We, Erika and Arnelle, met over a decade ago in high school. Not many people did computer science at our school, and neither of us knew engineers personally. It didn’t occur to either of us to invest in trying out computer science back then. We parted ways in college, where as freshmen at Yale and Stanford we decided to try computer science but did not know how to code. To avoid being weeded out of our intro CS courses, we built up our own support systems. These paid off— we secured top software engineering internships (Erika at Facebook and Arnelle at Google).
Finding resources (friendly peers, tutors, and industry-facing organizations) to lean on as we took tough computer science classes became the difference between trying computer science for just a semester and becoming engineers.
When we reunited in the Bay Area after college, we noticed the similarities in our stories. While leading the LinkedIn Learning (Lynda) Social Learning Team as a Product Manager, Erika reconnected with Arnelle who was a Consultant at Bain to launch our first startup, Zimela - an app that garnered over 5,000 users and was featured by Apple as App of the Day.
Edlyft packages the support we built for ourselves to equip more students to crush it in their computer science courses and land top jobs.
