After high schools throughout Silicon Valley freed students for summer vacation, 28 teens returned to a classroom for three days of IT training.
IT is information technology, a growing field that predicts it won’t have nearly enough workers in the coming years as the baby boom generation retires and students become less interested in the profession.
SEMI Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Jose, is trying to solve this problem. In 2001, it launched High Tech U, a three-day workshop that lets high school students explore engineering and computer science through fun, hands-on activities, such as building transistors at Applied Materials and jumping into “bunny suits” at Intel’s clean room.
Applied Materials and Intel, two of Silicon Valley’s top tech companies, teamed up with SEMI to host the region’s sixth High Tech U at their corporate headquarters June 20-22. They especially wanted to spark IT interest among females, African-Americans and Latinos – groups that are significantly underrepresented in IT.
According to a report released in June by the Information Technology Association of America, women represented only 32.4 percent of the IT workforce in 2004, a decline from 41 percent in 1996.
African-Americans accounted for 8.3 percent of IT workers in 2004, compared to 9.1 percent in 1996. And Latinos accounted for 6.4 percent of IT workers in 2004, an increase from the 5.3 percent in 1996 but still significantly lower than the percentage of Latinos in the overall U.S. workforce.
Andres Ramirez, a junior at Latino College Prep Academy in San Jose, signed up for High Tech U at the urging of his teacher. The 16-year-old has been leaning toward a career in construction, in part because he doesn’t want to be constrained by a cubicle all day long.
“I like being outside,” Ramirez said.
But after surviving the first all-indoor day of High Tech U – Ramirez sat in an Applied Materials multipurpose room from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. – he said it wasn’t all that bad.
“I liked the currents,” said Ramirez, who learned to hook up diodes, resistors and capacitors, and measure voltage.
Lisa Anderson, a SEMI vice president, surveyed the multipurpose room and smiled. But she did notice a slight problem.
Only eight of the 28 students were girls.
“Our goal is to recruit 50 percent boys and 50 percent girls,” she said.
One of the girls, Kathryn Daniels, said being outnumbered by boys is “kind of intimidating.” But it’s not something that would stop her from competing against the guys in the IT profession, where the jobs range from computer programmers to electrical engineers.
“I have a lot of friends who are guys,” said the 15-year-old Milpitas High School student. “I think I can interact with guys in the workplace.”
What was more intimidating, she said, was discovering how difficult and time-consuming it is to create microchips and wafers.
Daniels hardly knew anything about IT before entering the program. But now, she said, “I have a lot of respect for the job.”