Passionate about git workflow?  Dying to share your experience with modernizing legacy mainframe services? We'd love to include you in our weekly speaker series.

Every week we bring in a guest speaker from industry to talk about their area of expertise. The goal of the speaker series is to expose our students to as much industry technology and real world team process as possible.

Topics can range from beginner to advanced. We strive to have a healthy mix of software and non-software topics. Examples include: technology or language deep dives, project management, user experience, the engineering process, customer success, or even talking about all of the layers of your company's technology stack.

Mentors can help in a variety of ways. As a mentor, you can meet with students on your schedule. Your responsibilities could be as simple as giving a tour of your company's facilities to helping guide them during their group project work. Groups may meet in a public place, virtually, at the Prairie Den or take turns hosting at their organizations. This opportunity makes a big difference to the students because they get to establish real connections and gain more first-hand exposure to working professionals.

Scholarships are a nice way to help support the program and help to reduce the cost of the program for students. Even a $500 scholarship goes a long way. It's an easy way to help students afford the program and gain some great PR exposure for your company. Scholarships can be put towards a specific demographic or background (women, low-income, New Americans, etc) or they could be used towards the purchase of a laptop ($500 buys a great refurbished MacBook Pro for use in the classroom). Scholarships can be structured as a charitable donation since we're a 501(c)3.

Every cohort works on real world projects from the community. Our favorite projects come from other non-profits, but any tangible community project is fair game. We need your help to identify project partners. If you have experience with scoping project requirements and want to help, even better!

Involvement in our employer networking is a way for us to continue communicating with your organization about things like student presentations, career day presentations and interviews, mock interview practice, and invitations to our social events. There's no commitment on your part, we only ask that your organization maintain an understanding of our program and if you're ever hiring junior developers, you'd consider interviewing our students and alumni.