Can hardly wait to celebrate this VERY exciting milestone! Our students from the PAS4AI (“Preparing Autistic Students for the AI Workforce “) program have secured a dozen fantastic #AI internships! 🌈 💼
Thanks to Rick Kubina, Somayeh Asadi, and Taniya Mishra, PhD, our co-PIs, as well as JiWoong Jang, Aidan San, and Rory McDaniel, our brilliant instructors.
The PAS4AI students will be doing #internships this Summer and Fall at CentralReach, WorldStrides,SocialWise VR, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aspiritech, George Mason University, and SureStart!
While our numbers today might be small (15 students in the 2024 inaugural cohort), the impact is real. PAS4AI is an NSF-funded ExLENT project that SureStart is honored to collaborate on with Dr. Andrew Begel from Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Somayeh Asadi from University of Virginia, Dr. Rick Kubina from Penn State University and Dr. Matthew Boyer from Clemson University with a goal to create transparent and supported success pathways for hashtag#autistic community college students to find first roles in the hashtag#tech and AI workforce.
As we reflect on this incredible milestone, we are filled with optimism for a more inclusive AI future. Thanks to each of these organizations for coming alongside us to recognize the skills, ideas and achievements of our PAS4AI students.
We will be running this program again in 2025, so if you are an autistic community college student interested in participating or a company eager to hire our trainees as interns, message me or my collaborators and we will get you involved. Please check our program out at https://cmu-variability.github.io/pas4aiworkforce/ and encourage STEM-oriented autistic community college students you know to apply! Applications due January 31, 2025.
Here’s to neurodiversity driving tech and AI innovation of tomorrow. 🙌🏽✨