Jordan Bradley: app developer and MICA sophomore a CODE2040 finalist

It’s possible that Jordan Bradley, a sophomore interactive design major at the Maryland Institute College of Art, will be heading to Silicon Valley in a couple months.
Bradley, the co-creator of the Crowds events app that Technical.ly Baltimore reported on last December, is a CODE2040 finalist. The Silicon Valley-based nonprofit matches black and Latino college students with computer science skills or an entrepreneurial bent with startup companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley for summer internships. (Two University of Maryland, Baltimore County, students participated in the CODE2040 internship program last year.)
“CODE2040 puts you in front of their company partners who they feel will make a good match. Stressful and intimidating right now — but [I] am confident I’ll be headed to the Valley,” Bradley said via e-mail.
This will be the third year CODE2040 pairs its fellows with company partners in California, said Iris Gardner, manager of events and outreach at CODE2040. She said the program expects to have around 36 fellows this summer, which would be double the number they accepted last year.
Fellows go through two separate vetting processes. The first is with CODE2040, where Bradley has successfully completed a technical assessment, a written portion and a phone interview with CODE2040. Gardner said the phoner is a “culture fit” test. Ironically such tests have been employed by tech startups as justifications for limiting ethnic and gender diversity in their hiring pools, but Gardner said CODE2040’s phone interview focuses on whether finalists are interested in being entrepreneurs and “giving back” to the program and the San Francisco area.
Bradley is now interviewing with partner companies, the second vetting process, and in a few weeks he’ll know if he’s bound for Silicon Valley.