When Isaiah Martin first applied for The Hidden Genius Project’s Intensive Immersion Program he says he didn’t know anything about the tech industry. “After I applied and went through the program, I got really interested.”
Isaiah, a Cohort OAK2 Hidden Genius Alum, is now a freshman at Dartmouth College majoring in Computer Science, and is a member of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurship Network. He attributes The Hidden Genius Project to honing many skills that prepared him for college and beyond. Among the most notable, he says: “Learning how to learn…a lot of times during the first year they would give us problems and never tell us the answer. We would spend the whole day trying to figure it out. It was my first introduction to problem solving. [The Hidden Genius Project] instilled in us trying to figure stuff out on our own, encouraging us to find solutions online and figure out how to solve the problem or break it down and address it correctly.”
Over the years Isaiah has stayed connected with The Hidden Genius Project in a number of ways. He returned as a Youth Educator for our Intensive Immersion Program, volunteers at events such as Brother’s Code whenever he’s in town, and has even provided Nanobot curriculum training for The Hidden Genius Project instructors. He is currently supporting the redesign of www.hiddengeniusproject.org from his East Coast campus and says “Any opportunity there is to help out the program, I try to do that.”