How far they’ve come: Student tech team alums thrive in STEM studies and careers

Many of us can look back on our secondary education and pinpoint a moment, a mentor, or a class that shaped our futures. For Brandon Wolf and Alyssa Santiago, both alumni of Neil Armstrong Middle School in Fairless Hills, PA, that pivotal opportunity was joining Tiger Tech. Being part of the tech squad in their middle school years helped launch them into STEM fields of study and tech-related work.

So just what is Tiger Tech? Tiger Tech is an example of a student tech team, a group composed of middle and high school students at Verizon Innovative Learning Schools who function as an in-house IT department. The students help both their peers and also their teachers with the integration of technology into the classroom.

The first student tech teams were created in 2014, when Wolf was in eighth grade. Those students — the “OG”, as their mentor and former Verizon Innovative Learning Schools Coach Dawn Martesi calls them — helped the schools roll out the program. At the time, integrating tech into the classroom was a new concept, which students and teachers alike learned together. “We really were pioneers for our whole district, and we were really the first of any schools around us,” explains Martesi, who is now an elementary school principal.

From those first teams, student tech teams today have expanded into hundreds of Verizon Innovative Learning Schools around the country.

The chance to expand on and explore her interest in computers drew Santiago to her school’s student tech team in 2017. “I love computers and technology; I was always playing games, I was always coding,” she says. The tech skills — and confidence —that she built up in the program still help her in her daily life, says Santiago, who is currently a sophomore at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. “Troubleshooting is usually such a barrier for people, but doing it as young as eighth grade, you troubleshoot life problems, classroom problems, anything,” she says. “I like being able to speak up for myself…I still use that in college now.”

For Wolf, joining the team meant the chance to do hands-on work, both learning technology and also troubleshooting problems for his friends and teachers around the school. Ultimately his exposure to the field through the student tech team increased his desire to pursue a STEM major. “It definitely inspired me to go study mathematics in school,” says Wolf, who went on to graduate from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Participating in the student tech team also provided Wolf with career-readiness skills. After Cornell, he started work as an actuary for an insurance company based in New Jersey. “The biggest thing I got from Tiger Tech was…just learning to love problem-solving and troubleshooting. And that’s what I do every day in my job,” Wolf says.