Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Stephenson.
Hi Matt, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
After graduating from NYU Stern, I started my career at Goldman Sachs in Credit Risk Management during an auspicious time in the Derivatives market. I love how much I learned during that time in my life but made a move to the social impact space joining Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, a NY-based nonprofit that places mostly Black and brown college students into front office roles at bulge-bracket banks.
Afterwards, I attended Wharton for my MBA and started to develop both my network and familiarity within the social impact space. Over the past decade, I’ve worked in the K-12 Education sector in a variety of roles, including Associate Partner at NewSchools Venture Fund, Director of Finance for KIPP Austin Public Schools and even a High School Math Teacher. All of these experiences were critical to building the domain expertise, credibility and network to launch Code2College.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s all relative and depends on what you define as ‘smooth’. While the path hasn’t been easy, there is a great deal of privilege and access that I have that’s important to recognize. First, my professional experience has afforded me a great deal of subject matter familiarity. From pedagogy, internship program management and financial analysis to having launched two businesses prior, I effectively de-risked my launch, operation and scaling of Code2College significantly.
In addition, having graduated from two top business programs – NYU Stern for undergrad and Wharton for MBA – my academic background and professional network have accelerated our success. Any unexpected turns or bumps along the way have only served as lessons to help iterate our work and impact. But the most salient challenge that we continue to have is building awareness. I’d say that that’s an organizational area of development that we’re still working on.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As CEO of Code2College, I’m charged with the operations and scaling of the organization as well as the development of a category-defining and industry-leading program model that contributes to the building of a national network of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, homegrown early technical talent. We specialize in placing high school students – predominantly Black, Hispanic and girls – into paid, Summer internships in software engineering and other technical roles.
I’m most proud of how and how many students Code2College has impacted by serving as a conduit between low-access communities and industry professionals intent on service and skills-based volunteerism. I’ve prided myself on how so many aspects of the Code2College program model and operations mirror that of a private-sector enterprise because the results are capital efficiency, predictable service delivery and a highly intentional scaling approach. That said, as a former teacher and longtime Educator, we have a student-centered approach and critical lens on student outcomes. It’s the best of both worlds.
What were you like growing up?
I liked to read and have always been competitive.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://code2college.org
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/code2college
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/code2college
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/code2college
