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The 2022 Meta Summer Academy, formerly known as the Facebook Academy, graduated last month, a program that aims to give local youth a path to careers in technology.
The six-week program will teach 150 high school students, who will learn tools for their jobs, such as networking and coding skills. The program is designed for youth in Menlo Park, East Palo Alto, Redwood City and North Fair Oaks. The career exploration program allows students to learn the soft and hard skills that train them for tech careers, helping participants enter the tech industry.
Yasmin Magagna was a student at Menlo Park’s META Summer Academy and has since returned to META through the policy and community engagement team. Magana grew up in Belle Haven and attended Metta Summer Academy in high school, and said she found the network especially helpful. She says meeting people who have gone through similar college and careers was important to her success, and went on to become a first-generation college student at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I was the only Latina in my current class in high school, so it was hard for me to envision careers after high school and post-graduation,” Magagna said. “The idea of ​​going to college seems to be more than that because I don’t see that around me and my family.”
Another Redwood City participant, Enrique Avina, found the coding aspect of the course helpful enough that he went on to build his own app, Eraverse. Eraverse was created for the school MIT to help bridge the current gap between online and in-person communication with a platform. He credits Meta Summer Academy with fostering his interest in software development and giving him the technical skills to get started.
Avina said he appreciates not only the Meta staff, but the network of peers the program has given him.
“I think the program as a whole is a great tool for social mobilization. It’s kind of intergenerational, isn’t it? It really opens doors for you and gives you a big network and a community of fans,” Avina said. “I think this team member is very underrated because you spend college and the rest of your life with a support club, basically, where you all support each other.”
META representative Agustin Torres Jr. considers the program to be in its third season. In the year Launched in 2012, it focused solely on career exploration and connected local high school students with Facebook employees to gain insight into potential careers and a support network. The second iteration introduced coding classes that helped orient students to technology, and the current program replaced application coding with VR coding taught by a UC Berkeley professor.
“It’s great to see Meta connecting with the local community and bringing these tools to you to get involved in this industry and the technology industry,” Magagna said. “And to be able to provide you with the tools to not only be consumers of these apps, but also creators of new apps, new ideas, new visions.”
The program allows students to meet one-on-one in their field of interest to further encourage them in their careers. Mixers and work panels are also available for students to further immerse themselves in the company. This continued with the Covid-19 pandemic, although it was all done in 2020 and 2021. The most recent group was again in person.
Students use art and design to “amplify their voices,” according to Torres. At the end of the session, students present artwork and a book of the students’ designs is produced.
While the program teaches skills directly related to technology, Avina said students get a message that goes beyond their work.
“I think the whole message and the program gives us (it offers) the ability to take giant leaps and to have confidence in yourself, especially because a lot of us come from or a lot of us come from poor backgrounds, and a lot of us don’t have people in our families or role models or people in our lives that we can point to and follow their path,” Avina said. “So if you want to do something incredible, you really have to find a network of people that you respect that really believe in you and that gives you that platform to launch, and I think that’s what Meta did. For me.”
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