When I was like 12 or 13, my dad (an attorney) was doing some patent work for an MIT grad student who later went on to be a professor of CS. I was interested in computers at the time and trying to teach myself, and as a favor, my dad asked him to show me a few things.
He ended up teaching me Scheme, getting me to commit to an open-source 3D engine and work on computer vision stuff over the course of my early high school years. I ended getting into a top collegiate CS program with a very low high school GPA - primarily because the work I was doing outside of the classroom was pretty good. This degree opened the door to a masters degree and made finding a job much easier.
Today, I'm 23 and working full-time. My dad has started reminding me why I got to where I am, and that I need to give back and do what was done for me - find an aspiring kid who wants to learn, and teach them.
Maybe there are some problems with the mindset of the poor, but I think that part of the problem is that I am probably going to find this kid through my own middle-class network and continue to perpetuate a culture of mentorship that is often inaccessible to the poor.
Maybe there are some problems with the mindset of the poor, but I think that part of the problem is that I am probably going to find this kid through my own middle-class network and continue to perpetuate a culture of mentorship that is often inaccessible to the poor.
So don't... make it a point to consciously seek out a way to connect with someone who wouldn't usually have a chance to work with someone like you. Find the poorest neighborhood near where you live, find out what high-school is there, call the principal and see if there's some way you can engage with them to do some kind of mentoring or whatever. Of course that's just an example, but hopefully you get the drift: if this point matters to you, do something specific to break that cycle and help someone poor.
Easier said than done. Unfortunately, as indicated elsewhere in the thread, being poor becomes a mindset. Regardless of how it got started, it ends up there and it's hard to break. Personally, I've tried to help 2 or 3 poor kids just recently. I showed them how easy it is to program, I explained to them why it is one of the few professions with low barrier to entry and literally no limits on potential and I showed them the fruits of my labor (i.e. my coolest and most expensive toys). The result? None of them took a single step on their own. I just couldn't get them interested. One still imagines he's going to get rich making music somehow (yes, I explained why that, frankly, isn't going to happen for him), the others didn't even bother with a plan.
He ended up teaching me Scheme, getting me to commit to an open-source 3D engine and work on computer vision stuff over the course of my early high school years. I ended getting into a top collegiate CS program with a very low high school GPA - primarily because the work I was doing outside of the classroom was pretty good. This degree opened the door to a masters degree and made finding a job much easier.
Today, I'm 23 and working full-time. My dad has started reminding me why I got to where I am, and that I need to give back and do what was done for me - find an aspiring kid who wants to learn, and teach them.
Maybe there are some problems with the mindset of the poor, but I think that part of the problem is that I am probably going to find this kid through my own middle-class network and continue to perpetuate a culture of mentorship that is often inaccessible to the poor.