Local teen gets hooked on technology super highway

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Miss Juanet Santos Sablan of Saipan was recently admitted to the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology or NYLF/TECH. Sablan joins more than 2,000 high school students from around the country in San Jose, California for an exploration of the technology industry from July 26 through August 4, 2004.

Through the 10-day exploration, Sablan will engage in both group and independent projects, including workshops led by industry insiders, product demonstrations, campus visits and tech-commerce encounters. The Forum’s curriculum also consists of animated debate and discussion.

“The National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology provides a virtual summit whereby tomorrow’s innovators like Juanet Sablan build upon and add to their skills while also receiving inspiration and direction from the cream of the crop leading today’s industry,” said Donna Snyder, executive director of NYLF. “Many of these students are already exercising their capabilities. The value of this program is measured by the participants becoming better directed and better connected as they go about finding the right fit within the field of technology.”

Currently slated to speak at NYLF/TECH are: Dr. Robert Full, chancellor’s professor and director of the Poly-PEDAL Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley; G. Scott Hubbard, Director NASA Ames Research Center; Kevin Mitnick, Co-Founder of Defensive Thinking; Dan Morris, Editor-in-Chief at PC Gamer; and Laura Wallace, General Manager of Northern California Microsoft. Additional companies and institutions take part in the Forum’s curriculum include Applied Materials, Ask Jeeves, Electronic Arts, IBM, Philips Semiconductors, Silicon Graphics, San Jose State University, Stanford University, Santa Clara University, University of California at Santa Cruz and many others.

NYLF is a nonprofit educational organization that empowers outstanding young people with the confidence to make well-informed career choices and has provided programming to more than 50,000 young people. For additional information, visit the organization on the Internet at www.nylf.org.

Sablan, daughter of Nicolas D. and Maggie S. Sablan, is an incoming senior student at Mount Carmel School. She hopes to get an inside view and top information from the trendsetters of the technology industry. She claims attendance at this forum will be one of the determining factors in her pursuit for a career in technology.