Category: General

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) When I was younger, I used to look up to entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. In retrospect, I had this naivete believing that anyone ... no matter what age, gender, socioeconomic background, or whatever ... could obtain their same positions. As a sociology major, I learn about how inequalities in the distant past are still incredibly prevalent today. In fact, a lot of the “tech gods” that we worship built their legacy off of such inequalities. The single narrative of anyone being able to be in the positions of Musk and Bezos ignores the structural advantages and concentrated affluence that they have. Financially speaking, Musk’s parents profited off of apartied. Zuckerberg’s family was the first investor in Facebook. They act as if each person…

You’ve just excitedly clicked on the new Mr. Beast video, expecting to see how he recreated the new Squid Games, but before you get to the chirpy intro, you hear — Irritated, you wait five seconds before you skip the ad and move onto the video, forgetting the ad altogether (except for the annoyed feeling you got from it). But what if ads weren’t bothersome? What if there was a world in which the advertiser asked your permission first and made the experience interactive and entertaining? On top of that, what if you would help the world become a better place? Sounds impossible to achieve, but entrepreneur and angel investor Tarek Eldin is building this world at his new venture, Let’sGive.org. Motivated by the ineffectiveness of most ads and users’…

This blog post is meant for two different types of readers: the returners and the newcomers. The returners might be asking — what’s with the new website, the new logo, and more importantly, the new name?  For the newcomers, we used to be Youth CITIES, which is still a cool name, but how much cooler is yCITIES? Think of all the possibilities the “y” could signify: you, youth, young adult, your mother, (y)etc. And that is exactly why yCITIES changed its name.  This organization, having begun in 2008, has grown with a significant number of folks who began their journeys here in their teens. Whether they’ve stuck for the entire ride or continued on their roads and returned, the name yCITIES reflects the open arms with which we welcome all,…

When I was in high school going through Youth CITIES March to May Bootcamp myself, I was exposed to an entirely new world of innovative leaders and a new way of thinking, and pushed myself to present my work in front of a crowd of people far larger than I’d ever presented to in a classroom setting. It was a whole new way of thinking, and gave me the confidence I needed to make the transition to an independent college student. Now that I’ve graduated from college and returned to Youth CITIES to mentor the L3 Innovation Challenge, seeing these students grow over just 7 short weeks has made me realize all over again how impactful this program is and its ability to introduce students to a whole new way…

Waiting with a number of students in the lobby of Lab Central for Class 5 to get started, we turned toward the entrance, hearing a loud, high pitch voice of someone singing and cheering through the entrance of the building. Accompanied by Youth CITIES founder Vicky Wu Davis, aka her mother, as well as her eight and eleven year old brothers, it was none other than Sanibel, the famous four year old students have been learning about and beginning to design for! She entered the building dragging a rolling suitcase that was bigger than her, and when it got stuck on the doorframe and her brothers jumped to help out, she screamed back “My do it!” in the most adorable voice I’ve ever heard. Once we all entered the classroom…

At the end of last week’s blog I mentioned a conversation we had as a class about playing basketball with a visual impairment. This discussion came up again in Class Four, and Vicky Wu Davis, Sanibel’s mother, went into more detail on the conversation in the latest blog post. I’d like to use this example again to illustrate some of the main points of this week’s class.  As a class we discussed potential problem areas and entered a high level discussion about ways that technology could solve particular problems that a blind individual might encounter. One student, Vicky’s eleven year old son, brought up a great point that implementing this technology in a basketball game could lead to unfairness on the court or even cheating, giving a player with a…