Natasha Singer

up near Cleveland, northeast.

One of the recent grads I spoke with whose story really resonated for me is named Nathan Spencer, and he's 22, and he grew up in a small town outside of Cleveland.

Let's see, I probably first encountered a computer through those big boxy family computers probably when I was in middle school.

And he enters school just as this coding careers promise is becoming entrenched in American popular culture and education.

Everybody is on computers.

I mean, we were introduced to like the Google suite and like writing on a computer like in fifth grade and middle school.

And he talks about watching some of the videos we talked about earlier and the hour of code and learning coding basics in middle school.

Yeah.

And as he enters high school, his interest and his learning in computer science deepens.

The AP course I took, a lot of that was focused on games.

We made Minesweeper.

We collaboratively as a class made like a dungeon crawler board game.

I made Tetris for my final project.

And as a high school senior, he takes an AP computer science class and it ends up being a really formative experience.

He said he had a really great teacher who taught him a lot.

I think that's kind of where that interest sparked was we'd make a game and then my teacher would drop something like, oh, like, did you know that everything that you're working with is actually just stored in like a

But along the way, he discovers he loves programming.

He loves being able to make stuff with code.

It's not just the promise of money.

It's the promise of making stuff.