The City of Cupertino hosted its third and final Teen Speaker Series panel on Tech Careers in the Cupertino Community Hall on Saturday, Nov. 22. During the session, teens interacted with Rithik Sachdeva, a BEEP program adviser, and Rushabh Doshi, co-founder and co-CEO of Hiro Finance.
This collection of events organized by Cupertino’s Youth Activity Board is meant to empower and educate eighth to 12th graders. The first, held on Nov. 1, covered financial planning with Upward Path Institute Founder and CEO Vinnie Gupta alongside independent college counselor Tina Pratt, while the second, held on Nov. 15, covered financial literacy with Cathy Tam and Sunny Wang. For this final session, Doshi walked the attendees through his entire schooling and career in computer science, explaining what he learned from each of these moments.
“Nobody has ever invented something by being on the surface of something.” Doshi said. “You look at any invention throughout the history of humanity, the people who invent and push our frontiers, and you guys will hopefully do that. There’s like a million problems out there we haven’t solved. You’ll soon find the depths of where human knowledge stops, and that depth is where invention begins, because that’s where you go and explore.”
Freshman Naira Menon attended this event to learn about specific branches of tech. As someone who is considering going into a tech-related field, she wanted input into what that could look like for her.
“I learned the different ways that you could get into different fields,” Menon said. “Maybe why you would get into a more technical aspect versus a more creative aspect, and how you could figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.”
Teen Commissioner Sumedha Kumar served as the moderator for this event and worked with the other Teen Commissioners and Youth Activity Board to organize as well. She shares her satisfaction with the turnout for the past few events, especially with his year’s Teen Speaker Series being her first time moderating a panel.
“Even being able to stream these kinds of things and share them with other people, because they’re not able to be here, I think that is super cool for teenagers,” Kumar said. “Obviously they’re very busy, but this is important information to know as well.”
