Google expands its program for black coders
100 college students will be trained for a full year
SAN FRANCISCO – Last summer, Howard University dispatched 26 students to Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus for an intensive 12-week course on coding.
The experimental test run boosted students’ technical chops and their confidence, and now — starting in the fall — the Internet giant is opening the program to 100 students from Howard and other historically black colleges for a full academic year.
Embedding these students in the Googleplex to soak up the ways of Silicon Valley is the latest effort from the company to reverse years of hiring patterns that have resulted in a homogeneous workforce.
Tech companies blame a small pool of job applicants for the strikingly low numbers of African Americans and Hispanics working in Silicon Valley. But USA TODAY research shows that top universities turn out African-American and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate leading tech companies hire them.
Why the disconnect? An endless loop of new hires, boasting of childhood coding classes and programming competitions, coming from the social networks of people already working in Silicon Valley or from an elite club of universities such as Stanford and MIT.
By contrast, many Howard students get their first serious exposure to computer science in college, and few have spent much time in Silicon Valley, the tech industry’s hotbed of innovation and home to many of its biggest players, from Apple to Facebook.
The Howard West program, one of many being deployed by Google to increase the diversity of its mostly whiteand Asian-male workforce, is trying to interrupt that cycle and already has yielded results. Four of 14 participants who applied for software engineering
internships are returning to Google this summer, and Google says it’s hopeful it will hire others.
The details of how the expanded program will operate in the fall — which schools will take part and even what it will be called — are still being ironed out. The more complicated question is whether Howard West can change demographics and attitudes, particularly at a tense moment for the Internet giant, which is in the grips of a culture war over its diversity initiatives.
Wayne Frederick, president of Howard University, one of the largest of the 102 historically black universities and colleges in the U.S., says Howard West already is paying dividends — and not just for the students who spent the summer drilling deep into software engineering and computer algorithms. Faculty members, energized after teaching at Howard West alongside Google engineers, revamped their courses to cover more ground at a faster clip.
Howard West was one of the factors contributing to a more than 40% yearover-year increase in computer science enrollment at the university.
Howard Sueing, a Google employee and an instructor in the Howard West program, says he wishes the program existed when he started at Google to help absorb the “daily dose of culture shock” he experienced in his first days at a company where 2% of the workforce is African American.
The demographics of Google — and more broadly of Silicon Valley — triggered varying degrees of culture shock for Howard students, but being completely immersed in the company accelerated the learning process for everyone, Howard University computer science professor Harry Keeling says.
“It’s these students’ dream to work for these tech giants. To get the opportunity to do it and to do it at the same time they are gaining credits toward a degree, it’s a double win in my view,” Keeling said.
The presence of Howard students also planted a seed on the Google cam- pus, Keeling said. “There is an impact to their environment that these students are bringing,” he said, something Keeling calls “the Howard Flavor.”
Lauren Clayton, 20, is a computer science student from Nashville. Her math-teacher mom raised her with a passion for problem solving and critical thinking. Math classes were Clayton’s favorite, but there wasn’t much in the way of computer science at her high school and, she says, “people don’t talk about it where I’m from.” Then she enrolled in an introductory computer science course the second semester of her freshman year at Howard.
Getting the chance to learn directly from tech veterans on the Google campus helped her gain the skills Clayton says she’ll need to land a full-time position after graduation.
Her enthusiasm is contagious on Howard’s leafy campus in Washington, D.C., where students routinely pepper Clayton with questions about the experience.
“It gave me an inside look at what their lives are like, the things they work on, the technology they use. I was really inspired me to work hard to get where their engineers are today,” she said.
Alanna Walton, 22, a computer science student at Howard who has interned at Google for three consecutive summers, recently accepted a job as a software engineer after she graduates. She says Howard West got straight A’s from her classmates, from exploring the Google campus to visiting top tech companies such as Facebook and PayPal. Their only complaint: that the experience of working at Google may have been too authentic, with a crushing load of classes and assignments.
Last summer, Walton interned at Google in Mountain View, Calif., but after graduation she’s going to work for the company in New York, where the tech workforce is 7.3% African American and 9.6% Hispanic vs. 2.2% African American and 4.7% Hispanic in Silicon Valley.
“When I was in Silicon Valley, I realized Silicon Valley really isn’t for me. It didn’t feel as inviting as I wanted it to,” said Walton, who grew up in a predominantly African-American community. “New York is a little more comfortable.”
Not Clayton. She’s one of the four Howard West graduates tapped to return to Google next summer as a software engineering intern.
And, come graduation, she says her internal compass will be pointing due west.
“Definitely, Google is on the list, and I would like to be in the Bay Area. That’s where everything is happening,” she said. “That’s the place to work if you are in tech.”