In a partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Intel has launched a US$5m fund aimed at bring 1,000 students from diverse backgrounds into tech, particularly computer engineering and science.
The Intel fund will aim to bring this many students into these fields in the next five years to increase the number of “women and underrepresented minorities” who have been shown in figures released by the major tech companies to be the least represented in tech roles.
As part of the funding drive for the university, Intel says it will support five existing Georgia Tech programmes.
These include summer schools for engineering as well as providing financial support to talented underrepresented minority and non-traditional students as part of the Retaining Inspirational Scholars in Technology and Engineering (RISE) programme.
The funding will also facilitate mentoring of minorities who are undergraduate students, a 10-week summer programme to attract minorities from across the US for graduate programmes and to raise awareness of graduate education among underrepresented students.
“Filling the tech industry pipeline with diverse students is critical to increasing the number of diverse engineers and computer scientists in the field,” said Rosalind Hudnell, vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer at Intel.
“The goal of this programme is to inspire and support more women and underrepresented minorities to earn technical degrees so we can hire them down the road – we want to foster those future tech innovators.”
The company has been rather busy when it comes to attempting to bridge the diversity gap to achieve full representation of underrepresented minorities and women by the year 2020 in its US workforce, with a US$300m fund to finance other programmes similar to the one now in Georgia Tech.
‘Tech Tower’ at Georgia Tech image via Shutterstock
