Future leaders spend summer with Microsoft

Two Uniondale High School students spent the summer testing the latest in technology in a Microsoft program designed to expand its reach and educate younger generations.

Aaron Osorio, a senior, and his sister, Aariana, a junior, were two of the 30 participants in this year’s program.

Microsoft’s annual summer program, Blacks at Microsoft, invites students ages 15 to 19 to their facilities for six weeks to get an introduction to the world of technology.

The program started in 2016 with a group of six students visiting Microsoft’s New York City location, and it has grown since then to run in multiple locations, including Boston, Washington D.C., and cities in Texas, North Carolina and Florida, with 30 participants at each location, according to Alfred Ojukwu, the worldwide leader of Blacks at Microsoft.

“The whole point is to prepare them for school,” Ojukwu said. “Get them excited about education, coding, working in groups, and teaching them different things about what it means to be a part of a company, a corporate network (and) dealing with being diverse or underrepresented.”

Aaron Osorio expressed appreciation for being selected for such a unique program.

“I think it was a great learning experience for everybody, because it’s almost like they required you to be uncomfortable,” he said. “You needed to get your hands dirty with the coding. You needed to also present. You needed to talk in front of a lot of people. You needed to learn how to design your project to make it aesthetically pleasing to the judges.”

Over the course of the six weeks, the Osorios, along with the other students, learned about coding and software, as well as different mental health techniques and what the corporate world is like, according to Ojukwu.

The students spent much of the time working on “hackathon” projects, where they created and coded their own AI programs, with a presentation to judges and Microsoft faculty about their projects at the end of the program.

Aariana Osorio was the team leader for her group, and their project focused on pollution. They created a web app that showed different kinds of pollution in different areas based on zip code, as well as what to avoid based on certain health risks and what people can do to help reduce the different types of pollution. They won second place for their idea and execution.

“You were able to see a map of the area, and there were markers signaling what kind of pollutions there were, and there was an AI chatbot that gave you suggestions on what to do if you asked,” she said. 

Aaron’s group project, called Amigo Voice, was based on the concept that many kids need another source of comfort when they’re feeling lonely, he said. The solution was a therapy bot that people use while they need it, and then delete it once the task is completed.

“What we tried to do is make it as human as we possibly could in six weeks,” Aaron said. “We could talk to it, it would talk back, and you could customize the entire website in any way that you wanted to do it.”

In addition to their projects, the students also listened to presentations from guest speakers and took field trips to other companies, including the Nasdaq stock market. They even got to ring the Nasdaq bell to open the stock market during one of their Wednesday field trips, which was the first time the Blacks at Microsoft group was given that opportunity, Ojukwu said.

“That was a special treat for them to be able to do the bell ringing,” he said.

He added that Blacks at Microsoft is looking to expand the program to include additional chapters in other areas of the country, such as Atlanta, Chicago, and the west coast, and to partner with cities in ways that would allow future participants to be paid for the work they do.

“We value the program a lot,” Ojukwu said. “There’s so much emotion in it.”

Aariana said she felt inspired by her experience in the program and learned about all the options she has for her future.

“I’ve always been interested in STEAM or STEM, and I knew that I wanted to be an engineer,” Aariana said. “But saying I want to be an engineer is such a broad term because there’s so many different jobs, and as they said in the program, your job, what you end up as, it might not exist right now, because technology is always evolving. It’s always advancing.”