Free, short-term non-college pathways to STEM careers at the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood prepare underrepresented students for jobs in tech.

About one and a half years ago, Isaiah Hickerson woke up in the middle of the night having dreamt he was a coder.

The dream was totally random, as dreams so often are. He didn’t know a thing about coding.

He was 23, and though originally from California, he’d been living with his uncle in Miami. By day, he was answering phones in the grooming department at PetSmart. After hours, he was trying to figure out what to do with his life.

He’d tried social media. And he’d taken some community college classes in business and biology. He was lukewarm on both.

“I just felt empty,” Hickerson said. “I wanted to do something different, but I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a passion for anything. And I didn’t know what passion felt like.”

He knows how far-fetched it sounds, but seeing himself coding in the dream changed him. Moments after he woke up, he was online trying to figure out what it all meant.

“I remember the whole entire thing and it’s crazy. I can’t make it up,” Hickerson said. “I literally got up right from there, 2 in the morning, probably 2:05. I remember the whole entire timeline because this is what shifted — my dream is what brought me here.”

Spotlighting Programs Providing Non-college STEM Pathways

By “here,” Hickerson means the Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s nearly finished with a one-year software engineering fellowship program. It’s not a college or a for-profit tech boot camp, but a nonprofit, tuition-free program designed to help students from historically underrepresented communities — like Hickerson, who is Black — get high-paying jobs in tech.

Across the country, colleges and universities offer scores of programs that act as non-college pathways to STEM careers designed to help students from underrepresented groups. Far less common are independent nonprofits that focus on students who don’t have the resources to go to college, don’t want to go to college or don’t believe they can succeed in a demanding STEM program. These nonprofits offer short-term training programs, for free, and help with job placement.

Read the full article about non-college STEM pathways by Olivia Sanchez at The Hechinger Report.