This Summer, we’re excited to partner with New Orleans-based Rooted School — a high school that prepares students to receive both college admissions offers alongside job offers from high-growth technology companies — to employ two summer interns to join our sales and marketing team.
Celebrating its inaugural graduating class, Rooted School partnered with local New Orleans technology companies to place graduates into both internships and full-time roles spanning, sales, marketing, accounting, and software development. Learn more about Rooted’s Green Balloon Fellowship here.
Saidi Rodriguez and Marché Walter, incoming freshmen at Case Western Reserve University and Villanova University respectively, received credentials for the HubSpot sales and marketing software during their studies at Rooted. As Skilltype’s primary system of record for customer relationships, this credential was a very attractive aspect of the overall package the interns brought to our team this summer as we seek to grow our community entering the new fiscal year.
During the two-month assignment from June to August 2021, each intern will have the opportunity to gain experience with sales, marketing, research, and product. As members of the first graduating class of Rooted School this year, Rodriguez and Walter are continuing the Rooted internship model by developing real-world job experience prior to matriculating into college, and paving the way for future Rooted graduates to join our company.
The green balloon fellowship is exciting to us on a number of levels. On a personal level, being educated in the New Orleans Public School system, it’s meaningful to see children like me receive opportunities to enter high-tech, high-growth industries from the neighborhood I grew up in. As it relates to the library and information science profession, this opportunity is a fresh contribution to the broader diversity conversation taking place in the industry.
Hubby and I are discussing ways to diversify the library and medical fields and we decided change needs to start in high school. How do we make it clear that guidance counselors need to steer kids of color into these fields? All suggestions welcome.— 📚Angela Hursh: #LibraryMarketing Consultant (@webmastergirl) July 6, 2021
Just this week, Twitter user Angela Hursh commented on the need to steer students of color into LIS. While our position on this conversation warrants a much longer piece, if the intention is there, there is no shortage of opportunity for hiring managers to lower the barrier of entry to discover the profession. Within a couple of weeks of onboarding, both of our interns have expressed interest in opportunities to serve their academic libraries in a work study capacity after being completely unfamiliar with the library as a place of work.
You will be both hearing and seeing more from Skilltype on this conversation in the future. In the meantime, please join us in welcoming Saidi and Marché to our community!
