We are very excited to announce that we will be expanding our program to offer our participants the opportunity to build a portfolio of work.
For the first time ever, we will be extending the program for students giving them the opportunity to work on their projects beyond the scope of the program.
We heard YOU!!! We do this because numerous students asked for this opportunity and some have worked in the previous years on their own to finish their projects for extra learning opportunities.
One of our goals has always been to provide participants with the opportunity to extend their skills and work on their projects from the beginning to the end. With that, the program participants will gain an extra valuable skill to add to their resume to support their post-secondary education and scholarship applications and, when they are ready to start, this will help young women with their career journey.
What does this mean? The participants will have the opportunity to work with a team of experts beyond the 4 weeks of the program to finalize their projects.
Each team from each cohort will be assigned a business challenge and they will engage in a “healthy” competition with each other. At the end of 4 weeks, the challenge partner along with a panel of judges will select the winning solution from each team. That means that the winning solution is selected to be finalized, however, the other team can join and they, too, can work with a team of experts and learn just as much from them.
After the program ends on August 20, 2021, the students will be paired with professionals and work on their project to the upcoming 3 to 4 months.
“It is a well known fact that young people are having a hard time to get started in their careers, therefore having the opportunity to work on a portfolio of work before starting their post-secondary education it will not inspire young women to pursue STEM based education, this will allow them to use the skills, and the portfolio of work to engage in numerous opportunities, including their first employment opportunity in tech, applying for post secondary education as well as use it for their applications for scholarships. The opportunities are endless” says Doina Oncel, Founder at hEr VOLUTION.
In 2019, a group of students along with a couple of volunteers from Shopify, have come together at the end of the program and worked on their portfolio of work, informally. Here is what they did.
At the end of the 2020 program, the young women worked on powerful ideas, here is the demo from the Python Cohort and here is the demo from the JavaScript Cohort. The Care on Click team had been selected to participate in the MetroHacks’s EmpowHer Computer Science competition, the only Canadian team to participate in this competition based out of Boston, MA in the US.
“Our young women have been asking for these opportunities and we are very excited to work with our program founding partners at Shopify to make this happen for the participants moving forward” says Doina Oncel, Founder at hEr VOLUTION.