‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Developer CD Projekt Red Opens Applications For 2024 Edition Of Annual ‘Girls In The Game!’ Mentorship Program
It appears that there’s something about the Fall air that makes video game developers want to promote the concept of ‘diversity and inclusion’, as in the same month that Ubisoft is kicking off their own women and non-binary mentorship program, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has begun accepting applications for their similarly-themed ‘Girls in the Game!’ initiative.
Launched in 2021, the Girls in the Game! program was developed in parternship between CD Projekt Red and the Polish-based non-profit Perspektywy Educational Foundation – who per their official website, dedicates a large portion of its attention to “promoting participation of women in the STEM education is the main specialization” – as an apparent “response to the gamedev industry’s demand for talented women.”
(Curiously, it appears whomever wrote this specific blog post forgot to double check their work, as rather than detailing just what work participants may be asked to do, the relevant sentence instead ends abruptly – “As part of the project, participants–” – without providing any actual curriculum information.)
“Nearly 2.3 million women say they play console or computer games daily, and 22% of female gamers say gaming is their passion,” explain the two companies in a blog post announcing the start of this year’s program, as translated by DeepL. “However, among those working in gamedev, women account for only 20%. The Perspectives Educational Foundation has been studying the situation of women in technology for years, both in Poland and around the world. To get the broadest possible picture of the industry, it also monitors women’s participation in engineering education, and then their academic and professional careers in technology companies. Although more and more women have been entering the high-tech industry for more than a decade, there are still very few of them – from a dozen to about 25%, depending on the career segment studied.”
In service of this goal of fostering young talent, the 12-month long mentorship program “is aimed at high school students of all types, with particular emphasis on candidates from smaller towns” and “consists of a year-long training cycle and individual mentoring from experts from CD PROJEKT RED.”
More specifically, per the program’s full terms and conditions, applicants must be “a student of a secondary school located in the territory of the Republic of Poland” and will notably be given priority if the individual “lives and studies in a town with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.”
Further, more than just a straight-forward mentoring program, Girls in the Game! also offers accepted applicants a financial scholarship of 12,000 PLN (approx. $3,110 USD per current exchange rates) to help them “cover the costs of education and development”.
For those interested, the application window for the program “begins on September 9 and will last until October 31, 2024”.
From there, a committee will look over said applications and pick the program’s next batch of participants – roughly 20 in total – before ultimately beginning their education in February 2025.
Notably, like its aforementioned Ubisoft counterpart, it does not appear that CD Projekt RED’s mentees will provide any commercial work for any of the studio’s currently-in-development projects.
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