Lately, life’s been fast-tracked for Anthony Peña, a student at Florida International University in Miami. The 23-year-old co-created a receipt management app, won first-place honors in local and national demo day competitions, mentored interns at Facebook University and secured an internship with Amazon in 2022. 

In just nine months.

And it all started when he received an email with this subject line: CodePath.org brings free coding course to FIU.

“I thought it would be just one class,” says Anthony, a computer science major. “But it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.”

Anthony enrolled in CodePath’s 12-week Android training program for students interested in pursuing careers in software engineering, cybersecurity and other tech fields. In addition to intense, project-focused labs and coding sessions, students also receive career support and access to mentors. The nonprofit’s goal is to increase diversity in the sector by offering support and training to underrepresented minorities and historically excluded populations.

The work has left him with little free time—not that he’s complaining.

“I’ve been disconnected from my gaming PC for about six or seven months,” he says. “I don't have the itch anymore to play. I'm totally fine spending the day studying. You just have to build that habit.”

That’s how Anthony ended up creating PaperClutch, an Android app (soon to be available at the Google Play store) that stores and sorts receipts that are scanned in by users. During the second half of the CodePath program, teams build an app from the ground up. He and teammate Aldo Socarras wanted a mechanism for reducing the half-billion pounds of paper receipts printed every year. Students then present their apps to an audience of peers, teachers and industry professionals during “demo day” competitions.

In the spring of 2021, PaperClutch won first place at FIU’s event, then went on to earn a first-place award at CodePath’s National Demo Day.

“We’d never had experience with mobile development or machine learning,” says Anthony, still amazed that their idea has been so successful. “We helped each other out.” 

The four hours of weekly classroom work significantly boosted his programming skills for Android app development. But Anthony says he derived as much benefit from the mentorship and coaching aspects of CodePath. For example, CodePath Chief Learning Officer Tim Lee convinced him to delay graduation for a year to concentrate on finding an internship in the field—something that not only provides on-the-ground experience, but has the potential to lead to a full-time job after graduation.

Fast forward a few months, when Facebook selected Anthony as an intern lead for Facebook University. For three months during the summer of 2021, he mentored and supported incoming freshman and sophomore interns for Facebook University, helping them debug code while they built their own apps.

This fall he’ll be interning at Square as a software engineering intern, and in 2022, he’ll work as a software engineering intern at Amazon. 

Landing those positions took hard work from Anthony—and help from CodePath. When he first started pursuing internships, he would get interviews with companies, but fall short of making the final cut. CodePath helped him improve his interviewing skills and coached him through the more technical aspects of the process.

“There wasn’t a point when I was by myself,” he says. “They also have a Slack channel for students to ask questions, and there are always people available to help you out.”

When he graduates in 2022, Anthony wants to work for a large tech company, where he hopes to work his way into a management role.

“Ever since high school, I told my mom that I’m going to work at Google one day,” he says. “I didn't know how I was going to get there, but that was always one of my goals. I just want to make an impact. I need to leave the world a better place than how I found it,  and I want to repay what CodePath has done to help me.”