Meta Summer Academy leads local teens to tech jobs | News

The 2022 class of the Meta Summer Academy, formerly known as Facebook Academy, graduated last month, a program that aims to give local youth a pathway to careers in tech.

The six-week program teaches 150 high school externs, where they learn tools for their careers such as networking and coding skills. The program is tailored for teens in Menlo Park, East Palo Alto, Redwood City and North Fair Oaks. The career exploration program allows students to learn soft and hard skills that train them for careers in tech, helping participants find a way into the tech industry.

Yasmeen Magaña of Menlo Park was a student in the Meta Summer Academy, and she’s since returned to Meta on its Policy and Community Engagement Team. Magaña grew up in Belle Haven and entered the Meta Summer Academy as a sophomore in high school, and said she found the networking particularly helpful. She said finding people of similar backgrounds to her own who had navigated college and careers was vital to her success, and she went on to be a first-generation college student at the University of California at Berkeley.

“I was also the only Latina in my high school in my current grade, so it was difficult for me to kind of envision careers post high school and post college,” said Magaña. “The idea of going to college seemed a bit beyond that because I didn’t see that around me and my family.”

Enrique Avina of Redwood City, another participant, said he found the coding aspect of the course helpful enough that he went on to build his own app, Eraverse. Eraverse is currently created for his school, MIT, to help bridge a gap between online and in-person communication through its platform. He credits Meta Summer Academy with both piquing his interest in software development as well as giving him the technical skills to get started.

Avina said he also appreciates the network of not just Meta employees, but his peers that the program has given him.

“I think the program as a whole is a huge social mobility tool. That’s kind of a generational thing, right? It really does open doors for you and gives you a huge network and community of supporters,” Avina said. “I think this cohort element is very underrated because you get to go through college and the rest of your life with a fan club, essentially, where you’re all pretty much supporting each other.”

Agustin Torres Jr., a representative of Meta, considers the program to be in its third iteration. It began in 2012 solely focused on career exploration and connecting local high school students with Facebook workers to understand a potential career and gain a support network. The second iteration introduced coding classes, which helped to further lead students to tech, and the current program has replaced the app coding classes with VR coding taught by a UC Berkeley professor.

“It’s great to see Meta connecting with the local community and providing you with these tools for them to be able to also participate in this industry and the tech industry,” Magaña said. “And being able to provide you with tools that will enable them to not just the consumers of these apps and but also being creators, like developing new apps, new ideas, new perspective.”

The program also allows students to meet one-on-one with someone in a field that they’re interested in to further encourage students in their careers. Mixers and career panels are also available to students for further immersion into the company. This continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, even though it was all done virtually in 2020 and 2021. The most recent cohort was in-person once again.

Students also use art and design to “amplify their voices” according to Torres. At the end of the session, students submit an art piece and a book is made of the students’ designs.

While the program teaches skills directly related to tech, Avina says that students have found messages that go beyond their careers.

“I think the overall message and kind of what the program provides us (with) is that ability to take giant leaps and have confidence in yourself, especially because a lot of us come from, or most of us come from, underrepresented backgrounds, and many of us don’t have people in our families or role models or people in our life that we can point to and follow their path,” Avina said. “So if you want to do something incredible, you really have to get a network of people who really believe in you people that you respect, and that give you that platform to be able to launch off of, and I think that’s what Meta did for me.”