Undergraduates in work-based learning experiences often produce meaningful contributions as viewed by their supervisors, yet report a negative perception of their contributions because they struggled during the process or produced only a few lines of code change. As a result, many omit these contributions from their resumes and job interviews, losing a meaningful signal of technical ability. This study examines how guided blog posts help CS students in work based learning experiences reflect on what they learned and contextualize their experiences. It also evaluates the depth of reflection produced. The study included twenty-five juniors and seniors studying CS at CTCs and other affordable local colleges. All participated in one cohort during Fall 2024. Each student was assigned a simple open source issue to solve from a popular open source project over the course of several weeks with the help of an industry mentor. While working on the project, students drafted a LinkedIn blog post using a five-section outline covering project mission, assigned issue, technical architecture, challenges faced, and submitted solution. We conducted a thematic analysis of the published posts and measured reflection depth using Mejia and Turns's Knowledge Gain instrument. Four themes emerged from the posts: identifying problem solving techniques, growth mindset, the challenges and benefits of collaborative development, and the impacts of their contribution on users. Additionally, students demonstrated deep reflection across all four Knowledge Gain constructs. Structured blog posts offer a low-cost addition to experiential CS learning such as capstones, micro-internships, internships, and apprenticeships. This study is descriptive; future work should compare outcomes against a control group.

Team-based capstones are a cornerstone of computing education, designed to prepare students for professional computing practice. The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping how students plan, implement, test, and document their capstone work, raising new questions about workflows, team dynamics, assessment practices, and graduate readiness for using GenAI in the workplace. This Working Group (WG) investigates how GenAI is influencing capstone design and practice from the perspectives of students, early-career graduates, instructors, and employers. Using a mixed-methods approach, including a scoping literature review, cross-institutional surveys, and semi-structured interviews, the WG will examine how GenAI is currently integrated into capstone courses, how students use and perceive GenAI across the project lifecycle, how instructors are adapting task design, supervision, feedback, and assessment, and how employer expectations for GenAI competencies align with university preparation. The ultimate goal is to produce evidence-based guidance that helps educators realign capstone experiences with the realities of GenAI-integrated professional computing practice.

Many studies have aimed to broaden participation in computing (BPC) through extracurricular educational initiatives. When these initiatives are structured as open-enrollment extracurricular programs, their success often depends on their marketing approach. However, there is little in the computing education research literature about how to conduct effective marketing for these initiatives. We describe the changes made to the marketing strategy of one such program, an educational hackathon for middle school and high school students in the Pacific Northwest. These included reducing promotion to affluent families, using targeted school-based communication, and emphasizing cost supports during initial promotion. We then compare attendance and self-reported demographics before and after the intervention. Results indicate a higher proportion of students from marginalized and low-income communities and no reduction in overall attendance.

Community college students cite career advancement as their top reason for enrolling, with over 70% of first-year students expecting to participate in an internship as part of their college experience. However, surveys indicate only between 10% and 25% of bachelor's degree holders participated in an internship, with Black and Latino students, women, low-income, and first-generation students having less access. With strong associations between paid internships and positive outcomes in the labor market after graduation, the impact is substantial: new grads who start out underemployed are five times more likely to remain underemployed after five years.

Higher education computer science programs traditionally focus on teaching a fairly common set of foundational programming and data structures concepts. While these foundational skills are necessary to prepare students for success as computer science or software engineering professionals, they are often insufficient to engage, inspire, and ensure persistence among the many students from first generation, low income and under-represented minority backgrounds who are pursuing degrees in computer science today. Within most academic programs there is limited opportunity for students to actually practice applying the skills they are learning to solve problems or to work with large existing code bases. Additionally, the focus on learning these foundational skills - often in discrete courses on discrete assignments - lacks the context and bigger picture that allows students to begin to develop a sense of belonging in the computer science profession. Revising the curricula within individual CS departments across multiple institutions to address these limitations would be extremely challenging and time-consuming. A viable alternative might be a scalable, non-institution-specific learning pathway that complements the knowledge and skills covered in most CS curriculum. In that vain, the Computing Talent Initiative (CTI), an institute at California State University Monterey Bay, has been offering a fully online program, called Accelerate, that is available for free to students studying CS from community colleges and state universities throughout California. The team is wrapping up the second year of offering this program, which has demonstrated promising results in helping students develop the skills and self-efficacy to make meaningful contributions to large, real-world software projects.

Many computer science students report feeling under-prepared for interviews and entry-level jobs, and colleges have been working to address this problem, but are we putting effort into teaching the right skills? This poster reports initial results from a survey of both CS professors and the industry representatives who hire and work day-to-day with our graduates. We find that, when asked what skills are most important and most lacking in today's graduates, industry and academia disagree.

Internships help students connect what they have learned in the classroom to the real world, and students with access to internships are more likely to graduate and secure employment. However, many students are unable to find an internship by the time they graduate. This experience report describes a program where volunteer software engineers mentor students as they work on open-source projects in the summer, offered as an alternative to a traditional internship experience. We catalog the considerations involved in providing an experience similar to a traditional internship, describe our program's design, and provide two years' worth of participant evaluations and career outcomes as a measure of efficacy. The program served mostly undergraduates from non-R1 schools who are underrepresented in technology, and achieved similar educational outcomes to a traditional internship program. Most promisingly, mentors were willing to serve as a professional reference for 80% of students and the number of graduating seniors who secured full-time employment in technology was 7 points higher than average (despite occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Many colleges lack the resources to teach computer science students the skills to succeed in interviews and work on real-world products. Internships solve both problems, but are often not accessible to under-served students and colleges, adding to the under-representation of minorities in technology. This poster reports the results of a program providing unpaid open-source internships with volunteer industry mentors.