On Friday I had the privilege of accompanying our G:URL Gamers and their amazing instructors Regis and Amy to their final presentation at Zynga. The students have been working for the past two weeks to create their own games, which they shared with a group of female engineers, designers, project managers and programmers.

Last week, 35 Next Gen students and eight staff members, as well as 15 students from Loyalton High School, caravanned to YouTube headquarters in San Bruno.

On February 11, BAVC Media Next Gen and Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) held a career panel for young professionals at City College of San Francisco. The panelists shared advice and discussed how they've forged careers in the game, design, film, coding and audio industries.

Three Next Gen students made their radio debut last month on KALW’s Your Call program, hosted by Rose Aguilar. The discussion was candid, with students touching on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, their own experiences interacting with the police, and how young people have plenty to contribute to social justice movements. 

The Lesbians Who Tech Summit, held at the Castro Theatre in February, created a radical, wonderful, alternate reality in which the tech industry wasn’t represented by the shirtless brogrammers on Dice.com’s now-ubiquitous billboards, but by the 1,200 (mostly) queer women in attendance. 

I recently had the opportunity to participate in the webinar "Makers, Learners, Seekers: Showcasing Your Work Through Portfolios and Certification" as part of @america's Makers in American Spaces webinar series, where the audience explored non-traditional ways of assembling knowledge outside of the classroom.

The following reflections were provided by two peer mentors from the Bridges Fellowship program, which just completed two intensive week-long series of career workshops and trainings in June and July.