SCOTT BROCATO:
Laura, can you tell us about the program?
LAURA JIMENEZ
Sure. So UNM’s Continuing Education's mission is to provide quality and accessible education opportunities to our local community. And when we look at what professional development programs to offer, what we're looking for is what skills employers are looking for—not only looking for now, but as well as for the future. And so in the last few years, we've seen AI, artificial intelligence, quickly transform and become part of our daily lives. We see it everywhere, and not only in our daily lives, but it's also becoming a huge part of employers and organizations’ strategies now moving forward, and it's only projected to grow. And so what we would like to do is to help educate New Mexicans on this very high-tech field. And in order to do that, we've partnered with Fullstack Academy. They've been around for awhile and they offer very reputable tech boot camps. And they are now offering the AI and machine learning boot camp. And what it is, it's 26 weeks long. It's part time to accommodate for busy schedules. It's offered on weeknights, three nights a week. It's also offered live online, so that means you take it at the convenience of wherever you'd like to take it. You can learn from anywhere, but you also receive that live instruction and expert feedback that you would normally receive from an in-person program.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Can you go into deeper detail as to what kind of stuff one will be learning through the program?
LAURA JIMENEZ
Yeah, absolutely. Everyone has kind of heard about AI tools out there: chatGPT and ChatSonic; and this program is not about how to use those tools. It's about how to create those tools. It's a very high-tech focused boot camp. So students will be learning anything from coding Python, to mathematical computing, to data analysis, to regression models. And so all the very high-tech fundamentals that you would learn, and then also how to apply those skills into real world scenarios and what the different careers look like. So it's a career training-focused education program, not only where you can go and get these high-tech skills, but it's also comprehensive in terms of that it offers real-world scenarios, a capstone project; it connects students with real employers, it helps them build their network and their resume and career coaching. And so it offers participants of this program the valuable tech skills, and also the confidence on how to get your feet in the door and apply those skills. So it's kind of a full circle. We do have a very detailed syllabus on all of the skills that you can learn. And you can find that on our website.
SCOTT BROCATO:
And what is that website?
LAURA JIMENEZ
Bootcamp.unm.edu.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Can you tell us a little bit about Fullstack Academy itself and why UNM decided to partner with them for this program?
LAURA JIMENEZ
So we as a university, we vet many different partners across the nation all the time. And what we find is, in order to help educate our local community and New Mexicans, we would like to get the best possible education out there. So although it's a national, they partner with other very big national universities. We wanted to go with them because we felt the quality and their instruction was the best for this type of boot camp. In that way, it's a cohort-based learning, so New Mexicans can, when they register, they are in cohorts with other New Mexicans as well, and they learn together so they can kind of get that local feel with top instruction. And so we wanted to bring that to New Mexico, because when we feel that when we create those opportunities here locally, not only do they receive that education here, we don't want them to go somewhere else. They don't want to leave. We don't want to have to leave the state to go have to find that education elsewhere. We wanted to bring it here locally and that helps build our local talent pool and workforce, and on the flip side encourages New Mexican employers to hire professionals locally as well. So we thought it was a win-win; and so we felt after a lot of vetting, that their quality of the curriculum was the best.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Laura Jimenez, marketing manager with the University of New Mexico continuing Education Department, thank you so much for telling us about this on KRWG Public Media.
LAURA JIMENEZ
My pleasure.
