A handful of students at Barber Middle School in Cobb County didn’t take a trip to the beach this summer, but instead entered the workforce as interns with MAD-learn.
MAD-learn, which has an Atlanta office, is a company that helps students develop their own apps that launched in 2014. Their focus is on computer science and STEM in the classroom, and they’ve been running this internship program since June 2017.
But why middle schoolers? Alefiya Master, creator of the internship program and CEO at MAD-learn, believes that students need to be engaged early in order for them to take more computer science courses in the future.
“We need more students who are sitting at the table, participating in technology creation, and having their voices heard,” said Master.
MAD-learn is one of few programs that actually allows middle schoolers to gain job experience. The organization also partnered up with the Congressional App Challenge to bring students to Congress to showcase their coding.
Eighth graders were able to get hands on experience at hard skills, such as software development and soft skills, such as teamwork, according to a news release. The interns selected at Barber Middle were Buchi Emerah, Ana Carroll, Syeda Tanzim, Jalen Walker and Alix Bennett-McMayne. Three more interns, Aaliyah Anderson, Sophia Simon and Suany Rivera-Abrego will be interning with the company in the fall.
Alix said that the program helped her craft better emails.
“Working with MAD-learn was amazing,” Ana said in a news release, “I got to experience what it was like to work with a team worldwide and hear their thoughts, ideas, and perspectives.”
While the internships wasn’t paid, the eighth graders can put this experience on their resume. That puts them a leg above their peers.
Getting job experience before they go into the workforce helps students figure out what they want to do, and shows employers that they can capable of handling various tasks, according to Indeed. Employers are more likely to hire someone with job experience than not. Mentors were assigned to these students, and that allowed them to network with them to build to other opportunities.
The MAD-interns return to the classroom, equipped with the skills of resume writing, coding and teamwork, and have the job experience to prove it.
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