Florida IT Career Alliance
As a student ambassador I have had the opportunity to attend leadership conferences, visit schools throughout the panhandle, and inspire younger students to pursue careers in STEM fields by working on a variety of projects with local schools.
Last spring (2015) I was highly involved with a local high school in Tallahassee where I visited an introductory engineering class to assist on the class project designing a Lego Mind storm Robot for an upcoming competition. Visiting the students twice a week for the whole semester, I was able to assist with their design and basic programming skills as well as ask them questions to spark their interest. I found that the students not only enjoyed working collaboratively to problem solve, but they also had a surprising amount of curiosity about my career path. I also worked once a month this semester with a high school that visited the College of Engineering to work with Arduino circuit boards and basic programming. The students were greatly interested in learning how to use the technology to create an array of interactive applications.
Moving forward as an ambassador, in the fall (2015) I was a part of launching the Google CS project as a trial run for the schools in our area. I spent three days a week attending a middle school where I was facilitating the program and assisting students when they had programming questions. I found that mentoring students has been a mutually beneficial experience, I learned a great deal from explaining programming concepts that I was able to apply to the computational class I was enrolled in during this semester. Overall, this project was a success and it was rewarding to witness students’ progress and interests continually grow throughout the project.
FITC was involved in providing tours for schools visiting Florida State University and providing information regarding the technology and engineering programs as well as serving to help many other student organizations. FITC has also assisted the Digitech and TalTech conferences, provided LinkedIn help sessions, resume workshops, and more for our fellow college students.
​
My time as a student ambassador was hard work but most certainly rewarding. Reaching out to students locally and across the panhandle has given me the opportunity to spark the interests of students to pursue a technical career and also drives my ambition even further. The FITC program is no longer supported by a grant and thus the activities have currently been diminished as a result.
Please check out the following articles about the Florida IT Career Alliance:
http://fitc.cci.fsu.edu/meet-rachel-roberson/
