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Twins' Tuition 4 Women's StartUpLab

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America and Penelope are first-generation Latina students who are majoring in Computer Science at different schools.  Penelope is a student at California State University, Los Angeles. America attends Los Angeles City College. They both recently been accepted to an accelerator program in Silicon Valley known as Women's Startup Lab .

This program is a very competitive program where only 20 women are accepted across the States. WSLab accelerator program empowers women on how to prepare for startup growth, work on founder developement and leaderships skills and to expand their network to investors and advisors.

The twins are born and raised in East Los Angeles. They went thru the  LAUSD system. They went to Murchison Elementary School in Ramona Gardens, they went to El Sereno Middle School in El Sereno and they went to Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights. 

Penelope got her interest in technology by taking a class in Robotics at Cal State LA with Dr. Espinosa . She learned about micro-controllers, machine learning, and programming.

America got her interest in Computer Science with LACC STEM Academy and her independent study under Mr. Bhakta, a physics professor and Mr. Samplewalla, a computer science professor. They are both encouraging advisors who helped developed her further interest in technology and pursuing STEM.

They learned more about technology attending Meetup User groups such as DIY girls , Girls in Tech LA , LA Mobile Developer GroupGirls Develop It LA and LA Makerspace .

They have gone to learn about development of apps and open data by attending conferences such as GDC NEXT, SWE14, CES2015, LATISM, ADOBEMAX, AT&T Developer Summit, TECHWEEKINLA, and PhoneGap Day while keeping up with their studies in school.

They learned more about using technology going to hackathons up and down the West Coast. Hackathons are where programmers and non-programmers come together and have from 24 hours to 48 hours to come with an app or hardware prototype to present to the judges according the the challenges that were given. 
They attended and done incredible achievements at Silicon Hardware Chef , Palo Alto Women in Tech HackathonLATISM hackathon , FlightDeck Virtual Reality Hackthon , AT&T Super Mobility Week (Team Ridesafe), AT&T Women in Tech Challenge ,  Intel RealSense SDK Hackathon, and Global Game Jam @ USC .    

As America and Penelope continue to go to more hackathons, conferences, meetups, and workshops, it is still a humbling reminder to them that there are few women in technology and even fewer Latinas. We need to empower these ladies and help them with their rest of their tuition for Women Startup Lab accelerator program so they both can learn how to be powerful latina tech co-founders and we need to show that our community supports them.  Any donation will be appreciated.

Organizer

America Gloria Lopez-Martinez
Organizer
Los Angeles, CA

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