Last month, 65 students from over 20 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) visited eBay as a part of the third annual HBCU ICE (Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship) Summit to empower students─ most of whom are Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology majors ─ to chart their career paths within the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) industries. The main purpose of their visit was to see first-hand the day-to-day operations of technical and innovation professionals and to network with African-American tech employees and members of the Bay Area African-American Employee Network.

Kelly Minton, from the Office of the CIO (OCIO), led the event for eBay. Dean Nelson, VP of Global Foundation Services from the CTO Organization provided an overview of eBay and shared great insight into how our data centers enable our global company to succeed. Vikram Tuli, who leads IT Infrastructure and Engineering for the OCIO, spoke about the OCIO Function while also providing colorful examples of how data analytics are changing our behaviors.

Finally, the event ended with a group of enthusiastic eBay employees who joined Dean and Vikram on a panel to answer students’ questions:

• Dominique Hollins, Subsidy Operations Manager for eBay Daily Deals

• Rebecca Carter, Data Scientist

• Christopher Norman, Recent College Grad in Tech

• Daniela Martinez, Recruiting Representative

• Peter Copeland, Recent College Grad in Tech

This was the first time that eBay was invited to participate in the annual HBCU ICE Summit and eBay was honored to join. Other companies who participated were Google, Uber, Yelp, Pandora, Twilio, Intuit and Oracle. We look forward to continuing our discussion with HBCUs and have set up a site for them to dialogue with us directly: www.ebaymainstreet.com/hbcu