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It took a proposal from Steve Ballmer to entice a promising computer science college student to give some thought to a career at Microsoft. Now she’d like to see more women and minorities follow her lead.

By Fred Albert

March 3, 2008

Miya McClain was 18 years old when Steve Ballmer made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.The college freshman was at a Seattle hotel demonstrating an internship project for a gathering of high-tech executives when Ballmer stepped up to the dais. After delivering his keynote address, he stood before the crowd and offered McClain an internship at Microsoft.

“I wasn’t going to apply for the Microsoft college internship,” confided McClain, now 24 and a software design engineer in test for Office. “I was just going to intern at other, smaller companies like I had in high school.” But when the CEO of Microsoft offers you a position in front of a room full of industry hotshots, how can you say no? Representatives from other companies swooped in to counter Ballmer’s offer, but it was too late. The die was cast.

It was a heady experience for McClain. As both a woman and an African American, she is a rarity in computer science. But for those who know her, the development was hardly surprising.

McClain was just 14 years old when she hooked up with the Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that prepares children of color for higher education and careers in laptop or computer science. “We put her to work the first day, and she just took to it,” recalled Trish Millines Dziko, a former Microsoft employee who serves as TAF’s executive director. “Each day she just got better and more curious. She just had it.”

McClain had harbored an interest in technology for years. “I was always interested in gadgets and electronic stuff,” she said. But as a youngster who was home-schooled most of her life, McClain hadn’t had much exposure to people who worked in high-tech—and certainly not women or people of color in the industry. That all changed when she met Dziko, who is also African American. “Sometimes, in order to see yourself in a position, you have to see someone like you doing the same thing,Windows 7 Key,” McClain said.

She remained in the TAF program throughout high school, picking up skills in HTML and JavaScript, then interning each summer with a small technology company.

“When I went to college, I was ready to go into computer science,” McClain said. With the help of a scholarship from Blacks at Microsoft, she entered Mills College in Oakland, California. But even then, she hadn’t pictured herself actually working at Microsoft. “I always thought I’d be at some small startup. That’s what I had done in high school, so that’s what I knew.” But Ballmer’s offer changed all that. She spent the next three summers interning in Redmond, and became a full-time employee after graduating from Mills in 2006.

McClain rarely turns down an offer to speak about her work—especially to young people. “I want people to see that you can be young, you can be black and a woman, and still be in a technology field,” she said. “There are still times I go into a room at Microsoft and I’m the only woman there, and the only black person. But if I can let people know that…you can survive in this world and do well, then other people might see that they can do it, too.”

McClain says that most of the black people she meets at Microsoft work in the business or marketing end of the company. She’d like to see Microsoft pursue black technology students more aggressively. She also thinks school systems could do a better job informing children of color about opportunities in the field. “A lot of people are trying to start in high school, but I feel it’s something that [should] begin in elementary school,” McClain said.

Dziko agrees. “The assumption is that kids of color can only do certain things, and then it perpetuates itself all the way through college—for those who actually go.”

McClain was pleased to find that the same variety of experiences she enjoyed at small firms were available to her at Microsoft—all within a single company. “Working at Microsoft is just a great opportunity for me,” she said. “It’s just meant endless boundaries. I can go as far as I want. I really like that about the job.”