Paubox Kahikina Scholarship networking lunch: Topics for improvement

Now in its second year, the Paubox Kahikina Scholarship has four recipients.

As a recap, the primary objective of the Paubox Kahikina STEM Scholarship is to encourage Native Hawaiians to pursue careers in computer science and software development.

With students now on winter break, I sent our recipients an invite last week to have lunch with me today at The Pacific Club.

Nick Wong and Alyssa Lyman were able to join me. Here are my takeaways from our lunch.

See also: Paubox Kahikina Scholarship broadens to all Hawaiian STEM majors

Expanding the Network

One of my first questions for Alyssa and Nick was how we can improve the scholarship. After some follow up inquiry, it was obvious to me there is value in a network. Sharing my professional network with our recipients is certainly something I can do.

On that note, I'd like to get a Zoom call going in early January to get our four recipients introduced to the Paubox Kahikina Scholarship Advisor Network.

Big Tech Prep: Nailing the Interview

On the topic of improving the Paubox Kahikina Scholarship, Alyssa astutely pointed out using services like LeetCode to prepare for coding interviews at Big Tech companies would be very helpful. Since these services aren't free, I think more research here on our part is warranted.

Perhaps Paubox can purchase LeetCode credits on behalf of Kahikina Scholarship recipients. Nick Wong supplemented the discussion by mentioning he found the book "Cracking the Coding Interview" to be useful in job interview prep.

Since Nick already had the book, I bought three more copies from my iPhone for Alyssa, Lauren, and Kobe.

Keywords

As I covered in my post Software Engineering is an Honorable Profession, college debt in America is spiraling out of control. In fact, the average debt for a bachelor’s degree has climbed to $30,301. In my opinion, that sounds more like a person's first year of college.

At any rate, we know students are clamoring for help to offset debt load. On that note, Alyssa shared some keywords she used while researching scholarships:

• Minority scholarships
• Native Hawaiian Woman STEM Scholarship

We can certainly get to work on ranking for those keywords.