After participating in a four-day cultural exchange in Panama, 10 Jamaican tertiary students are calling the Huawei Seeds for the Future program the experience of a lifetime.
The group, which was made up of students studying STEM – science, technology, engineering and maths – fields at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona and the University of Technology, Jamaica, left the island thinking they would just get advice to improve oneself in information communication technology and technology (ICT). However, the program not only equipped them with knowledge to strengthen their technical skills but to improve their lives holistically.
First launched in 2008, the Seeds for the Future program is a global corporate social responsibility initiative aimed at developing the region’s ICT talent by bringing together communication and cultures. Resuming physically for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, the trip was Huawei’s reward for the best students in online seminars last year.
The Jamaicans joined students from Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname and El Salvador, engaging in workshops on storytelling, time and environment management technology, technology and creative space, and entrepreneurship and leadership as they explored Panama City.
Brianna Roper, a 20-year-old computer science major at UWI, Mona, said the program was outstanding.
“It’s been a phenomenal experience and I’m so grateful to be here,” she said Gleaner. “At first, I was a bit hesitant to apply because I thought I might not make it, but being here, I couldn’t be more grateful. It’s been so many new experiences and I intend to apply everything I’ve learned here in my life going forward.”
Roper was the best female among 17 participants.
Echoing Roper’s sentiments, Janielle McKoy, a 21-year-old medical physics student at UWI, Mona, said: “It’s been really impactful. I found the sessions very informative and just the whole group of people we are working with. … It’s a very diverse group; we are talking to people from Trinidad, Suriname, El Salvador! It was a whole bunch of different personalities and really great students, so to have the opportunity to work with them and just interact and the values that they would have given me, it was really a special experience.”
During the exchange, the students engaged with technology experts from the Technologico de Monterrey, a private university based in Mexico.
According to Justin Newell, a third-year actuarial science student at UWI, Mona, the lessons learned from this experience will chart a clearer path for him after completing his degree.
“The online program itself, the one-week program. I learned a lot about 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and as someone who has been in the field of actuarial science, I have also done computer science. It also helped me strengthen my fields in coding and computing and helped me understand artificial intelligence,” he said.
“It’s almost like I know my way forward after graduation now,” Newell added.
