Jelani Nelson Interview

Immigrant Computer Scientists

Episode 13: Interview with Jelani Nelson, Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley. Grew up in US Virgin Islands, where an overwhelming majority of population is Black and the educational ethos is very different from the mainland US 50 states. He also created two successful international CS programs for high schoolers: AddisCoder and USVICoder, in Ethiopia and US Virgin Islands. MIT PhD 2011.

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1. Jelani Nelson Interview (00:00:00)

2. Biography (00:06:11)

3. Ethiopian vs. African-American Culture Clashes (00:08:27)

4. US Virgin Islands vs. Mainland Schooling, 198s-90s (00:15:54)

5. Quizbowl: the superbowl in US Virgin Islands! (00:22:15)

6. Small and tight knit US Virgin Islands, 1980s-90s (00:26:24)

7. System Racism, and its Absence in US Virgin Islands! (00:30:28)

8. “Virgin Islands is more than 80% Black.” (00:33:20)

9. “Everyone empowers Black on US Virgin Islands” (00:35:03)

10. Surviving Cat 5 Hurricane Marilyn, 1995 (00:38:59)

11. Teaching himself programming in high school, 1990s (00:46:49)

12. I had never actually heard of MIT... I actually only applied to MIT.” 2001 (00:52:31)

13. Virgin Island classmates: out of 30, all but 2 went to college! (00:56:48)

14. Creating AddisCoder: CS for High Schoolers in Ethiopia, 2011 (00:59:50)

15. Understanding and working with the Ethiopian government system (01:09:51)

16. CS for Jamaica High Schoolers, coming Summer 2022! (01:18:40)

17. Blacks in STEM - Exposure and access to opportunity (01:23:26)

18. His analysis of inequity in IOI (Informatics Olympiad)'s students' background (01:24:05)

19. Impostor Syndrome (01:30:36)