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After donating $5 million to support college scholarships for Dreamers and undocumented students, and a prospective $120 million donation to Bay area schools, CEO and Founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerburg recently donated $250,000 for scholarships in technology.
The recent donation to Dev Boot Camp - a program that claims it "transforms beginners into full-stack web developers in 19 weeks" - will cover tuition for 20 underrepresented minority students pursuing a career in tech coding. Students must be California residents, interested in tech coding, and be African American/Black, Chicano/Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or a female. The application period will open April 18 and close May 2.
The announcement came just a day before the f8 Conference, which has a predominantly male developer audience. An even smaller percentage of the developers are ethnically-diverse. As of June 14, 84 percent of Facebook's company was male - 51 percent of which were Caucasian and 43 percent Asian. Only 3 percent were Hispanic and 1 percent was African American. Globally, Facebook is 32 percent female. Through the scholarships, Facebook hopes to "increase [the] diversity of its workforce to better represent their customer base."
Last year, Zuckerburg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced they would donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares - roughly $45 billion at the time - to philanthropic initiatives. By the end of last year, they had donated about $32 million to education reform, including underserved communities in the Bay Area, the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the Centers for Disease Control Prevention to fight Ebola, and the Newark Public School System.
If you are a female, or student interested in technology or computer science, check out our many scholarships in addition to the Facebook F8 Scholarship.