Creating IT Futures Blog, 9/27/2011 (Khalia Braswell, Stephanie Brown, Julius Clark, David Gottlieb, Reginald Jamerson, Dennis Rankin)

Julius Clark

It's Time to Show IT Off. The thing is, if material success is important to a person, then a kid could do a lot worse than to follow a career in information technology (IT). For example, it was recently reported that mobile app developers are pulling in six figures — whether they had a college degree or not.

Six figures for someone in their 20s! Hey, that seems like rap star status to me.

Julius Clark thinks so, too. Clark is the president of the Charlotte (N.C.) Chapter of the Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA), a professional technology organization formed in 1975. I was introduced to Julius over the summer when Creating IT Futures Foundation partnered with BDPA's own foundation to award $10,000 in scholarships.

Read the full Creating IT Futures Blog post.

CompTIA Blog, 8/31/2011 (Stephanie Brown, Charles Eaton, Wayne Hicks)

Two Foundations Team Up to Provide Scholarships for Talented Minority Students. By the time she had graduated from Stanford University, Stephanie Brown had already completed internships with Fortune 500 companies Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Deloitte. She was only 21. Getting connected with BDPA in high school put Stephanie Brown on a learning track that led to a managing stint at Microsoft.

Says Brown: “Here I had all these awesome role models. It was a turning point in my life.”

Brown attributes much of her success to an organization that has been quietly helping African American students succeed going on four decades. Today with chapters in more than 40 cities, the Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA) has been helping middle school and high school students develop interest and acumen in technology fields such as IT in which minorities (and women, for that matter) tend to be under-represented.

Read the full CompTIA Blog post.