Scholarship Recipients to Receive Mentoring, Training, and Continuing Education
April 11, 2012 (Philadelphia, PA) – Chariot Solutions, a leading enterprise application and mobile development consulting firm, announced today that it has launched the Chariot Scholars Program. The program will aim to increase the diversity in the Philadelphia-area IT community by mentoring and training women and minority software developers. Scholarship recipients will receive one-on-one mentoring, skill evaluations, and a tailored two-week training program near the end of the term.
“As software engineers and developers, we at Chariot are concerned about the lack of women and minorities in our field,” said Ken Rimple, Director of Education at Chariot Solutions. “Our goal is to improve diversity among our peers, which is the reason behind the Chariot Scholar Program.”
Chariot will select three applicants from the applications submitted and match them with a Chariot member. The mentorship will be kept confidential with the scholars selected. The program is only open to minorities and women who have a background and aptitude in information technology and are over 18 years of age. These individual must live in the Delaware valley.
Scholarship winners will gain access to Chariot’s extensive education services team, which was started in 2008 and has provided continuing education to IT professionals throughout the country. Courses cover a wide-range of emerging technologies, including the Spring framework, Hbernate, Maven, Scala, and others.
“Though we can’t explain why there has always been such an imbalance of women and minorities in this industry, we are trying to take steps towards doing something about it,” said Mike Rappaport, CEO of Chariot Solutions. “Under this program we will provide proper training, mentorship and support to the scholarship winners to help them have long and successful careers in software development.”
Interested individuals can self-nominate, or be nominated by others, at chariotsolutions.com/scholar and all applications must be received by Tuesday May 15, 2012. The program is anticipated to start in mid-June 2012 in the Chariot offices in Fort Washington, PA.
Robin, Rebecca, Sarah, Fritz, and I all played Super Dungeon Explore, which my friend Josh was nice enough to bring and run for us. Lisa, Janette, Abby, Stacy, Jennie, and Kristin all played Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, but then switched out to play some Pandemic as well as King of Tokyo later on in the night with Jesse and Anthony. 
Nicole is a Philadelphia native who loves to write, play video games, and shop for socks. She has a regular day job as a secretary, but by night, she’s the Senior Editor of video game site Warp Zoned, a columnist on popular culture for literary magazine Press 1, a contributing writer at local blog Geekadelphia, and has recently gotten back into Dungeons & Dragons with a serious vengeance. Her current goal is to write a novel and get super famous.
There was toffee. Seven-layer bars. Two kinds of cookies. Two-ton brownies. And don’t forget the Nutella treats.
Dawn is a medical reporter specializing in database analysis. She writes for the Wall Street Journal’s medical section and covers bad reality TV for the culture desk. She’s also Director of Journalism at the University of Delaware.
