“They say the future is being written in lines of code,” Mariel Reyes ’02 says. “I do not want to live in a world where 50 percent of the population is not part of the equation in creating solutions for it.”
It is a problem Reyes left a World Bank job to help solve. In 2016 she founded the nonprofit {reprograma} to teach Brazilian women to code. The country has a growing tech sector, but only 17 percent of engineers are women. The nonprofit is supported in part by big players like Facebook and IBM. It hosts 18-week coding boot camps for unemployed women. Today {reprograma} has 160 grads. Of the most recent class, 85 percent landed full-time jobs in the tech industry.
“I was brought up being told we are here in this world to make a difference,” Reyes says. “That was reinforced at Santa Clara … It’s very much about why are you here, what’s your purpose, and how can you help others?”