Carmen Salas (front row, center) poses with students and other staff at The Marcy Lab School.
Over the past decade, there has been a renewed focus on prioritizing social and economic mobility for young adults as part of a larger effort to end generational poverty. Part of that focus includes transforming how, when, where and in what capacity young people can access equitable pathways to the skills and industry-aligned training necessary to get good jobs in high-demand fields.
Enter The Marcy Lab School, a free, one-year alternative to college founded by Reuben Ogbonna and Maya Bhattacharjee-Marcantonio in 2019. The school gives students from underrepresented backgrounds with career aspirations in the tech sector a cost-efficient way to develop both the technical skills needed to become a successful full-stack software engineer—such as learning accessible front-end web development, back-end web development with JavaScript, and data structures and algorithms—along with a number of critical soft skills centered on coaching, mentorship and leadership training. After just one year, Marcy Lab graduates are placed into high-paying software engineering roles, earning an average of $100,000 per year.
Carmen Salas, the first student admitted to The Marcy Lab School and a current instructor, recently talked with the Cognizant Foundation about what her experience has meant to her.
What encouraged you to pursue computer science?
Funnily enough, Karlie Kloss was the reason I started coding. Growing up, I was encouraged to follow a more traditional path: to go to college to be a lawyer or a doctor. But I was always creative and wanted to do something different. Karlie started a coding boot camp for girls because she saw there weren’t enough women in tech. The majority of my high school were women, and at our first hackathon we were the only all-female group—the rest were all boys.
I saw immediately that not many women pursue this kind of work, which was actually very motivating. At first, I was interested in front-end tech, and saw coding as a creative outlet that sparked my interest. Eventually, I wanted to become a software engineer after joining CodeNation as a junior in high school, where I first learned how to code, and realized how attainable a career in tech could be.
How did you find your way to Marcy Lab?
Coming out of high school, I was set on software engineering and decided to pursue a computer science degree. I went to college for only a month before I started looking for other alternatives since I was struggling to get into the classes I needed to pursue my computer science degree. When considering my next steps, my alumni manager at CodeNation connected me to Reuben right around the time he and Maya were launching The Marcy Lab School. While it was scary to drop out of college to be a part of the first-ever cohort for The Marcy Lab School, I ultimately decided on pursuing this untraditional path because I thought it would be the best option for achieving my goal of becoming a software engineer.
