This decal runs concurrently with the Women in Tech Initiative at UC Speaker Series: Identifying Pathways into Tech.

Bringing together academics, CEOs, teachers, and inspirers, this speaker series showcases the abundant pathways into different sectors of tech. This series hopes to illuminate the human side of tech by exploring the person behind the product/idea. Find out more about the speaker series here.

Opportunities and Barriers is for students who want hands-on experience in creating projects that advance diversity and inclusion in tech. The course engages in an innovative approach to learning by viewing social-good opportunities from diverse perspectives.

The course leverages weekly guest speakers who are practitioners from diverse sectors of tech fields – college recruiting to medical technology – who work toward finding technology driven sociological solutions. By exploring diverse social good innovation via guest speakers with expertise, this decal hopes to enable students to see different pathways others have taken into the tech industry, network and get feedback on their big ideas. Students from all majors can learn new pathways into technology careers where they can use their skills to enter unexpected fields and/or identify pathways into tech. 

This course uses innovative pedagogy as a student-centered learning, student facilitated course that brings students across campus majors and diverse life experiences to contribute to discussion-based learning rather than a single-perspective lecture. The course culminates with a capstone project where they will be able to pitch and prototype their idea in front of a panel of judges and their peers.