Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Matthew Stephenson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Matthew, appreciate you joining us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

There are three main lessons my parents taught me that are still apparent in everything I do today: accountability, respect and compassion.

I learned early on how incredibly important accountability is in life. I grew up with the sentiment, “The job isn’t done until it’s done right.” This led to several late nights working on critical projects despite being in over my head on content expectations. I needed to ensure that whatever was asked of me was not only delivered on time but was at the expected caliber of my teammates. This persisted with me during my early internships starting in high school and proceeded into my early college years.

The second lesson is respect. Nobody is below you, nor is anyone above you. It doesn’t matter your social, ethnic or economic background, everyone deserves your respect and nobody deserves to fear you.

The third, and arguably most important, lesson my parents taught me is compassion. My parents often led by example in this regard. They showed me early on the value in caring for those around you. Throughout my childhood, I served at the Church Soup Kitchen every Saturday with my family. This act reinforced the importance of community, empathy, and service.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

In my early years, I was encouraged to “study computers” by an elder at my church. This along with my affinity for business, led me to double-major in Finance and Information Systems. While completing my undergraduate degree, I completed several coding projects, held several side jobs, and earned a coding internship that helped to significantly pay down my college expenses. The further I progressed in my educational journey, the more passionate I became about wanting to introduce underestimated and under-resourced students to these accessible skillsets.

During my years of working at SEO, helping to place Black and Latine undergraduates into life-changing roles on Wall Street, I realized that I could replicate this impact but at an earlier intervention point when students may not even be considering pursuing a college degree. This realization led to the creation of Code2College and our innovative model of placing underrepresented high school students into paid, technical, life-changing internships.

Starting at any early age, these roles can help to cultivate generational wealth which would lead to transformative change within lower-income communities. This transformation could help put a stop to the opportunity gap (absence of women, Black and Latine representation in STEM) which plague our STEM workforce ecosystems.

I am incredibly proud of the impact that we are already seeing in our early stages of operation. We’ve been able to scale this work nationally, have served over 3,000 students and have placed hundreds into paid, technical internships.

One might wonder – and many prospective hiring managers have asked me – “What exactly can a high school student do?”. I would tell them to look at the numbers: 83% of hiring managers rate Code2College HS interns as performing at or above the level of undergraduate interns, 98% of Code2College interns enter 4-year undergraduate degree programs, 80% of Code2College interns pursue a STEM undergraduate degree and 100% of Code2College interns that have graduated from college have been offered full-time STEM positions.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

The largest pivot our company had to make was in March of 2020 as a response to the COVID 19 Pandemic. Like many other companies during that time, we needed to switch from in-person programming to a fully remote model within a matter of weeks. However, this exploited another problem: many of our students did not have access to a computer or even wifi. In the face of this issue, we turned to our numerous partners to donate laptops for us to refurbish and send to our students with no cost to them. At one point, we leveraged one of our partner CTOs and his son to reimage 80 laptops in a single weekend! We were able to distribute dozens of laptops to students all over Central TX and stood up new programming in only two weeks time.

The lockdown also created another issue: social isolation. To combat this, we started hosting Fun Friday activities with our students who were otherwise bored and disconnected from friends. Each Friday we would introduce a new STEM topic, activity or other random project to our students and through this, we were able to reengage 100+ students months before school districts were able to reach them.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Building our reputation takes time, and frankly, is still an ongoing process for us. Our unique program model initially brings people to our door curious to learn more about what high school students are capable of. From there, we show our proven track record of the services we provide and the impact we make in our students’ lives. From an internal standpoint and as a small business, we embody a “get it done” attitude with a client and community first approach. Everyone within our organization is working towards our mission of serving our students. This consistency in messaging and larger impact in the community is what has slowly built up our reputation.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://code2college.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/code2college/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/code2college
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/code2college/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/code2college
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQq1Gtv7vXWzYUMrEYfs6DQ