‘I needed a challenge’: Frida’s story
In fall 2021, Stanford offered an undergraduate computer science course, CS 105: Introduction to Computers, to under-resourced schools nationwide through a partnership with the National Education Equity Lab. Frida Gonzalez, then a sophomore at Birmingham Community Charter High School in Los Angeles, took that inaugural course. She thrived in the class and later, as a junior and senior, served as a mentor for fellow students at her high school taking the same course. In April 2024, she was accepted into Stanford. You can watch the video with her story above, or read the transcript below.
Stanford courses available to Title I high schools now include offerings in bioengineering, ethics, and civil rights history; the program reached more than 1,290 students in its first two years.
Transcript
Frida Gonzalez: I'm Frida Gonzalez. I'm a 12th grader and I go to Birmingham Community Charter High School. I decided to take CS 105 at first because I felt that I needed a challenge. CS 105 really pushes you out of your comfort zone, it really puts you in that position of a college class.
I am an only child; my parents are both from Mexico and they immigrated here in the early ’90s. Being first gen, after I took CS 105 and brought home that A+, my entire family was so proud of me, and I think that that really warmed my heart. It really made me feel good about myself, that I could learn anything that I put my mind to.
It made a lot of difference that CS 105 was specifically a Stanford course for me, because throughout middle school I had always heard about Stanford and how great of a school it was. The course really definitely built up my confidence to apply to different colleges, a lot more prestigious colleges, especially: Stanford, U Penn, U Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Barnard, and USC.
During CS 105 we had the amazing help of Elina, our teaching fellow at the time. She was really sort of a huge mentor for a lot of us. She was someone who we could go to for any specific questions, and although she wasn't there in person, it did feel like she was, because we had weekly Zoom meetings with her. And we could do online one-on-one tutoring with her as well.
I'm a peer mentor for CS 105. It involves me sort of working alongside the students and guiding them through the coding projects that I took two years ago.
It's really nice to kind of see that they understand something after my explanations. I took a lot of inspiration from Elina, who was such a great help for all of us, and so I kind of wanted to reciprocate that. It really just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy because I know that I had at least a small impact in their lives.
