Exploring Futures in STEM: TI’s Industry Day Empowers Bay Area High School Students
APRIL 2025
On April 24th, Texas Instruments welcomed 80 middle and high school students to its Great America Campus for an immersive Industry Day designed to ignite interest in STEM careers. Organized in collaboration with the Bay Area K16 Collaborative, the event brought together students from three campuses: Renaissance Academy, Eden Area ROP, and Milpitas Unified School District. More than 60 TI volunteers led the event, which offered a hands-on introduction to life at a leading technology company.
Industry Day was the culmination of a semester-long curriculum, where students at all of these campuses utilized TI-provided robotic rovers to bring coding and engineering concepts to life. Intentionally designed by TI’s Education Outreach ERG, the curriculum immersed students in project-based learning using calculators and Rover platforms to navigate real-world problem-solving tasks, such as programming robots to draw shapes or traverse mazes.
Building on students’ hands-on classroom experiences, Industry Day provided them with the opportunity to see how their newly developed skills translate into real-world applications. The event featured an engaging employee panel and dynamic roundtable demonstrations led by ten TI business units, offering students firsthand exposure to the wide range of roles within a leading technology company, from sales and product design to mechanical and electrical engineering.
Months of exposure to Texas Instruments through the rover-based curriculum had equipped students with the technical foundation and curiosity needed to fully engage in these conversations. They came prepared not only to observe but to ask insightful questions and draw meaningful connections between classroom learning and future career paths. One student, Nora, was particularly struck by her newfound connections, sharing, “I learned about many different College pathways, which is helping me as I think about college and what I want to do in the future.” Another student, Bryan, felt more certain about their academic journey, claiming, “I know I want to go into engineering, and this experience illustrates what I might experience when I’m older.”
This transformative experience would not have been possible without the dedication and expertise of the Texas Instruments Education Outreach Team, including Sophie Canepa, Drew Thoms, Zachary Lau, Ethan Frommer, and Archana Venugopal, as well as the exceptional leadership of educators Edwin Kang and Kristin Berbawy, who brought the curriculum to life in their classrooms. Together, students’ in-the-class experiences paired with contextualized career exploration offered students a powerful, end-to-end look at STEM in action, demonstrating how curiosity cultivated in the classroom can lead to real-world innovation and foster greater academic and professional clarity.