our host partners. She didn’t receive an offer.
Janvi returned the following year and worked even harder than the previous year. She developed a portfolio of technical projects, improved her communication skills and earned yet another interview. This time, she secured an internship in Summer 2019.
But after the unexpected events of 2020 led to many companies, including several of our own partners, cancelling their internship programs, Janvi was unsure of her summer plans.
Silicon Labs emerged as one of several partners who would commit to maintaining their summer internship programming with Code2College for Summer 2020, and enthusiastically brought Janvi on as a Summer 2020 high school intern.
But if you know anything about our relationship with Silicon Labs, it should come as no surprise that they delivered for our students, program and organization.
Our relationship with Silicon Labs began back in July of 2016 with a single volunteer. Four years later, it has now evolved into a partnership with over a dozen regular volunteers actively participating in a variety of ongoing instruction, mentorship, and STEM career exposure activities and dozens of volunteers who participate in a variety of monthly 48-hour college & career access events.
Many of these volunteers are women engineers who are paving the way for the next generation of technical talent and showing themselves as examples for the hundreds of students in our program.
Esther Alexander, a Staff Software Product Quality Engineer, continues to serve as a workshop mentor and May Ledesma, a bilingual Technical Writer, is a veteran instructor for our Software Engineering Leadership Program.
Esther, May and dozens of other Silicon Labs employees collectively contributed over 302 volunteer hours during our last program year, thereby earning Silicon Labs the #2 spot out of nearly 60 corporate partners who were featured in the 2020 Diversity in STEM Report. Volunteers like Esther and May are at the forefront of creating an open and inclusive culture both at Silicon Labs and in Code2College.
Silicon Labs is not only invested in the mission to transform the tech industry; they are actually leading it. Passionate about solutions and success, Silicon Labs has made a critical commitment to the growing technical talent in Central Texas: increasing diversity and access in STEM. In doing so, they are bringing real change in addressing the opportunity and skills gaps faced by many minority and low-income students seeking to enter and excel in STEM careers.
Not only a founding corporate partner, Silicon Labs is actually the FIRST corporate partner to work with Code2College. Silicon Labs has categorically invested in our work by providing enthusiastic and talented volunteers, hosting award-winning STEM industry case competitions which have exposed our students to the Semiconductor industry while honing their analytical and presentation skills, as well as hiring several Code2College interns over the past two Summers.
Despite interning virtually this Summer, Janvi gained a great deal of technical and professional experience working with Application Engineers and even had the great fortune to work with colleagues who had graduated in the major that she planned to pursue at UT Austin starting this Fall.
Now a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin studying Electrical & Computer Engineering, Janvi is now leaps and bounds ahead of her peers given her years in Code2College working with Engineers from a number of partners, including Silicon Labs, as well as having interned with professionals in her intended field of study.
When we say that Silicon Labs is invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM, we mean it. They don’t just show up, they deliver. And for the past four years, they have fostered relationships, challenged gaps in the industry and have already made an impact in the lives of hundreds of minority and low-income high school students in Central Texas, who are now poised to become the next generation of technical talent.