Shilpa Agrawal is a founding staff member of Comp Sci High, where she currently serves as the Director of Computer Science, coaching all the school’s CS teachers and overseeing the four-year CS course progression and the AP CS A teacher. Prior to joining Comp Sci High seven years ago, Shilpa earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT and worked at Google for three years as a product manager.
Shilpa aims to build a computing culture that not only accepts people with different backgrounds, but actively encourages them to bring their full selves to the table. “As a child of immigrants,” she says, “I know from personal experience the transformative impact of a teacher who sees a student for who she truly is—and celebrates, from a place of genuine understanding, the culture she belongs to.” One way of achieving this impact is to build, through active recruitment and training, a pipeline of diverse and passionate new CS teachers.
At Shilpa’s school in the South Bronx, students have mostly lacked access to high-quality CS education, CS hardware, and other resources before high school. It’s crucial that the students feel welcomed, are able to learn a breadth of technical skills, and included in all their identities, and Shilpa has made that a priority. That connection to real-world skills is central to Shilpa’s teaching practice. In designing her school’s four-year computer science pathway, she aimed to equip students with skills that would translate to a job immediately after high school, if need be. She says, “It’s everything from full stack development to cybersecurity to graphic design.” Group work is of utmost importance, and Shilpa takes care to praise and reward her students for soft skills like communication and group contributions, not just for their raw skill at coding. She has drawn on her professional network to recruit guest speakers and volunteer tutors from the world of tech to assist her students with their work. “My goal,” she says, “is for students to have a pathway to economic freedom through fulfilling, stable careers that will enable them to break cycles of poverty and empower their families and communities.”
Heading into her fellowship year, Shilpa hopes to harness her collaborative mindset to learn from and with her cohort. “The best way to improve the CS teaching profession is to share ideas with other practitioners, troubleshoot common problems, and brainstorm ways to improve equity in this line of work,” she says.
