This transformative, multi-year investment by Raytheon Technologies will support hundreds of SMASH scholars and alumni from the earliest stages of the leaky tech pipeline, through high school, college, and onto early STEM career opportunities.
Scholars selected for this program will spend three summers at one of our national university partners building core technical skills and developing critical soft skills and community building skills. They will also receive mentoring and school-year programming to build on their summer experience.
Raytheon Technologies will host SMASH Rising pods at their locations around the country. These paid opportunities will be granted to up to 30 new SMASH Academy alumni each year. Each cohort will spend five weeks working alongside company engineers as they build solutions to address some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Raytheon Technologies has also committed to financially support 50 SMASH Alumni with the cost of their undergraduate education. Each year, 10 new scholars will be granted a $40k scholarship that will be allocated in $10k yearly increments over four years.
We are creating an intentional pipeline to guide students from high school through early career, help them create their future, and provide them with career opportunities that lead to Raytheon Technologies or other companies in STEM fields.
– Pam Erickson, Raytheon Technologies
Chief Communications Officer & Head of Corporate Social Responsibility
SMASH and Raytheon Technologies Announce Partnership to Help Students in Underrepresented Communities Overcome Barriers in Pursuing STEM Careers
Read Press ReleaseRaytheon Technologies’ corporate social responsibility initiative, Connect Up, leverages the scale and resources of its business and global employee base. SMASH’s partnership with Connect Up aims to lift communities, inspire the next generation workforce, and build a more equitable, prosperous world.
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The Leaky Tech Pipeline framework aims to increase understanding of the underlying causes of disparities in the technology ecosystem, raise awareness about effective strategies and stages for intervention, and drive the development and implementation of comprehensive solutions.
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Overall data trends across the tech industry show a disparity in Black representation across the ecosystem. From 2014-2020, in aggregate, there has been only a 1 percentage point increase in Black representation among the top tech companies, and individually, there has been very slow progress.
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