December 3, 2024
"You cannot be what you cannot see".
Next week during PreparationTech's Tech Skills Day, a group of lucky high school students will get to talk to Mattias Scheek, an Afro-Dutch entrepreneur who sold the speaker technology company he and his brother Timothy Scheek founded to Sonos for a cool $100 million.
The Tech Skills Day kicks off PreparationTech's 2024-2025 program and will bring together students from several Dutch high schools who are interested in learning more about tech-related study, training and careers. The students (mostly girls, racial and ethnic minority students, and students from low-income backgrounds) will hear Mattias' story, network with other role models from groups under-represented in tech, and then participate in coding, robotics and AI chatbot development workshops. The event will take place at the Amsterdam Public Library's main branch.
The Day has been developed as a direct response to student feedback from last year's PreparationTech pilot program sponsored by Adyen, Rabobank and Schuberg Philis. The majority of the 150 high school students who participated lamented that their schools do not offer similar classes and specifically asked to experience tech skills classes. (Before the Pilot Program, 20% of students indicated an interest in tech studies, training, and careers while by the end of the program, this rose to 70%.)
A big thanks to our event partners: Codam College, OBA Maakplaats, OBA Next and NewTechKids. And to Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, for training our teachers to give the AI chatbot development workshop.