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Posts tagged as “STEM fields”

11 Year-Old College Freshman Carson Huey-You Studies Quantum Physics at Texas Christian University

By goodblacknews on January 8, 2016
11 year-old college freshman Carson Huey-You (photo via risingafrica.org)

In this day and age, 11-year olds don’t usually go to college.  But it’s those who break the rules that get the most recognition.
Carson Huey-You is amazing and brilliant.  The young prodigy was accepted to Texas Christian University at the age of 10, where he chose to study the difficult field of Quantum Physics.  In case you’ve never heard of Quantum Physics, it is defined as:  The study of the behavior of matter and energy at the molecular, atomic, nuclear, and even smaller microscopic levels.
The young student speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently, and got 1770 on his SAT.  He is also a very good piano player, among other things.   He was so young that he wasn’t able to actually apply to the school online.  It turns out that the software would not allow applicants to state that they were born in the year 2002.
The child is expected to be a college graduate by the age of 16, which would make him a year younger than the youngest graduate the school has ever had. ‘‘I’m taking calculus, physics, history and religion. Those are my four classes,’ Huey-You told CBS DFW.

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Claretta Huey-You and Carson Huey-You (photo via risingafrica.org)

This is not the first time that young Carson showed such promise.  He was reading by the age of 1 and doing pre-algebra by the age of 5, according to his parents.
“He’s definitely very talented and also he’s very serious about his work and he really enjoys it.  And that’s the best that a professor can hope for his students, right?’ Associate math professor Qao Zhang said to CBS DFW.
Carson says that his first week of college was “overwhelming, but exciting and fun.”
In the spirit of family learning and growth, Carson’s mother expects to join him on campus to get education of her own.  Claretta Huey-You says that she herself is planning on going back to school to study nursing.   Additionally, his brother is expected to finish high school by the age of 13.
To read more, go to: risingafrica.org

New Fellowship "Code For Progress" Prepares People of Color for Coding Careers

By goodblacknews on August 27, 2014

The 2014 graduating class of Code for Progress (Photo courtesy of Code for Progress)

The graduation ceremony started with a freedom chant led by fellow Angie Rollins, a member of the BYP100. The 40 plus people in attendance joined in, clapping and repeating the chorus: “What side are you on my people?/What side are you on?” It grounded the event in this political moment, referencing Michael Brown and Ferguson in the chant as they began. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a graduation for community organizers, or radical political educators. Instead, it was a graduation for 11 newly trained coders, finishing the first-ever Code for Progress (CFP) fellowship. They all spent the last four months in an intensive coding bootcamp in Washington, D.C., learning from instructor Aliya Rahman the basics of a handful of different coding languages, with the hopes of beginning their careers in technology.

The graduation was held at Google’s downtown Washington, D.C., offices, a fact that felt both fitting and somewhat ironic given recent conversations stirred up this summer with the release of Google’s, Apple, LinkedIn and Yahoo’s self-reported diversity statistics. Unlikely to be a surprise to anyone working within the  industry, the stats show abysmal representation for non-Asian people of color overall, and a poor showing for women as well. So for the 11 fellows, seven of whom are women of color, they are unlikely to find many peers in their future places of employment. The freedom chant, while distinctly out of place at Google, was actually quite fitting for the mission of CFP—its goal is to bring politically minded organizers into the tech industry.
The fellowship is a direct response to the lack of diversity in the tech field, and it also tries to address a root cause of these disparities: access to computer science education. “Folks who are in communities of color have a higher probability of going to a school that doesn’t teach computer science,” says Rahman. “Seven kids took the advanced placement computer science exam in Washington, D.C., [last year], compared to hundreds in Maryland and Virginia.”