SALT Announces the Recipient of the 2020 SALT Opportunity Scholarship & Internship

SALT is proud to announce De’Alsha Diamond as the recipient of the 2020 SALT Opportunity Scholarship & Internship.

“The program is part of our commitment to diversity and is intended to provide educational and work experience opportunities while helping remove financial barriers for those that have been underrepresented in the STEM fields and FinTech industry,”said Debra Johnston, Chief People Officer at SALT. “ We are excited to be a part of the next steps in De’Alsha’s journey and to continue working toward the long-term goal of building a more diverse and inclusive workforce.”

De’Alsha Diamond graduated from Montbello High School in Denver with a 4.0 GPA and has since obtained certificates in Web & Graphic Design and Healthcare Patient Services from the Community College of Aurora. She recently worked in Quality Assurance at Ibotta and is also a graduate of the Professional Development program through CrossPurpose, a non-profit organization focused on abolishing relational, economic, and spiritual poverty through career and community development.

As the recipient of SALT’s scholarship, De’Alsha, as of September 21, 2020, is attending a Software Engineering course through General Assembly, a leading global technology education organization providing robust training in mobile and software engineering, data science, product management, and other digital-related skills. The Software Engineering course is a 12-week, full-time program designed to transform students from novices to job-ready, full-stack software engineers. Following the successful completion of the course, De’Alsha will have the opportunity to partake in a 12-week paid, part-time internship at SALT where she will be able to apply her knowledge and work alongside our software engineers.

Participation in the SALT Opportunity Scholarship & Internship program will enable De’Alsha to expand her coding abilities and gain related work experience that will help her pursue a career in software engineering.

“Diversity in the workplace is essential for so many reasons, primarily because of all of the different perspectives that come with it,” said Brandon West, Product Director at SALT. “I think most people struggle to understand what other people go through and they naturally see the world through their own eyes. When you start to diversify your workforce, you start to understand the world differently — you begin to think about different personas and users of your products and rather than problem solving and engineering for the same type of person, you begin to do that for everybody. That’s the value that diversity adds to a company.”