iMentor pairs youth with IT professional mentors

iMentor is an organization with a goal of connecting 20,000 students over the next five years with professionals online. Huge is helping them get there by organizing a happy hour and info session Tuesday in its Dumbo offices.

RSVP for the iMentor Happy Hour

The organization connected us with a couple of its existing mentors in advance of the event. They wrote to us about what’s been meaningful about working with students through the program.

Jin Chung is a backend developer on Ebay‘s merchandising and recommendations team. She told us that her mentee, Larissa, wasn’t so much having trouble with her school’s subjects so much as keeping on top of her work. So they had a serious talk about organization and, Chung says, “Shortly after our monthly meeting, Larissa sent an excited email that her mom was on board with her new organizational habits, and they had taken the first step of investing in folders and the next step of reorganizing her backpack.”

Daniel Schobel is a developer on Twitter’s geo team. He wrote to us about how lucky he feels to have a great job at a great company that treats him better than he could have hoped for. So he wants to open up that experience to more people, and that’s why he got involved. He shared a story about helping his mentee, a “Sneakerhead,” build a computer program to keep track of new sneakers from Nike.

Schobel wrote: “I felt it was a poignant moment when we were talking through the technical implementation because I got to learn about a subculture I had no knowledge of and he had a practical project which would require his learning some new tech but with a tangible end goal.”

Check out how iMentor breaks down its model here.