Young Professional Gives Back on Birthday

Photo Courtesy Ashley Nealy

Staff Report

In honor of her 27th birthday, Ashley Nealy, “The I.T. Girl,” is establishing the Ashley R. Nealy STEM Fund at the A.T.O.M.S. Center at Kennesaw State University to advance the teaching of mathematics and science in Georgia’s K-12 schools. Ashley attended Kennesaw State University for both her undergraduate and master’s degrees and wanted to do something special for her birthday this year. She works as an IT Specialist for the federal government and also owns a creative solutions company, Mindly Maven, LLC which specializes in web design and graphic design.

“Females and minorities are severely underrepresented in the computing industry. This fund will help more teachers go into teaching these subjects to encourage more people from these groups to go into STEM careers. I was influenced by a high school teacher to go into the field and statistics show it’s vital to start early.”

Ashley’s birthday is also the start of Computer Science Education Week which runs from December 8 - 14, 2014 and is produced by Code.org. She will team up with State Representative-Elect Erica Thomas (District 39) to teach coding to over 60 students at South Cobb High School during Georgia Day of Code on December 10th which is part of an Hour of Code’s worldwide effort to reach 100 million students in one week.

“As I was looking through the list of schools, I was happy to see many from Cobb County, but I saw a lot of schools missing as well. I decided to target South Cobb High School since it has a high population of students who are economically disadvantaged and could benefit from learning how to code. I contacted Representative-Elect Erica Thomas about this and she was extremely excited to bring this opportunity to South Cobb.” The event will be named “South Cobb Codes” and Ashley hopes to extend the initiative past the day of code to expose as many students as possible to the world of computing.