ScriptEd Bootcamp!

ScriptEd's 2015 Internship Bootcamp is underway!  Today we're at Viacom with our 70 interns. Yesterday we were at Appnexus, and tomorrow we'll be at Google.

Today, our students are learning about workplace communication, brushing up APIs, exploring different types of development environments, getting practice with commenting code and working on projects that they'll present tomorrow afternoon.

It was really neat to have two of our alums teach a workshop on workplace communication today. Lilibeth and Rebecca both just finished their freshman year of college. They're both majoring in Computer Science.  I think having them give tips on how to interact in the workplace resonated especially well with our interns.

Enjoy some photos from yesterday and today below.

Appnexians Leslie and John welcome the ScriptEd students

Volunteer Paul speaks at a workshop on 'Meeting Your Manager'

Cool Appnexus T-Shirt!

Volunteer Adam gives students a refresher on Bootstrap

Part of the ScriptEd team outside of Appnexus

Day 2 at Viacom

Spin

Below, I'm going to tell you two stories of how my race went this weekend:

Story 1:

Yesterday, I was so excited to compete as an Elite Triathlete for the first time ever at the Philly Triathlon.  I shaved off 5 minutes in my bike time and 4 minutes off my run time from last year's Philly Tri. I finished 8th* in the Female Elite division.  I'm so excited that my times keep improving this season.

Story 2:

Yesterday's Philly triathlon ended up being a duathlon because of a torrential downpour. The race directors cancelled the swim - which was really bad news for me because the swim is by far my strongest leg of the triathlon.  The race started way behind schedule and was really muddy.  I lost my Garmin watch -- an expensive piece of equipment -- during the bike portion so I couldn't keep track of my time. I ended up getting second to last in my division.

----
Both of these stories are true. Like with most stories, there are key points that I add or leave out depending on my audience or on how I feel about what happened.  If I hadn't taken off a bunch of time from the previous year, I probably would have told more people the second version of the story. In reality, I'm really happy about how I did, so I've been telling people the first version.

People spin stories and issues all the time. As a business leader, I try to keep spin in mind whenever someone brings something to my attention -- It's important for uncovering problems and understanding the full picture before making a decision on something.  Here are some of my favorite questions:

• What do you mean by _____?
• If you do _____, how will it affect ________?
• If you were looking at this from ___'s perspective, how would he/she describe it?
• What's the upside of this?

Spin is also important for positive thinking. Almost every bad situation has something positive about it - something to be learned, a new opportunity, or a way to start from scratch. Positive thinking is incredibly important for leading a team.  It's hard to motivate people who can't see the silver lining.

So use spin! It's great! But also be aware of it.  It helps keep me both optimistic and realistic.  

--

*My unofficial results after that race had me in 6th, but the official results had me at 8th. 

Bucket Lists

I received a 2 am email with the subject line "Plans" from one of my friends last night with the following message:

1. Before I die I want to _________________
2. Before I die I want to _________________
3. Before I die I want to _________________
4. Before I die I want to _________________
5. Before I die I want to _________________
6. Before I die I want to _________________
7. Before I die I want to _________________
8. Before I die I want to _________________
9. Before I die I want to _________________
10. Before I die I want to _________________

What do you fill those 10 spots with?

----

Let's set aside my friend's existential crisis for a second and talk about bucket lists.  I believe very strongly in the idea that people should strive to do the things they want to do every day and not wait for 'someday' to do what they want. In practice, how you live your life every day matters a lot more than getting to see Machu Picchu before you die.  

That's not to say I'm perfect at every day life, of course. No one is.  We all are limited in our resources and time, and we all face hardships and challenges that make every day life difficult (some of us more than others, for sure).  There are plenty of things that are hard to change in my life and that I can't control. We all have those things.  For those things, I try to either make the situation better or change my outlook and stay positive.

This also doesn't mean I don't have long term goals -- I have plenty! They are a big part of what makes up my day to day life.

But bucket lists aren't really my thing. Going for bike rides on Saturday mornings, spending time in the park and getting to work with kids are my thing.  

Kids Say the Darndest Things.. on Age

Kids really say the funniest things.  Because I've worked with kids for my entire career, I've had a lot of experience with being the old person in the room.  Kids say really, really funny things about about age.

Below I'm sharing some funny tidbits from things kids have said to me over the years about my age.

On Age and Skin (from 2008, when I was 24)

I was at a pizza shop with a group of students near Columbia one night after a Model UN conference.  The restaurant was covered in mirrors, and we had to watch ourselves eat in front of these mirrors.  I looked exhausted, so I made a comment to one of the students saying "wow, I look old and exhausted.  Look at the bags under my eyes."

The student responded "yeah, and look at your wrinkles!"

I relayed the story to a different student the following day.  That student reassured me saying "Miss, you don't have wrinkles. Your skin is way too oily to have wrinkles."

On Marriage (from 2007, when I was 23).

I told my students a story about how when I was a kid, I thought I would get married when I was 25. Then I started college, and thought I would wait until I was 30. By the end of college, I inched that number up to 35.

One student reacted frantically and said "35?! You better hurry up and meet someone - you've only got 2 years!"

On Having Kids

Our 18 year old intern announced to our staff recently that she would definitely have kids by the time she was 26 -- anything older would be WAY too old.  She said this not realizing that nearly our entire staff is older than 26, and none of us have kids.

Internship Visits!

We're excited to kick off our ScriptEd Summer Internship Program in a little less than a week!

Over the past two weeks, our interns have been visiting their host companies to meet managers, tour offices and learn about workplace expectations. Next Monday - Wednesday, we'll hold our internship bootcamp where our students will learn some additional workplace skills before they get started with working full-time after the July 4th holiday.  Thank you to Appnexus, Viacom and Google for hosting our bootcamp sessions.

Thanks so much to our internship providers who are working with our kids this summer! We really can't wait to get started.

Here are some photos from our visits over the past couple of weeks.

Mindspark

O'Reilly Media

Uncommon Goods 

Yuzu

Great Teachers Make Great Leaders

The more experience I get with running a company, the more I'm convinced that teaching is one of the best ways for people to develop leadership skills. All of ScriptEd's staff members have spent time teaching.  Daily, I see them apply the skills they've learned managing a classroom to the work they do at ScriptEd.  I also see ScriptEd's volunteers develop these skills over the course of the school year. Here are some of the ways that teaching makes for strong leaders:

1. Good Teachers are Good Communicators.  It's incredibly important to be very clear and direct in your communication when you are leading a classroom. Good teachers also understand that things need to be explained in several ways to ensure that everyone understands what's happening and what the expectations are.
   
   As ScriptEd continues to grow, we are learning how important it is to communicate very clearly with each other and with all of our stakeholders. In order to run things efficiently and effectively, we need to make sure we're all on the same page.
2. Good Teachers Have a Plan.  All good teachers plan their lessons and have an idea of what they want to achieve -- or what key understandings they want their students to have by the end of a class, unit or year. Having a plan keeps you focused on what's most important.  Similarly, at ScriptEd I see our staff focused on measurable outcomes. They have goals that they want to achieve, and they're experiences in the classroom help make them very good at planning the ways they'll achieve goals.
3. Good Teachers Know How to Adapt on the Fly.  While good teachers spend a lot of time planning, the reality is that things almost never go according to plan. Teachers always need to think creatively and improvise to ensure that students are learning.  The same is true of almost any project at work, and especially at ScriptEd.  We have way too many balls in the air to do everything perfectly.  It's important that our staff knows how to improvise, roll with the punches, think outside the box for solutions, and make the best of any situation without losing their cool.  Teachers do this all the time.
4. Good Teachers Know How to Manage Many Things at Once.  Think about all the things that teachers have to manage: lesson planning, grading, behavior management, contacting parents, making copies, buying supplies, professional development, field trip planning, after school club planning, figuring out to differentiate instruction -- the list goes on and on.  AND -- they have to do all of this on top of actually teaching. I've never felt so overwhelmed by any job than I did when I was teaching (and this INCLUDES starting-up a company - seriously, teaching is harder).  Teachers learn how to manage many different things at the same time. They learn how to delegate, share resources, and work efficiently to make sure everything gets done. These are incredibly important leadership skills.
5. Good Teachers Know How to Differentiate Their Management Styles.  Personalities are a very real thing, and no two people can be managed the same way. When you're teaching, you're usually managing 30 personalities at the same time while trying to maintain order in a classroom.  You learn that some students need to be given special assignments to keep them on task,  that some students respond really well to praise, and that some just need to be left alone. You learn how to pair groups of students together to maximize learning.  Good leaders know how to differentiate their management styles to get the best work out of people.

While ScriptEd will not always be an "all-teacher" staff, whenever we hire a former teacher I feel very confident that we're gaining a team member who will continue to help us thrive.

Monday Inspiration: Why Not Me?

This is one of my all-time favorite ads.  With less than a week until the Philly Triathlon, less than a month until the NYC Triathlon and about 6 weeks until the National Championships, I suspect that I'll be watching a lot of this ad in the next few weeks.


Enjoy.

Good Ideas Come From Everywhere

During our staff retreat on Wednesday, our conversation turned towards making a staff handbook.  We were talking about the different things we would want it to say and how useful a guide might be for our new employees.

I've never put together a staff handbook before, and have been thinking a lot about what I would want to include.  During the conversation, I was pretty sure that we hadn't come close to thinking of everything.

And then our 18-year old intern, Rebecca, announced that she was already on top of making a staff handbook. A few weeks ago, I jokingly said to her that if she could get together a great staff handbook, I would hire her full-time immediately. (I wouldn't actually because she just finished her freshman year of college and I want her to finish school--she knows this.)

On her own, Rebecca started reaching out to a handful of start-ups and asked them to share their staff handbooks with her so she could use them as a guide for making a draft for ScriptEd.

I am completely blown away by Rebecca's initiative.  She's clearly a very ambitious and talented young woman.

I also think that ScriptEd's culture plays into Rebecca's confidence in her own ability and agency.  I believe in empowering our staff, volunteers and community to shape the direction of ScriptEd -- It's as much their organization as it is mine. Giving people ownership over their work makes them more committed and invested in it. Plus, if I micromanage everything we'll never achieve the scale we need to achieve our long term goals.

Good ideas come from all sorts of people, and if we give people the agency to take ownership of those ideas and run with them, we'll achieve a lot more.

ScriptEd Staff Retreat 2015 - Reflection

We just finished up the second day of our ScriptEd staff retreat.

One of the big themes that came up over and over as we reflected is that we need to build stronger operational and organizational systems as we continue to scale.  Over the summer, we'll start using project management software that will *hopefully* reduce email traffic to our inbox, and we'll work to build out a CRM.  

We also thought a lot about our calendar for the year, and started to plot out key dates throughout the next school year.  Our big priorities right now are getting our internships started, recruiting new volunteers for this Fall, solidifying our school partnerships, and hiring and on-boarding our new staff.

We were also really fortunate to have Jen Chiou from Code Speak Labs do some professional development workshops with our team. We learned about giving and receiving feedback, about how to motivate people, and about 'hypothesis first' problem solving.

There's a lot to think about, and it's really easy to feel overwhelmed by everything.  I am the type of person who likes to put my head down and get work done, and long periods of reflection with out action can make me feel antsy. At the same time, reflection is so necessary. Without it, we might march off doing lots of work in the wrong direction.

From our discussion on all things related to volunteers: recruitment, processing, training, placement, engagement, retention and reflection. 

Be like SpongeBob!

We're in the middle of our ScriptEd staff retreat, so today's post will be extra brief.  Our student Sam dropped some wisdom on us last night - we should all be like SpongeBob:

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Show Me Your Passion: Cover Letters

I've read tons of cover letters over the last few months. We've received applications from a lot of very impressive people.  However, over and over again, so many cover letters have one fatal flaw that immediately puts applicants in the "no" pile:

If your cover letters doesn't mention ScriptEd, its mission, and why that mission is important to you, you will not get an interview. Here's why:

1. Working at a company with a social mission is really hard work. We're a nonprofit. You're not going to be making a ton of money. I need to know that there is something else motivating you to do this work. 
2. Not only are we a nonprofit, we're also a startup. You're going to help form the direction of the company because you're joining a small team.  I need to know that you're committed to the work. 
3. You need to be able to 'sell' ScriptEd's mission.  You should be able to speak and write passionately and persuasively about ScriptEd. The only way we can make a bigger impact is by getting more people involved in our work. 

Show me your passion!

Full Circle

On Saturday, we received a volunteer application from a ScriptEd alum for the first time ever.  This Fall, Earl Clifton will join ScriptEd as a volunteer at his alma mater, Harlem Village Academy High School. He will team teach with some of the volunteers who first taught him how to code, including Andrew Ingraham and Megan Taylor.

I wrote about Earl and his coding raps last week.  Earl is now interning at a tech startup and will soon become a full-time web developer.

I frequently say that I'll know that ScriptEd is successful when things come full circle: when the students we serve come back to us as volunteers.

It's happening, and it feels amazing.

This is a photo of ScriptEd's first class of Summer Interns (2013) that sits on my desk.  Earl is in the middle!

Two Weeks of Bike Commuting

I love riding my bike, but I've always been really afraid of commuting by bike in New York City.  The traffic is kind of crazy.  I was also in a bike accident about five years ago (I got hit by a cyclist from behind while running and ended up with a very bloody face in the ER), and it's made me nervous about riding in crowded places ever since.

This means that a lot of the biking I do has been restricted to loops around Central Park and Prospect Park, and riding up and down the West Side Highway bike path for the last few years.  As you might imagine, this gets pretty boring after a while.  So, I bought a commuter bike a few weeks ago to up my triathlon game and to get to see more of the city by bike.

Unfortunately, I still think it's pretty dangerous to commute in New York City.  It's going to take a lot of time for me to get comfortable on the roads.  I'm only two weeks in, but here are some things I've learned:

1. Bike lanes are kind of meaningless.  I try to ride on roads that have bike lanes, but most of the time there are cars parked in the bike lanes (or pedestrians decide that bike lanes are for them), so I'm not really sure whether it's better to ride on a road with bike lanes or without bike lanes. 
2. Avoid the Brooklyn Bridge, unless you go across really early or really late. It's overcrowded with tourists. Use a different bridge.  
3. Watch out for cyclists who text or take photos (sometimes with a selfie-stick) while riding.  An unbelievable amount of people text and take photos while cycling. I don't get this at all.
4. Use your teacher voice. I've learned to be pretty vocal while riding my bike to make sure people know that I'm behind them, passing them, etc.
5. Pedestrians don't think bikes are dangerous vehicles.  Pedestrians constantly cross the road when bikes are coming their way.  

It's so important to be really alert and able to quickly react when riding around this city. I'm going to keep working on it. 

Professional.. with a Touch of Whimsy

I have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks interviewing job candidates for positions at ScriptEd.  I'm asked the question "What is ScriptEd's culture like?" over and over again by interviewees.

This is a really tough question to answer.  There is so much that goes into our culture, and it feels like it's still shifting as our team continues to find its identity.  So far, the best answer we've been able to come up with is "Professional.... with a touch a whimsy."

ScriptEd is an organization that values professionalism and measurable results.  We collect an enormous amount of data on our program to measure student learning, volunteer engagement, company satisfaction, school satisfaction and student outcomes.

At the same time, we're working with kids and we love to have fun.  So every once in a while, we get a hint of whimsy in our culture.  For example, we had a program wide selfie competition happen towards the end of the school year.  We celebrate our employees birthdays by making them King or Queen for the day.  We do shakedowns at hackathons.

The work we do is hard, and we are fighting an uphill battle for our kids every day. We're not making a ton of money.  If we can make our work fun, I think everyone wins.

Volunteer Daniel at our Rainbow Themed Hackathon

ScriptEd Curriculum Hackathon - This Saturday!

This Saturday, ScriptEd will hold its first ever Curriculum Hackathon.  A group of volunteers will compete in teams to build lesson plans and projects for our Advanced students.  Prizes will be awarded to the teams that create the best lesson/project plans.

ScriptEd creates its curriculum in collaboration with its volunteer software developers. We do this to keep our lessons current and relevant to industry trends and best practices.  Further, everyone on ScriptEd's staff is a former teacher.  We combine our backgrounds in teaching and knowledge of pedagogy with our volunteers' expertise to make effective and impactful learning experiences for our students. This helps our kids succeed in summer internships and eventual careers in technology.

If you're interested in checking out our ever evolving curriculum, click here, and if you want to help contribute to it, please join us on Saturday!

Coding Raps!

One of our ScriptEd alums, Earl, is attending Flatiron School through the NYC Web Development Fellowship.  He is now completing his internship and is well on his way to becoming a web developer (and, we hope, a ScriptEd volunteer!)

Below I'm sharing some of his freestyle raps about code.  They are awesome (especially Fizz Buzz. Watch it!)

Enjoy.

Fizz Buzz!

Ruby on Rails

Legacy Show

Triathlon Season + ScriptEd's Triathlon Team

This weekend, I competed in my first triathlon of the season - a very hilly Northeast Regional Championship at Quassy Amusement Park in Connecticut. I am really pleased with how I did.  Last year, I finished the race in 2hrs and 49 minutes, and this year I got at 2:41. I dropped a minute in the swim, 2 minutes in the bike, and 4 minutes on the run, and went a bit faster in my transitions.  I also re-qualified for the USA Triathlon National Championship in Milwaukee this August. If this is any indication of things to come, I'm feeling pretty confident that this will be my best season yet.

This season, I combined my two passions -- ScriptEd and competing in triathlons -- and registered ScriptEd as a charity partner in the New York City Triathlon.  A small group of us have been training together and raising money for ScriptEd.  Please consider donating. If you're interested in competing with us - please let me know. I just secured three more individual spots on our team.


Happy Monday.

Changes

Yesterday, I turned 31. Thank you to everyone who made my day really special.

If I could pick one theme that defined the last year of my life, it would be “change.” My life completely changed in the last year:

1. I moved three times -- From Manhattan, to Brooklyn, to another place in Brooklyn. Before last year, I lived in the same apartment in Manhattan for seven years - the longest that I’ve lived in one place for my entire life. There’s a lot I miss about living in Manhattan and in my old apartment, but I also feel like I’ve “come home” by moving to Brooklyn. Living in Brooklyn forces to me have more of a work / life balance. I’m really loving it here and can’t believe it took me so long to get here.
   
2. I ended a relationship with my best friend. Erik and I lived together for five years. He is one of the most creative, passionate, charismatic and intelligent people I know. He has so much to do with who I am today - he taught me all about bikes, he got me into programming, and he is the person who first came up with the idea for ScriptEd. His family became my family. Our relationship allowed me to pursue all of the things I wanted to in my twenties. In the end we decided, for a whole bunch of reasons, that we were not meant to be each other’s life partners.  
   
3. ScriptEd changed a lot. A little more than a year ago, it was just me and Becca working out of my apartment and coffee shops. We moved offices four different times in the last year to accommodate our growth.  We worked with a lot more volunteers, students and schools. The things I do day to day in my job are very different now than the things I did a year a go.

I definitely know a lot more about myself at 31 than I did at 21, but I’m still figuring some stuff out. All these changes have made me re-examine who I am and what I want out of life. They’ve all made me grow.

I’m really excited for the next year.

Wallpaper is Coming Down!

The wallpaper on the 17th floor bathroom walls at WeWork FiDi is coming down.  (See Monday and Wednesday's posts for more information.

Here's the email I got from WeWork about it:

I'll refrain from commenting on some of the parts of this email.  Overall, this is a good way to kick off my birthday :)

(Yes, it's my birthday! You should DEFINITELY give me a present. In fact, what I want most for my birthday is for you to donate to Becca's or Tom's Triathlon Fundraiser for ScriptEd. Becca and Tom give their blood, sweat and tears to ScriptEd every single day and could use some help. Thanks!)

Wallpaper Update

On Monday, I wrote a post about the WeWork bathroom wallpaper. I have also posted a few instagram photos here, here and here about the wallpaper. This has generated a lot of conversation on both Twitter and Facebook, and when we arrived back to the office from our internship training yesterday we found a ton more post it notes on the bathroom wall (which were removed almost immediately after I tweeted about there being more post it notes...)

Here's a more full story of what's been happening.  We first submitted a complaint about the wallpaper to WeWork last Thursday, May 28th. We did not receive a response to the complaint, so I followed up with them yesterday (Tuesday, June 2nd) again.  The Community Team at FiDi said I would need to address the issue with the Brand Team at WeWork.  Here's the exchange we had:

Me to WeWork:

WeWork Response:

Here's to hoping this gets resolved. While WeWork strives to be edgy, cool and forward thinking in its decor, I think we can all agree that there is nothing edgy, cool or forward thinking about objectifying women. That's been going on for ages.

Volunteer Feature: Andrew Ingraham

I'm planning to feature some of our awesome volunteers here from time to time.

Me and Andrew at Get Fit or Be Hacking.
(We were a team - and we won!)

Meet Andrew Ingraham, a software developer with About.com. Andrew is one of two of ScriptEd's first ever volunteers. He accidentally wandered into our first volunteer training at Columbia University in 2012, and because no one else showed up, we had no choice but to take him.

Andrew has totally blown me away by his commitment to ScriptEd and our students. This year, he completed his third year of teaching at Harlem Village Academy High School. He played a critical role in creating the first version of our curriculum, and he also has taken on ScriptEd students as interns at About.com every summer, and this year, is raising money for ScriptEd by competing in the New York City Triathlon (want to donate to his fundraiser? Click here.) He's also just an incredible teacher, friend, and human being, and our students are so lucky to have him.

Below I asked Andrew some questions.  Enjoy!

What's your favorite part about volunteering for ScriptEd?
Seeing a student have an "Aha!" moment.  Their excitement is contagious and it brings me back to how enthralled I was when I was first learning to code.  It never fails to put a huuuge smile on my face.

How has ScriptEd made you better at your job?
It's completely transformed my role at About.com.  When I started at About 3 years ago, I was a backend developer writing C++ with absolutely no frontend experience.  Since ScriptEd teaches HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (all frontend technologies), I had no choice but to learn them and to learn them fast.  As a result, my frontend skills have developed tremendously to the point where I'm now a frontend developer on my team at About and better at JavaScript than I ever was at C++.
It's made me a better public speaker, teacher, and gotten me more involved with the programming community as a whole, all of which benefit my work tremendously.
And it's not technically part of my job, but I'm designing and teaching a 10-week web development course for non-developers at About.com which will largely follow ScriptEd's first year curriculum.

Has ScriptEd changed your life?
Practically every aspect of my life has improved as a result of ScriptEd.  I'll keep this short, but it changed me from a backend developer to a full stack developer.  It introduced me to a community of amazing people, many who have become my best friends.  It expanded my programming interests beyond what's relevant to the coding I do at work.
I have found nothing more motivating than having students who depend on me.  It makes me so much more driven to understand material and find interesting ways of sharing that knowledge.
ScriptEd has made me a better programmer, teacher, and person.

WeWork Wallpaper

ScriptEd works out of the WeWork offices in the Financial District. Recently, WeWork put up new wallpaper in the women's restroom featuring sliced off women's legs and crotch areas.

This is ridiculous.  I feel uncomfortable having guests use the restroom, let alone any students that visit us.  It's disrespectful and makes me not too happy about working here.  This definitely does not scream "professional work environment."

Hoping WeWork gets this message and takes this crap down ASAP.